jrandeck

[jrandeck]

I bought two of these on the original deal (they’re running it again with promo code EMCKDHB22).  Still waiting for those rebates to come through of course.

They both work, though while one was packed in bubble wrap inside a white box, the other was just thrown in to the shipping box in its anti-static bag.  Odd that they’d pack the two differently.

I realize I’m living dangerously with these, I’ve had two of their 1TB models die on me (the second was a replacement for the first), but I was using those in an external enclosure and I don’t think they liked being moved around much.   The reviews on these don’t seem any worse that what I’m seeing of the Seagate or WD drives anyway.

[jrandeck]

Well, I just had 7 HD recordings going at once on a single WD10EACS drive (1TB  GreenPower, the original model) with nary a stutter, so I fired up ShowAnalyzer and kept adding threads to see where it would break, but with 7 threads going (one for each show) none of the recordings missed a beat.   I didn’t see any pixelation at all while watching any of the in-progress recordings while this was going on.  I wonder if the optimizations for the AV-GP drives makes them run poorly with ShowAnalyzer.

I guess I’ll quit worrying about whether or not my drives are fast enough to keep up with my tuners.    I suppose if I had 12 tuners it might be a different story 🙂

The odd part was that I expected to see the CPU maxed out by SA, but it was bouncing between 20 and 60% while running the 7 threads.  The SA UI said it was using 9-10 MB/s during this. 

This was on a Core i3 2100T and the drive was pretty freshly formatted with 64K clusters, BTW.

[jrandeck]

[quote=umdivx]

I did 6 HD recordings, (4 cable card, 2 ATSC) Not sure that 1 more HD stream would make a difference. If I recall correctly that I still had plenty of room to spare when 6 recordings at once.

-Josh

[/quote]

I must have misread your review the first time, or I confused it with a different review.   Looking back I see that you had 6 HD and 4 SD streams, which is pretty impressive in itself. 

ShowAnalyzer seems to be the wrench in the works for me.

[jrandeck]

Thanks for testing that.  I had a hunch that ShowAnalyzer would mess up the optimizations for recording.  I don’t think ShowAnalyzer fits the drive’s standard use case.

Another option might be to run ShowAnalyzer at off-peak times.  I have a 1 TB WD Black drive.  I’ll probably just use that for my recording drive.

[jrandeck]

That sounds like a fund test!   Consider yourself reminded 🙂

I was thinking about testing with just one of the green drives alone when I get a chance (after copying everything off so I can break the array) just to see what happens when I overwhelm one drive.

In theory, the RAID-0 array should be fast enough for what I have, though I’ve heard too many people complain about how slow Windows software RAID is.

[jrandeck]

Yep, I use 64 KB clusters an all the drives I record or store video on. 

I’d like to replace my current setup with a single drive if that will work, just to simplify things.  I can’t say for sure that any of the issues I’ve had are related to drive performance, but it would be nice to be able to take that doubt out of the equation.

 

[jrandeck]

[quote=babgvant]

[quote=swoon]

I suppose I should have said a serial port that complies with RS-232.

[/quote]

Sorry, just thought [that while correct] it was funny to call a serial (clunky, legacy) port on a PC -> RS-232 (high-end A/V feature).

[/quote]

Is there some new feature called “RS-232” on A/V equipment these days, or is it just the same clunky, legacy port found on PC’s that’s now new and exciting because you can use it to control your A/V gear?

 

[jrandeck]

I knew I’d need 2 NIC’s I was wondering whether it would be better to have 2 dedicated to the router or whether the LAN NIC could be shared with other VMs or the host OS.

When I was considering doing this I intended to set up a hyper-v environment, but a hardware failure on one of our desktops made me scrap plans for that server for the time being.  Basically, the server hardware became my desktop hardware, and I run Windows 7 there so I can play games, though for the amount of time I (don’t) spend doing that, I wonder whether it’s worth it to even have a gaming PC.  I think everything else I do on that PC could be done in a Windows 7 VM.

Right now I’m running Tomato firmware on an Asus RT-N16 router which does what I need, so this is mostly an academic interest for me at this point.

 

[jrandeck]

Does anyone know how well pfSense or something similar would work running as a virtual machine?   I thought about doing that but as I don’t have dedicated server hardware, I would need to share a NIC between the host OS and the VM (I suppose I could get another NIC if needed) and I didn’t know how well that would work. 

I know there are preconfigured VMs available for some of the products out there, though.

If you leave your PC on 24/7 like I generally do anyway, then that would save the extra cost of running another server PC.

[jrandeck]

Yeah, codecs are touchy like that.

You might take a look at this FFDShow guide:

http://www.missingremote.com/guide/how-to-install-ffdshow-software

I haven’t tried it but it looks like it should guide you around the pitfalls. (At least for the basic stuff.)

[jrandeck]

I believe babgvant’s Anti-pack codec pack installs the MPC-HC codecs so that they can be used by other programs.  He also has a utility for upping their priority (or has a link to one, it’s been a while since I installed it).

There used to be a guide on this site, hopefully it’s still there.

[jrandeck]

Just for grins you might try the free version of Splash Player: http://mirillis.com/en/products/splash.html

I have some clips recorded on my wife’s camera that only play smoothly using that player for some reason.  My previous favorite player for HWA was MPC-HC (Mediaplayer Classic – Home Cinema).  It doesn’t have the best looking interface, but it does its job well.

I don’t use FFDShow or CoreAVC so I can’t comment on how they compare, and I don’t know if it’s possible to integrate the players above into XBMC, but they are worth trying for a point of reference at least.

[jrandeck]

I’d say you’ve got plenty of CPU for HTPC use.  I’m actually surprised that what you have isn’t handling the 1080 video just fine without HWA. 

I have a mini-ITX system with a single core Celeron (Conroe-L) running at 2 GHz with NVidia 9300 graphic on-board and it plays most content just fine, though I have seen some stuttering on some Blu-Rays.

A new video card will probably get you a much better experience than a processor upgrade IMO.

[jrandeck]

I think that’s normal.  With my Motorola box, I get a tuner device, a panel device and two unknown devices, which can be ignored.

[jrandeck]

[quote=”Mast3rL33″]
It’s darn near impossible to come up with something new and fresh these days in the way of TV programming.  After about 55+ years of TV viewing, there’s very little I haven’t seen before on network TV.
[/quote]

So you’re saying Shatner makes a poor Archie Bunker?  I can’t argue with that 🙂

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