Joined the Media Center gang at last...

unklerosco

Got myself a nice little dell 5150c delivered today..

2.8 dual core, 250gb sata, 1gig ram etc.

Anyways, have it up n running on my plasma.. Works a treat. Working on getting my dvds stored onto my HDs at the mo, using a celron based pc as a media server.. Has 500gigs on it at the mo, have a 400gig drive thats getting RMA'd so that should be enough to store a whack od dvds... Plans is to split my dvds from the GFs onto different HDs so there'll be no slow down if we're watching them at the same time...

Anyways, anyone got any suggestions as to any plugins etc for media center. Have MyMovies but thats it...

Need to order a usb tuner as the dell only takes low profile pci-x cards n to my knowledge there aint any out there...

Conar

I just popped "PCI Express TV Tuner" into google and loads came back:

http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=764 for example.

unklerosco

Well i never... Could only find the one in the UK n it was a full sized card.

Cheers for that..

Simple question... In my music, some albums are missing the album art.. Where/how do i get it??

SouperComputer

I wouldnt bother separating the HD's where the DVD's are ripped TBH, certainly not from a performance POV. If I can have a PII400 serve 1TB to 6 machines, I dont think you will have any problems.

For album art, its an age old question which there seems to be no definate anwser. MCE should get the art automatically if the tags are correct though.

mossym

dvd max bandwidth is about 9.5Megs/sec. that's max. in reality most of the dvds that people think look really good are around the 6/7..even the sony superbits which have some of the highest bitrates. In reality you'll be looking around 5/6. Given the bandwidth of your drive, you'll be fine with them all without splitting i'd say. You can always rip a couple and try it out

SouperComputer

mossym wrote:

dvd max bandwidth is about 9.5Megs/sec. that's max. in reality most of the dvds that people think look really good are around the 6/7..even the sony superbits which have some of the highest bitrates. In reality you'll be looking around 5/6. Given the bandwidth of your drive, you'll be fine with them all without splitting i'd say. You can always rip a couple and try it out

Aye, 9.5 Mb/s (Bits rather than bytes) so, 1.119 MB (Bytes which is what HD's are judged by) gives you plenty of overhead, even taking head scratching into account a poor drive could easily deliver in excess of 30MB/s on a bad day.

If you plan serving a few clients, its a good idea to have GB Ethernet at the server and 100Mb to the clients, this ensures that the server bandwidth isn't monopolised by one client (that is copying a ripped DVD, bunch of MP3's or whatever). Granted bigger files will take longer to transfer, but 100mb is still acceptable and using this setup will ensure reliable, consistant, predictable peformance which with an entertainment system is what you want.

mossym

SouperComputer wrote:

Aye, 9.5 Mb/s (Bits rather than bytes) so, 1.119 MB (Bytes which is what HD's are judged by) gives you plenty of overhead, even taking head scratching into account a poor drive could easily deliver in excess of 30MB/s on a bad day.

sorry, should have put the units in..had them right in me head..but twould have made more sense to put them in the message..:)

you could also think about raid, that'd help your output from the drives..i reckon you'll be fine even without that

unklerosco

Its working fine with everything on the one HD... At the mo its serving movies to the htpc, mp3s to the gfs laptop n im using it now to surf the net n its working grand...

Man dvds eat up space fast... Series 3-6 of sex and the city is just under 100gigs.. Heck, season 6 is on 6 dvds!!! crazy. When i get my conroe system i'll get around to encoding them...

The entire series of red dwarf is just bigger than the last season of sex + city. Each to there own, think i'll convince the GF that she ought to buy me a 500gb HD for my troubles....

mossym

yeah i had thought of doing what you are trying. Then i figured i was using all that space for movies i'd watch what, twice, 3 times a year at most? for the sake of having to go to the rack and put the dvd in once every 3 months or less, i was spending a fortune on discs, adding noise to my system, and using more power. so i got a linksys nas that boots in the evening with 1 500 gig drive that has my music on it..and i use my discs..also i'm a purist..don't like compression in my movies if i can help it, so compressing them wasn't an option. With a 48" HD screen, soon to become a 120" screen, i need every bit of quality i can get..:)