Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Anyone on the forum have a network media tank? I'm waiting on delivery of a popcorn hour C200 at the moment, so reading everything I can about setting up and running it. Had a HTPC I built a while back running windows media centre but had some real issues with getting decent tv tuner cards and organizing/displaying/playing my music/movie collections.

I'm hoping that the C200 us going to be a little simpler over all, but then again, some of the reading I've done lately suggests that there's a LOT of work in setting up at the start.. Of course the main website says it's simple and automated.

Not sure if it is the same thing, but I have had my old xbox with the harddisk modified to a bigger one and have xbmc installed on it... I have been streaming movies, music across the network from a NAS drive that has heaps of movies stored on it... Best thing is that I don't have dvds that my little girl can destroy.... all on the NAS drive, play on demand...

Before Hi-Def came in, the old xbox was a great media centre...

I use the WDTV in the projector, and just got a new tv that uses USB for data, plays mostly anything via the network also.

Yeah similar thing Ivan I guess, except that you also have installable apps on it, as well as stream-able media content from websites including TED, big bonus for me watching TED and other online content on the main tv..

Yeah I've had the netgear version of the WDTV for a while now and it's been ok, but copying stuff onto a thumb drive, then transferring the thumb drive to the player starts to wear thin... Besides I have spent countless hours organizing my movie collection I now want the whole deal, I want all the movie information on hand in a database, I want cover art, actor and director details, plot, genre etc all there....

A couple of things to think about earthbound I would get the disc drive in it rather then the HDD then buy a seperate HDD box that allows at least 3 HDDs and set them up in a raid 5 & an ethernet connection (quicker then wireless)... this allows 1 HDD to crash and the other 2 still holdeverything safe ...youthen replace the buggered HDD and it then copies back the lost data... ie 3 x 1TB HDDs in a raid 5 will hold 2 TBs extremely safe until you replace the buggered one rather then loosing all that info

Still have the same setup myself Ivan.... works like a charm....

I think I'll need 3 x 2TB external....

I got the 2TB internal HD mainly because I don't use bluerays, if I ever did, I'd rip them in my computer onto the HD, as I've done with DVD's, that way I can keep the database with all the associated info up to date.. I want to keep everything in the one place and not have to swap disks..

Good idea with the raid box though, that will save a lot of mucking around backing things up.

I use a media player that hooks up to 3tb drives. And a pc that I can plug them into as well. Just looking at a server the other day. Guy seemed worried that I wanted 10tb. Going to put it in a room behind the plasma. Have the MK320 logitech keyboard and mouse that works 10mtrs away so I can use the plasma as a monitor without cords to trip over. Even use one on the work pc. 10mtrs away and the mouse works great. Can't see the arrow, but I know its moving.

Have you tried out windows media centre Duff? That was one point that hooked me at the start, comes with a remote control and you can set windows to boot up in normal mode or in media player mode. not bad for what it does, just depends on what you want, as a straight video/music player it's pretty cool.

I'm waiting for the voice support for my xbox kinect so I can just wave my hand and tell the xbox to play or pause the movie. I'll have to give the media center a go. I find that some media players have a problem with the windows video files, the media center would fix that.

Ahh careful. RAID is a form of redundancy, completely different to a backup. DD is correct in that you can lose a single HDD and still be able to access your data.

RAID however can not recover files, that's what backups are for. Most people don't bother backing up media files, just the important stuff like photos and documents.

Just clearing it up so you don't get caught out.

FWIW I have a QNAP TS-419P NAS with 4*1TB drives that serves all my media files and handles the downloading from the NAS itself. I then have a custom HTPC running which connects to my TV via HDMI. The HTPC runs windows and auto loads XBMC on startup. I use the WMC Remote (as pictured above) with a custom registry file loaded so that the buttons map correctly in XBMC. XBMC is fully working in library mode.

Works really well, I love it. There's heaps of info around about XBMC, its highly configurable. Give it a shot, you will love it.

The raid 5 uses 3 drives to make a copy of 2 for example
drive a is a copy of both b and c
drive b is a copy of both a and c
drive c is a copy of both a and b

And backing up movies and music are important as i like to do this the ripping off my CD's and DVD's only once so the cost of 1 extra drive that saves me hrs of ripping all of these again is worth the effort

As you cant always recover every crashed disk...I mean you could mirror the info but that is an overkill ...

I cheat even more than you Joel... I use the xbox extender set...

Wireless receiver that plugs into one of the xbox controller ports.... the remote control... and a wireless Microsoft MediaCentre keyboard...

Can do anything through xbmc.. even run apps or hook to the net... laying on the couch...

Everything resides on the networked PC with raid/mirrored drives... in the other room...

Just as an aside... the original xBox CPU and graphics card were actually way infront of many PC specs at the time...

And for many years an xbox cluster ranked as one of the top 20 supercomputers in the world...

There are now many PS3 and Xbox360 cluster supercomputers running around the world... mainly in universities...

I feel tiny now.

I am supposedly in IT yet haven't got any of the toys in this thread.