TBS6984 Quad Tuner HD TV Card

October 15th, 2011 2 Comments »

The dream is starting to become a reality… This bad-boy is a satellite tuner card designed to receive both ordinary DVB-S signals AND the high definition DVB-S2 signals used by C4HD and BBC 1 HD. More importantly, it has four separate tuners on-board allowing you to plug it in to a quad LNB to record channels from 4 multiplexes simultaneously.

It’s probably best I jump back a bit here and remind you of what I’m trying to achieve. You may remember the new home server with 6x 2TB drives in? Well all that storage wasn’t for nothing – I plan to use the server for not only storage and media streaming, but also as a TV Server. The TV Server will contain a number of tuner cards, and stream TV over regular Ethernet cabling throughout the house to PCs, laptops, or specially built home theatre PCs connected to TVs. The idea is that the server becomes the only place in the house where aerials / satellite cabling is terminated, and ordinary Ethernet cables take care of the rest of the house. Want to watch a program you recorded in the lounge but you are now in the bedroom? Not a problem, all recordings are held centrally on the server.

TBS6984So, step 1 is complete – I have a server. Step 2, fit the server with as many TV tuners as possible is underway. I already have a standard definition Freeview tuner in the server, but I wanted HD and the most reliable way to get that here in South Wales is via satellite. The TBS6984 is a beast of a card, requiring a full-height PCI Express x1 socket AND a dedicated PCI Express power supply. As you can see from the image on the right, at the top-right of the image you can see the internal power input connector. Now, luckily my TBS6984 Power Cablepower supply has two such outputs, usually reserved for high end graphics cards. I plugged my power supply straight in to the card and away it went. For those of you without a spare PCI Express power output, you have the option of using the provided molex adapter – you will need THREE spare molex connectors though! (see image).

Once installed, you’ll need some software to go with it. It supports  Windows Media Center with no playing around – now I’d suggest when you do install the card, you install just the drivers and not the supplied software package. Let Windows take care of the rest because the interface is superb. Sadly for me, though, Windows Media Center does not support Windows Home Server and the in-house distribution features I am after. I may have mentioned this before, but I have chosen MediaPortal as the TV Server of choice. (For reference, I’m using the release candidate of 1.2.0 and not the older 1.1.3 which doesn’t appear to work very well with DVB-S2 high definition satellite broadcasts for me).

Now, the major stumbling block for satellite broadcasts is the EPG (Electronic Program Guide). Freeview broadcasts as EPG, Freesat and Sky also have EPGs, but MediaPortal can’t use the Freeview one for satellite (it just doesn’t have all the same channels) and no-one has managed to write a simple EPG plugin to read Sky or Freesat’s EPGs… so the solution is to grab an XML based one off the web. Luckily MediaPortal has a plugin called WebEPG which does this, but you will need to manually map your channels to the relevant XML feed which is straightforward enough.

So, buying this card… now, it isn’t cheap, and when I purchased this a few weeks ago there were only two options: eBay or Hong Kong (probably the same place?). I chose Hong Kong, buying direct from www.buydvb.net using PayPal – it was quick delivery and cheaper than eBay. However since then I’ve noticed it available for less money on Amazon – hence the shameless product placement picture at the top of this article. It’s also worth noting that if you don’t plan to use it in a server, then it comes with a useful remote control, and that you can get single and dual tuner versions too. I’d highly recommend this card overall – especially as it allows you to cram four tuners in to a single expansion slot.


Home Server Backup: CrashPlan

April 22nd, 2011 3 Comments »

crashplan

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I would discuss my proposed Windows Home Server 2011 backup plan in a future post, well this is that very post.

Currently I have over 500GB of data on my home server which needs to be backed up. About 100GB of that I would classify as critical, meaning that I would weep endlessly if I lost it. That critical category includes photos dating back to 1992 and all my home videos of the children as well as financial records and other boring documents. So it is understandable then that I need to make sure that I somehow have a backups copy of this data available should my server fail or get stolen. I narrowed my backup options down to three possibilities:

1) Another NAS in the house: This option would require me to purchase a new NAS with a lot of hard drive space, and schedule my server to copy all the data to the new NAS as required. The main drawbacks of this method being that firstly I have the expense of purchasing the new equipment and its associated running costs, and the fact that the backups would be sitting next to the server they are backing up making it just as liable to theft or meltdown.

2) Another NAS at someone else’s house: Again, I’d have to purchase a new NAS and then convince someone else to keep it plugged in at their house. I’d then need to configure some sort of remote synchronisation from my server, over my broadband connection to the remote NAS. Again, the drawbacks are buying hardware, convincing someone else to keep my backup NAS plugged in and backups speeds limited by the broadband connection speeds. Most people also have download limits on their broadband account so I’d probably have to supplement the cost of the subscription too.

3) Use an online ‘cloud’ backup server: There are many services offering cloud backup. You install a bit of software on your machine, tell it what to back up, and in the background it synchronises with their servers over your broadband connection. On the plus side you don’t have any need to host or buy hardware, but on the downside due to the amount of data I need to backup I will have to pay a subscription and should I need to recover that data from the backups I’ll be the mercy of my broadband connection.

Anyway, it’s option #3 that I’ve gone for. Most cloud backup providers have a tiered pricing model based on the amount of data you need to store. My aim was to find a provider offering unlimited backups for a fixed fee. The first provider I trialled was Carbonite (www.carbonite.co.uk). They promise unlimited storage for £41.95 a year but all is not as it seems with this company. Firstly, the backup client selectively ignores certain files by default (for example, .exe and anything over 4GB). You can go through your folders and manually select to back them up, but personally I prefer to select a folder and assume that everything in that folder will be backed up without having to go through manually and double-check. The biggest problem with Carbonite though is the limitation on your upload bandwidth once your storage requirements hit 200GB – they start to limit your connection to 100kbps which means my initial server backup would take almost a year to complete! That’s unacceptable and renders the unlimited promise pretty hollow. So I moved on…

crashplan2… and found CrashPlan (thanks to a tip-off from Diarra) at www.crashplan.com. They are US based only and therefore charge in dollars, an annual subscription costing $49.99 with longer plans bringing the cost down significantly. At time of writing I’m still within my 30 day trial period but I plan to subscribe once that expires. I’m completing my initial upload progressively and the first 16GB completed in less than 4 days. The interface isn’t quite as pretty as Carbonite, but it’s far more functional and doesn’t ignore files randomly unless you specifically tell it to. Better still, CrashPlan is FREE if you don’t want to use their online storage service (called Crashplan+). You can use CrashPlan to back up to other CrashPlan users over the internet, or just use it as a backup client to back up to a USB drive. It works on and between Linux, Windows and Macs meaning a Mac user based in somewhere such as, let’s say Ireland, could back up to my Windows Home Server for free over broadband.

With the CrashPlan+ subscription, your PC is constantly scanned for changes to data or new files in your backup locations, and backed up according to a schedule (which by default is every 15 minutes). You can set this to suite your taste, for example by allowing backups to run only over night. Data is transmitted and stored using encryption – you have the choice of using a password or your own encryption key for extra security if required and for additional peace of mind CrashPlan will store multiple versions of your files allowing you to role back to an old version in case of corruption (stopping the ‘Oops I deleted all the text from this document then saved it’ scenario).

My full backup should take about 4 months but critical data should be backed up within a month. I’ll be sure to blog if there are any problems, but if you’d like to check it out yourself, the basic CrashPlan program is free for all platforms at www.crashplan.com and the online CrashPlan+ ‘CrashPlan Central’ cloud backup service is free for 30 days.

A Tidy Rack is a Happy Rack

April 15th, 2011 6 Comments »

After the recent installation of the new server, my network cabinet had started to get a bit crowded and messy. The main problem was the mass of tangled patch leads of varying colours and lengths all strung across the cable management and down the side of the rack, coiled up at the bottom to take up the slack. So I sat down with a long cable and a crimping tool to tidy things up.

Before:

KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

After:

Rack_after

I even went as far making a shelf out of an old piece of contiboard I had lying around in the garage. I’m using it for the server’s local keyboard, mouse and monitor – useful in emergencies if a failure should happen and remote access isn’t working.

Rack_kvm

Yeah, this is the blog equivalent of a slow news day.

Home Server 2: The Hardware

March 30th, 2011 2 Comments »

Home Server 2 - image 1Happy days are on their way. Yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows Home Server 2011 (codename Vail) had been released to manufacturing and should be available to the general public in early April. That means it is time to cash in the gadget fund and get the server ready to take it! This post concerns the hardware going in to the new server, and goes some way to explain why the darned thing is so flippin heavy. The image to the right is a reasonably high resolution shot of the inside of my new server. As you can see it’s pretty crammed in there containing a total of 6 hard drives for storage and all the relevant cables that go with it. Right… so what exactly is inside this case? Take a look at this image and then I’ll go in to more detail after (click to see full resolution):

Home Server 2 Layout

You still here? Good… we’ll start with the basics. There’s the case that houses everything, this is the Compucase 4U chassis I’ve discussed before, it’s a very shallow case and can be rack mounted in the rack installed in the garage. This is a flexible and relatively large case, well ventilated and ideally suited for my purposes. In to the case I’ve loaded my Asus P5B motherboard, Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, Sony DVD-RW drive and GeForce 7600GS graphics card left over from my last desktop upgrade. Waste not want not… They are perfectly good components still and should be able to cope with the stresses of server life for many years (fingers are crossed here).

Now it gets fun, to keep it cool I opted for a high performance heatpipe cooler on the CPU. Okay, so this was partly because I broke the one already attached to the motherboard, but also because the stock cooler is just not that good and due to the number of components I’ve put in the chassis I decided to play it safe.

Power is provided by a 500W OCZ power supply. I’ve done a few calculations, and even given the number of hard drives and other expansion cards I plan to use, 500W should be plenty. It seems you only need more than that if you are running high performance graphics cards and they don’t really have a place in my plan for this machine.

The Silicon Image RAID controller is actually a RAID5 capable card. In its current configuration however it is just running RAID1 for the two Western Digital Caviar Green drives. For those unsure as to what this means, RAID1 simply mirrors the contents of one drive on to the other which essentially means that the system can carry on running even if one of the two disks fails. The final four drives, totalling 8TB,  will be used in a software RAID5 array. This type of resiliency wastes less space than mirroring by using approximately 25% of the space for parity data, meaning I end up with 6TB of usable space whilst providing continuity (albeit with degradation in service) should one of those four disks fail.

Finally you may have noticed the KWorld TV Tuner. This is just for testing purposes at the moment, but the idea is that this machine shall also perform the role of a TV Server for the whole house. Once up and running, I’ll be replacing this standard definition Freeview tuner with a High Definition DVB-T2 card and two DVB-S/S2 cards for HD satellite. I’ve already managed to run an aerial cable to the garage from the loft, and two satellite feeds from the LNB on my dish in anticipation. That’s the plan anyway, but first I need an operating system and a migration plan for all my data so see you back here in a week or so?

2010 Gadget Rundown

January 25th, 2011 1 Comment »

Last year was a bit lighter on gadgets than previous years, but there were still some crackers. Here are my top 5:

#5: Homedics 9126 MiBody USB Scales
We’re using this nearly every day and haven’t yet had to change the batteries. It’s still logging our weight and working out our BMI, fatness level, etc…. and saving it to the same Access database with no problems. I’m still not crazy on the interface – and if you check the comments on the blog post I have linked to above you’ll find a link to an alternative piece of software. I haven’t checked this out personally because I like to open the access database directly and export to Excel (or just read the database tables).

#4: PC Upgrade 2010
This was the most powerful upgrade (comparatively) that I’ve ever bolted together. Usually I go for mid-range components but this time I pushed it a little further. It’s not top of the range, but the best price-performance compromise and this machine is likely to last me a lot longer than previous incarnations as a consequence. Yeah, it’s not one gadget, but a collection of components: Intel Core i5-750 quad-core processor, Gigabyte GA-P55-US3L motherboard, 8GB of DDR3 Crucial ‘Ballistix’ 1333MHz memory and an Arctic Cooling heatpipe heatsink. I’ve struggled to max it out – video encoding hits the processor and I can encode HD video in real-time on MPEG2. I have also been able to run two virtual machines without any noticeable degradation in the host’s performance.

#3: Server rack / Compucase
New Server 2I’m still working on this one and shall be for many months to come. The Server rack has obviously been installed, and inside the rack is a rack-mountable 24-port Belkin gigabit switch which I managed to get off ebay for a bargainous £20. The Compucase is now partially operational as a server, if only in a test capacity. It houses a new power supply, my old Core 2 Duo processor, motherboard and 4GB RAM. I’ve also stuck a RAID5 controller card in there and two 2TB hard drives. Eventually I plan to put a few more drives in there giving me around 10TB of storage (less will actually be usable). It should be ready by the release of the next version of Windows Home Server later this year.

#2: Panasonic HDC-TM700 Full HD Camcorder

So totally awesome and stuff! It should be at number one, but hasn’t quite made it for reasons which will become obvious (or maybe not) when you read #1. I’ve used the camera loads – the results are on my Facebook video page for those of you who can see that, and the footage is consistently impressive. In low light, it can appear at times to output low resolution, but if there are some well lit objects in shot then everything becomes very vivid. I have some amazing footage shot at Disneyland Paris during the evening parade and fireworks display. I only shoot at 1080i resolution – even my PC can’t quite cope with editing 1080p footage and my PS3 won’t play it back either unless I reduce the bitrate.

#1: shingler.co.uk
My 30th Birthday present…… and now the crucial component of my email address. I finally dropped the superfluous ‘o’. I don’t need to add any more to this paragraph because the significance of this entry is obvious… obviously :)

 

What didn’t make the top 5: A USB->Midi adapter which lets my keyboard plug in to my computer like the good old days – I just haven’t used it! There was also the PS3-IR500, a little Infra Red to Bluetooth adapter which sits next to the Playstation 3 and convert Infra Red signals from my remote in to Bluetooth signals to control my PS3. I use it daily and it sits there reliably and faithfully, but it’s not exciting. It’s also been replaced by a OneForAll device you can buy from most electronics shops now for a lot less money. It was good when I bought it, but there are better and cheaper solutions which don’t have to be imported from the States. Well, that’s it for this mega-post. Well done for sticking with it – check back in 12 months time for another gadget round-up post.

« Older Entries