Two Steps Up, One Step Back

For no particular reason other than intuition, I’ve ditched Windows 8 Storage Spaces and reverted to unRAID.

I had storage spaces running on MediaServer8 for several months but when unRAID 5 finally went final, I installed it on my old XEON box and started playing with it again. I remembered how much I loved it’s simplicity and inherent security and just went back to it.

Cutting the (virtual) cable...

I've come to a realisation.

We currently subscribe to $ky+HD standard package (no movies or sports) and pay around €44 for the privilege. Since moving to to Windows Media Center for TV viewing, we have circumvented some of the restrictions of the set-top satellite box such as limited storage space and dual-tuner limits. However, I'm still paying that €44 p/m, and it's going up.

What's more, in setting up favourite channels in WMC, we've come to realise how few of those channels we actually watch to any great extent.

There's very little beyond what's available on freeview / saorview that we actually view. So, what would happen if I packed in $ky? I'd miss the occasional Sky Arts concert and some first run sci-fi on Sky 1. Wife will miss food/style channels & kids will miss some of their channels. But that accounts for about 5% of our total viewing.

One little box...

New Linksys Modem/Router

So I had a call from my wife on Friday while I was at work;

"The TV isn't working, most of the channels are black"

Oh-oh. I'd sold the migration from set top box to WMC on a number of grounds, including ease of use. I was not helped by the fact that the weekend I migrated, my Satellite supplier updated the EPG UI, for the better.

Anyway, I figured there might be an issue with the software on the MediaServer and gave her the nuclear option of rebooting. That didn't work so I said I'd have a look when I got home.

On inspection, it did indeed seem that many of the TV channels were black with only free to air channels playing properly.

During setup, I knew this happened if the DVBLogic end of things was not set up correctly, the dreambox was down or one of several other things was preventing the dreambox helping decrypt the channels.

I immediately thought there was an issue with the card entitlements renewal. The dreambox is supposed to take care of this but it seemed like about a month since the migration to WMC and I thought it might need a night  in it's old home in the satellite box.

Next day, still no joy. I popped the card back in the dreambox and checked entitlements. All was well. Something else must be wrong...

Taming the Octopus

Well, Microsoft finally released Windows Media Center for Windows 8 and with it I set about my seeing if I could get TV working on MediaServer and HTPC.

I'm still a little frustrated that I need to maintain the server to manage storage and feed the living room TV while having  a separate machine drive my home theatre.

That being the case, I spent a LOT of time researching Virtualisation and what's possible. It turns out that PCIe passthrough is now possible. With a correctly specified motherboard and cpu (VT-d supported), it's possible to pass PCI and PCIe devices directly to VMs when using Xen or KVM on linux. (no support in Hyper-v on windows yet)

In theory, I could set up 3 or 4 VMs on one box. Two could be media players driving living room and HT via separate video cards. A third could be my unRaid with a multi-channel SATA card passed through for native speed/access and the 4th could be by NZB appliance.

In theory.

Remote Tribulations

Following on from the reconfiguration of MediaServer8, I needed to build an HTPC to drive my home theatre.

The theatre comprises a Pioneer VSX-2011 receiver driving a 7.1 speaker array consisting of 2x B&W CDM-1NTs, a CDM-CNT, 2x B&W DS6 diploes as surrounds and a pair of B&W DM601 S3s as rear surrounds. Sub is a Velodyne CHT12. Sources are a Pioneer DV565A CD/DVD/SACD/DVD-A player and a SqueezeBox. A Sony VPH-1271QM CRT throws a picture onto a 110" screen.

All of this looks and sounds great despite being particulalry old school (not an HDMI socket in sight!!). The only thing missing is a way to playback video material from the Plex Media Server running on MediaServer8. I had previously connected the server directly to the projector but that was problematic in the the same computer was driving the living room TV and we couldn't use both simultaneously.

Time for a new HTPC build!

MediaServer8 v2

So it's been a little while since I've had a chance to update here on progress due to work & family commitments. And there has been progress.

Last time, I was contemplating Windows8 as a media server instead of what has now become Server 2012. The rationale was mostly around cost and better software/driver support in the desktop OS.

The first problem I had was that all my data was stored on Storage Spaces in Server 8 beta. Some changes were made to Storage Spaces rendering RC and RTM versions incompatible with beta versions. So, I had to copy all my media data across to my trusty unRAID setup, install Windows 8 RTM, set up storage spaces and copy it all back again.