Client PC or extender?

Mailman74 · #1

I have blu ray rips and shows on my unraid server that I want to watch on my tv's. I purchased a few inexpensive pc's and added an nvidia gt430 to them. Trying to figure out if I could get by with a 360 for the last room that I need to supply media center to. I was going to buy this pc today because the price is good and we will only be using it for watching media center. http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0366175

lithium630 · #2

Mailman74 wrote:I have blu ray rips and shows on my unraid server that I want to watch on my tv's. I purchased a few inexpensive pc's and added an nvidia gt430 to them. Trying to figure out if I could get by with a 360 for the last room that I need to supply media center to. I was going to buy this pc today because the price is good and we will only be using it for watching media center. http://www.microcenter.com/single_produ ... id=0366175

Depends on the format of your blu-ray rips. I prefer using xbox 360's. They're cheap, work well and no DRM issues. All my movie's are WTV so they play flawlessly.

Mailman74 · #3

I ripped my blu rays to mkv and I have some tv shows in mkv. Currently I am using tmt5 to play blu rays. I always thought that you could not stream the full blu ray to extenders. I am fairly new to media center so sorry for the set up questions.

lithium630 · #4

Mailman74 wrote:I ripped my blu rays to mkv and I have some tv shows in mkv. Currently I am using tmt5 to play blu rays. I always thought that you could not stream the full blu ray to extenders. I am fairly new to media center so sorry for the set up questions.

No worries. You can't stream a full quality blu-ray to an xbox. If your movies are uncompressed than you'll need a pc or a different type of box such as a popcorn hour.

Mailman74 · #5

My client pc's are only used for streaming content from unraid server. We have a lot of issues with the client pc's not booting into media center, we hit green button on remote and the screen stays black and we have turn keep putting pc in and out of sleep mode and sometimes we have to shut down and restart. Wondering if the problem is related to HDMI issues or the sleep function. The clients are inexpensive pc's with windows 7 because I figured that my main pc would be doing all the hard work. The clients are dual core Athlon II X2 220 Processor 2.8GHz with 4gb ram and nvidia gt430 installed.

I was thinking of upgrading the client pc's with an ssd thinking that might help. I only paid $200 for the pc's because I just wanted something inexpensive for playback on tv.

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated

Venom51 · #6

The clients are already way more than you need for a client that's merely streaming content from your server. Sleep issues are likely driver related or Bios related.

Mailman74 · #7

Venom51 wrote:The clients are already way more than you need for a client that's merely streaming content from your server. Sleep issues are likely driver related or Bios related.

Cool thanks

lithium630 · #8

Mailman74 wrote:
Venom51 wrote:The clients are already way more than you need for a client that's merely streaming content from your server. Sleep issues are likely driver related or Bios related.
Cool thanks

I agree but you can't go wrong with an SSD boot drive.

adam1991 · #9

OK, I'm dying to know: what's the big deal with using an SSD boot drive on what amounts to a cable box?

Frankly, I never turn my machine off. The odd occasion when I do reboot it, Win7 is fast fast fast. I have a 7200rpm 320GB boot drive.

Maybe it's that I'm doing nothing else on this machine that makes the difference.

#10

For my setup it Speeds up navigating the UI, guide is faster, improves extender responsiveness. Using an SSD for the OS compared to a spinner improves many things Mediacenter-wise.

richard1980 · #11

adam1991 wrote:OK, I'm dying to know: what's the big deal with using an SSD boot drive on what amounts to a cable box?

Frankly, I never turn my machine off. The odd occasion when I do reboot it, Win7 is fast fast fast. I have a 7200rpm 320GB boot drive.

Maybe it's that I'm doing nothing else on this machine that makes the difference.

For the record, I have a fairly slow SSD, and it only takes about 15 seconds to go from BIOS handoff to usable desktop. How's that for "fast fast fast"?

But to answer your question, the big deal is speed. Not so much at boot, but while using WMC. WMC depends on quite a bit of information that is stored on the OS drive, and having an SSD for that drive significantly boosts WMC performance when the amount of data gets to be quite large (for example, when you have a large EPG database, or a huge library you are trying to load information for). If there's enough data that needs to be processed, having a HDD might result in a very poor experience in WMC, whereas having an SSD will yield a much better experience.

Not to mention that an SSD is the single best upgrade one can make to a computer right now. The cost-to-benefit ratio trumps any other upgrade you can make (except a free one of course), and in most cases also gives a much bigger performance boost than upgrading other components like the CPU.

adam1991 · #12

I'm concerned about the live watching buffer, which is by definition recorded on the OS disk as opposed to my large secondary disk. That kind of constant read/write/delete activity can't be good for a SSD, can it?

richard1980 · #13

The live TV buffer is stored in the recorded TV folder, which is set when you go into WMC settings and tell it what drive to use for recordings. So unless you tell WMC to use the SSD for recorded TV, the live TV buffer wouldn't be on the SSD anyway. Even if the live TV buffer was on the SSD, you can move it using either a symlink or a junction (see http://thegreenbutton.tv/wiki/index.php ... _TV_buffer).

Mailman74 · #14

Ok I am interested in putting an ssd in on of my client pc's. Any suggestions on brand, model and size?

richard1980 · #15

There are a number of good brands...I only have experience with an Intel SSD, but from what I've read from other people, Intel drives tend to be more reliable. I can't really suggest a size, as that really depends on what you do with your system. I have a 40GB SSD and I have 17GB free, but I don't really have anything installed except for WMC and a few utilities/plugins. I have 2 HDDs, one for recording and the other for storing misc files.

Mailman74 · #16

I am trying to fix the lack of response of media center. I put 4gb of ram in the machines and still have the freezing, not loading and playback issues of some files. I miss my sagetv set up. Thinking ssd might give me the performance upgrade I need. Don't know if it is an issue with hdmi or remote control so I guess ssd will get installed over the weekend

adam1991 · #17

huh. I built a plain-Jane setup from scratch--spinning drives, but two of them, one for OS, one for recorded TV. 8GB of RAM, onboard everything else including HDMI out, and a Ceton card. No problems like what you describe. But I don't do blu-ray anything, so maybe that's the issue here.

My setup is a purpose-built cable box, though; I don't do anything else with it (well, I lie--once in a very great while I'll use MCEBuddy to compress a show so I can ftp it to a buddy).

Mailman74 · #18

My client pc is a basically a cable box also, we only use it for media center. Maybe my problems are because it is a cheap emachines pc but I was thinking that I didnt need much for what I do when I purchased. I don't have tuners in pc because I use hd homeruns, I did put a gt430 gpu for hdmi which requires a 300 watt psu but the pc only has a cheap 220 watt psu. Do not know where my problem lies but maybe it is the psu or upgrade to an ssd. Thanks for help

TheGreenButton - Windows Media Center Forums

TheGreenButton - Windows Media Center Forums