WHS (Windows Home Server) + XBMC = Fun

kemik Wrote:I stream Blu Ray rips no probs. Guess it will depend on your network to a degree as I have 1Gb switch and 1gb Network card in my WHS. Used to have 100Mb switch and it worked with that too

I have Cat 6 ran through the house, a managed 16 port gigabit netgear switch, and gigabit cards in my server and every machine (except my laptop, which is either 10/100 or 54Mbps, depending if I plug it in or use wireless. so looks like it shouldn't be an issue for me then.

Now just to see if i should look at using WHS for my storage server, stay with freenas, or wait for the next version of WHS to come out.

I use an HP Mediasmart WHS machine with great success on XBMC. It's connected through a simple gigabit router to my little Zotac-based HTPC (running Ubuntu), and it has no problem playing back high-bitrate BluRay rips.

It showed up easily as a network share, and pointing XBMC at it was probably the easiest part of setting up my XBMC installation.

I've been using freenas for years with zero problems and fantastic throughput.

Reading this, I was wondering if anyone uses freenas (or any tftp server) to boot xbmc on a system without any disks?

pFranzen Wrote:I use an HP Mediasmart WHS machine with great success on XBMC. It's connected through a simple gigabit router to my little Zotac-based HTPC (running Ubuntu), and it has no problem playing back high-bitrate BluRay rips.

It showed up easily as a network share, and pointing XBMC at it was probably the easiest part of setting up my XBMC installation.

Hi,

What software do you use and what format do you rip your Blu Ray's to for storage and playback?

Thanks

Just for completeness, OpenFiler is very FreeNAS-like but with more bells and whistles.

A while ago I ditched WHS due to a file corruption bug.

I'm considering it again and I was wondering if any of you experience any problems editing files directly on WHS? Copying file to a local storage and uploading it to WHS again when editing is finished is really not a solution for me.

Second question is can WHS utilize 2 core CPUs? I thought Atom based mobo would go easy on electricity consumption but I'm unsure about CPU. Atom 330 or 270?

I know there are other solutions beside WHS, but I always liked file copy management of drive extender much better that RAID.

Cheers, P.

pecinko, I believe the new HP WHS servers are dual core so yes...
I tried WHS on a ASRock 330 ION and it worked pretty good. It could handle more than one 1080p stream at once. Ripping movies with MyMovies+AnyDVD took a little while but not too bad. All in all a good little server to go along with XBMC

I got away from WHS and have since then came back to it. Honestly, it has been very stable. I have 6 terabytes of pool storage and a separate drive just for the OS. If you do a little googling on WHS "Vail" you will see that a beta version has found it's way to some sites for download and it appears to be legit. Will be 64bit and has the 2008 server codebase.

I custom built the box myself and have tested it out by streaming from 4 different computers at the same time with no issues. It is not a power friendly box because I wanted the resources to stream without any problems so I have a script that shuts down the box at midnight and it's off until we need to turn in on.

If you are interested in it, you might want to wait until the new version is released.

Evanrich Wrote:For those of you running WHS for your media server, can you tell me what kind of speeds you get over your network, and if WHS is capable of streaming a 40GB bluray rip? I only used WHS for machine backups before, and its been about 6 months since I've used it.
Thanks.

Read/Write Rate of my WHS = 68-70MB/s
A Bluray image will only need aboz 40Mbit/s (5MB/s) so even with 100Mbit/s its enough!

pecinko Wrote:A while ago I ditched WHS due to a file corruption bug.

I'm considering it again and I was wondering if any of you experience any problems editing files directly on WHS? Copying file to a local storage and uploading it to WHS again when editing is finished is really not a solution for me.

Second question is can WHS utilize 2 core CPUs? I thought Atom based mobo would go easy on electricity consumption but I'm unsure about CPU. Atom 330 or 270?

I know there are other solutions beside WHS, but I always liked file copy management of drive extender much better that RAID.

Cheers, P.

The file corruption bug was fixed in the first power (service) pack and shouldn't be an issue any more. Whs is just server 03 with a few extra services and a few missing services. It can use multiple cores just like any other NT derived version of windows. That said, you probably won't get much benefit unless you're doing more than just using it as a nas. I would avoid any non 64 bit CPU (like atom); the next Whs is based on server 08 r2, so there won't be a 32 bit version.