HTPC and XBMC and USB HDD, oh my.
So I've mentioned the Great PC Relocation Project for the girls and all that lately. The PC that's now Hallie's used to be Heather's, and it's also long served as our media server--all our movies and music were on it, for streaming to the tv and elsewhere. We'd typically leave it on all day for that purpose, and since Heather tends to check her e-mail and whatnot as she gets a few free minutes here and there throughout each day. But now that she's switched over to the laptop, it doesn't make as much sense for that PC to stay on all day, since the girls only use their computers for maybe an hour each day, and as a full-on desktop PC it takes a good amount of juice to keep it up and running.
Sp phase 2 of the project was to find another media storage and streaming solution. My first thought was to buy or put together a NAS box, something I can just connect right to the router and voila. And that would work for streaming at home, but I also occasionally stream music to myself here at work, for which I use Tonido (which is one of the best free products ever, as far as I'm concerned). But Tonido is a server that needs to run on a PC, so a simple NAS wouldn't cut it.
Then I got to thinking about the little net-top PC I picked up a few years back, one of these. It's been our living-room computer for years, but rarely used because it's kinda slow, the little wireless mouse/keyboard I got to use with it isn't very handy, and it didn't stream too well over the network (though I only had an old 802.11g adapter to use with it). But I thought what the heck, I'm gonna wipe it, replace Windows xp with Win7, install XBMC and see how it does. (I also ordered 4GB of RAM to drop in, which should be way better than the stock 1GB, and an 802.11n WiFi adapter.) So I did that yesterday evening, and wow. Oh, I should also mention that at Costco a week or two ago, I was looking at the external hard drives and saw they had a Seagate 3TB desktop drive on sale for $99, which seemed like a pretty good deal, so I snagged one of those.
So anyway, yeah. XBMC is awesome, and it seems to work very well when playing from the external HDD instead of the network. We were watching an HD copy of Jurassic Park 3 last night and it looked really good--I noticed a hint of jitter and slowdown occasionally, but that may have just been because it was also scanning the rest of the movies for metadata at the same time. I'm also hoping the additional RAM will help stabilize it, since the system RAM is also the video RAM. Between the library functionality and the fact that it remembers where we stopped playback, Heather was like, "Why didn't we do this sooner?" Good question!
I'm looking forward to playing with it some more--I installed a few addons that looked fun, but I'm sure there are some must-have ones that I need. Any suggestions, if you have an HTPC and/or XBMC? I saw there's a Spotify plugin, that's pretty awesome. I like the default skin but I may try some others to see what I think--one blogger I saw swore by the Aeon Nox skin. Next I need to get Tonido working on it, and maybe Serviio so we can still stream directly to the tv, and to my tablet and other PCs. Then I can snag the hard drive from Hallie's PC that currently has movies on it and put it in my desktop for more photo storage instead. :)
Sorry to geek out--I was just excited that this seems to be such a sweet solution, and something we should have done before!
Sp phase 2 of the project was to find another media storage and streaming solution. My first thought was to buy or put together a NAS box, something I can just connect right to the router and voila. And that would work for streaming at home, but I also occasionally stream music to myself here at work, for which I use Tonido (which is one of the best free products ever, as far as I'm concerned). But Tonido is a server that needs to run on a PC, so a simple NAS wouldn't cut it.
Then I got to thinking about the little net-top PC I picked up a few years back, one of these. It's been our living-room computer for years, but rarely used because it's kinda slow, the little wireless mouse/keyboard I got to use with it isn't very handy, and it didn't stream too well over the network (though I only had an old 802.11g adapter to use with it). But I thought what the heck, I'm gonna wipe it, replace Windows xp with Win7, install XBMC and see how it does. (I also ordered 4GB of RAM to drop in, which should be way better than the stock 1GB, and an 802.11n WiFi adapter.) So I did that yesterday evening, and wow. Oh, I should also mention that at Costco a week or two ago, I was looking at the external hard drives and saw they had a Seagate 3TB desktop drive on sale for $99, which seemed like a pretty good deal, so I snagged one of those.
So anyway, yeah. XBMC is awesome, and it seems to work very well when playing from the external HDD instead of the network. We were watching an HD copy of Jurassic Park 3 last night and it looked really good--I noticed a hint of jitter and slowdown occasionally, but that may have just been because it was also scanning the rest of the movies for metadata at the same time. I'm also hoping the additional RAM will help stabilize it, since the system RAM is also the video RAM. Between the library functionality and the fact that it remembers where we stopped playback, Heather was like, "Why didn't we do this sooner?" Good question!
I'm looking forward to playing with it some more--I installed a few addons that looked fun, but I'm sure there are some must-have ones that I need. Any suggestions, if you have an HTPC and/or XBMC? I saw there's a Spotify plugin, that's pretty awesome. I like the default skin but I may try some others to see what I think--one blogger I saw swore by the Aeon Nox skin. Next I need to get Tonido working on it, and maybe Serviio so we can still stream directly to the tv, and to my tablet and other PCs. Then I can snag the hard drive from Hallie's PC that currently has movies on it and put it in my desktop for more photo storage instead. :)
Sorry to geek out--I was just excited that this seems to be such a sweet solution, and something we should have done before!