Bi-Amping with JRiver Media Centre

Having recently acquired a pair of long-coveted B&W 803N speakers, I've been running them from my almost-vintage Pioneer VSX-2011D receiver. This is very much old-skool analog with nary a HDMI connection in sight.  It's configured as purely a power-amp using the multi-channel inputs fed from an M-Aduio Delta 1010LT sound card. This card is connected to a MediaServer8 Win8 VM running JRiver Media Centre.

I plan on purchasing a proper power-amp to drive the 803s but for now, budget doesn't allow so I wanted to see if I could bi-amp the speakers using the re ever. It's a 7-channel system and does support bi-amping, just not in multi-channel mode.

Since I'm using JRiver as a receiver, I wanted to see if is possible to configure it to bi-amp the speakers. Turns out it is. Here's how;

Launching MediaBrowser and Netflix from Mediaportal

Since the MediaBrowser plug-in for Mediaportal has stalled and is now pretty much unusable, I've been spending my weekend looking at ways to get MediaPortal to launch external applications like MediaBrowser Theater and Netflix.

The MultiShortcut plugin for MediaPortal works well for the former - you can set it up as a tile on the MediaPortal home screen that, when clicked, launches MediaBrowser Theater and hides MP, bringing MP back to life when MediaBrowser is shut down.

This gets around the issues with using the MediaBrowser plug-in and seems to work pretty well. MediaBrowser Theater also supports remote control so it feels well integrated.

Netflix, on the other hand is a bit more challenging.

It's a Windows Store App so there's no obvious way to make a shortcut or find an .exe to launch from MultiShorcut. A quick search, however, revealed this easy process to make a shortcut for an App which I was able to use to construct the MultiShortcut exefile and arguments strings required. Here's the resulting settings for my system;

There's still no way that I can find to control the Netflix App with a remote control so it'll be necessary to pick up a keyboard or mouse for that task but this is close to good overall.

The Pursuit of Quietness

Since MediaServer8 now lives in my Home Theatre, I'd like to make it as quiet as possible. The current set-up employs 3x Silverstone 120mm fans working as intakes in the base underneath the hard drive cage, (these came with the SST-GD07B Case and are very quiet),  as well as 2x Noctua NF-S12A PWM Case Fans  working as intakes on the side. These are all controlled from a NZXT Sentry Mix 2 Fan Controller.

This is reasonably quiet, but I think it could be better. I ordered some Noctua NF-R8 redux-1200 by mistake, thinking they were 120mm when in fact they were 80mm so I had to get a few more Noctua NF-S12B redux-700 as well.

 I'm very impressed with these Redux line units. Even though they're bare bones (with just the fan and 4x fan screws in the box), the packaging still has a premium feel (with not a bit of clear plastic in sight). And are they quiet!

Power Issues

I've been having significant issues with my system over recent months with hard drive stability. I've been getting regular red ball disks in UnRaid, specific SATA ports have become apparently unusable, not recognising drives attached, multiple errors arising when the do work.

I had thought it was a failing motherboard but as a last resort before replacing it, I went online to check with gigabyte to see if there was a test I could run.

They suggested bios rests, disk and cable swaps etc. all of which I’d done in any case. The final suggestion as PSU replacement - it could be a failing power supply.

My system has a Corsair RM750 installed which powers a variety of devices including 6 internal drives, 6x fans via a fan controller, misc. On my way home from work, I picked up a cheap and cheerful CX650 and dropped it in.

I was seeing the same issues, but in testing and swapping drives around, I noticed that some SATA ports would work with some drives and not with others.

This led me to think there may be differing power requirements for these drives and if the PSU was on the limit, a particular drive might be tipping it over.

The PSU is modular and I was running power from 3 or the available 4 peripheral power sockets on the unit. I thought I’d try adding the 4th line in and powering some of the drives from that. Et Voila! Everything started working on all ports.

I had obviously misunderstood how the PSU output it’s power and had thought all PSU outputs were the same. Apparently, there’s some kind of split going on and by using all 4 outputs, I’ve better tapped the power availability.

Who knew. MediaServer8 is singing again.

Building Xen 4.4.1 on NetRunner Rolling (Manjaro)

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This is a post I've had in draft as I progressed through setting hop Xen in Netrunner. I managed to get it all built and running but at the end ran into a network issue in VMs that I didn't have time to solve. I'm publishing anyway for future reference and maybe it will be useful to someone. I'll update or link through to any follow-ups I do.
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To jump straight to the steps and skip my invariable ramblings, click here.

MediaServer8 has been offline for about a week now as I work on something of a radical shift: a long-term stalwart of the set up is under consideration for the chop. unRAID might go.

My whole-house integrated media server has been based on unRAID for some time now, with version 6 (still in beta) providing a virtualisation platform on which I've built a TV Server and several virtual HTPCs with passthrough GPUs.

This is a great setup as it consolidates multiple machines into one, reducing running costs and space usage while in theory being easy to maintain.

A Few Upgrades

A few updates to MediaServer8 this weekend. I replaced my 250GB cache drive with a Crucial Crucial 240GB M500 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5 Inch Internal Solid State Drive. My unRAID cache houses mainly Xen VMs and these have become noticeably faster to boot and peppier overall. On some internal transfers from unRAID to the drive, I see speeds of 150 Mb/s which is a big improvement on the spinner previously doing cache duties.

I also added an extra DVB S2 dual tuner to the system meaning I now have 6x tuners (4x DVD S2, 2x DVB-T) which is more than enough to service current live TV and PVR requirements.

6x Tuners in ArgusTV running in Windows 7 VM on MediaServer 8

Also, my X10 CM15A USB interface arrived so I can now control various lights and appliances around the house from a VM. My Christmas project is to set up a web server and application  to allow lighting and whole house audio control from tablet and laptop clients.