Let's crowdsource me a new whole-house DVR rig

[Wilky13]

Yeah I guess I wasn't clear what I meant. In the main Metro menu you can arrow around, but once you open most (all?) apps you lose the ability to navigate with a remote. Play/Pause/Stop are usually the only things that work. It's a shame too because the apps look great on a large screen.

Oh, that sucks. Leave it to Microsoft to make stuff less usable with each iteration. Hence the reason I went back to Win7.

[LuckyDay]

Yeah, I personally always use a mouse in the living room (wireless trackball, doesn't need a surface to move on), so it doesn't bother me, but I can understand why it's a dealbreaker to many.

And as for the tiles being made larger for who asked, a program called OblyTile. Free and easy to use. Just choose the program location and a jpeg/png to make the tile.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthr ... ?t=1899865

[ruff_hi]

You can't record to a NAS, so now you are dealing with scripts to move recordings after they are done. He said he doesn't want to fiddle and I would consider this fiddling and/or unreliable compared with what he has now. Again, I have one and am happy with it but would never use it to serve the rest of the household.

I was reading a bunch of HTPC blogs the other day and, remembering what I had read here re the above ('cannot record to non-local drive'), I found this article (Recording Live TV to an iSCSI target with Media Center) very interesting.

[3rob3]

Yeah, I figured somebody would bring ISCSI up. What I said still stands though as you can't install Microsoft ISCSI software on a NAS (Windows pc or server, sure). I also think the performance would be bad.

LuckDay, thanks for the link!

[tletourneau]

As to iSCSI, I use it with my Media Center system and a Synology with no problems whatsoever. It works great and I have the option of expanding my target storage as needed with the reliability of RAID. You just need to buy a NAS that supports the protocol.

[ruff_hi]

Some time this year (hopefully), I will be putting together a HPTC and a NAS. If my NAS (looking at running FreeNAS) doesn't support iSCSI, I'll have to spend the $50 or so to install a small HDD (for local recording purposes) and then shunt the recorded stuff to the NAS (script, purpose build program, batch, beyond compare, etc).

A quick google shows a fair few hits on FreeNAS and iSCSI ... has anyone actually done this and does it work? I could spend the $50 on something else .

[tletourneau]

I've never used FreeNAS but I know it natively supports iSCSI. Depending on amount of traffic you may want to consider LACPing multiple NAS connections.

[3rob3]

I didn't realize ISCSI was available for non-Microsoft OS's. I stand corrected but would still personally never use it as a recording drive.

[tletourneau]

Technologically there is no reason that iSCSI shouldn't be used. It's a block level storage technology that is no different than any other direct attached storage as far as media center is concerned.

[3rob3]

Do what you want, just stating my opinion and I would never do it on a main media server especially when the OP stated he wanted reliability, stability, and no fiddling. For a secondary pc that doesn't get heavy use, sure I would give it a shot.