So, after a week of struggling, fighting, and generally cursing computers in general, I’ve gotten my setup to work.
The original intent was to run Wireless (Draft-N) standard to stream my movies from my server in the office (which is less than 10 ft away). That didn’t go so hot. For whatever reason, despite the strong signal strength and high data transfer rates, my media files didn’t play worth a damn. Well, the 1080 ones at least. The 720 seemed to do ok. I’m at a loss, because I’ve seen that people have been able to wirelessly stream HD content without the buffering every 10 seconds. I’d be tempted to believe it was a failing of the Samba protocol, but it works fine over wired ethernet. I’m stumped. I gave up and did the “elegant” solution of running CAT-5 out to the living room.
Perhaps if I transferred the movies to the onboard hard drive, it would be a different story. When transferring anything from either of my Windows setups over the wire, they’re averaging 13MBps, which is much slower than the Wireless-N rate that it said I was getting. I’m considering the possibility of re-visiting the on-board NIC of my server, as that might only be 10/100 (and not gigabit like my desktop). I’m sure there’s tweaking that I could do between Linux and Windows, but it seems to accomplish the original intent in its current iteration.
Two more issues have cropped up. I wouldn’t really call them issues, though. More nitpicky things that anything else, I suppose. The first is that the blu-ray rips I’ve tested out have been encoded without chapter support. It’s a nitpicky thing, as I’ve seen a couple that do have that embedded. It doesn’t take much, which leads me to the inexorable conclusion that the community is lazy. It’s manageable, but navigating a movie with just fast forward and rewind is time-consuming. It’s like going back to the days of VHS. (You can run these movies through a media player on the PC and use the mouse on the scroll bar, so I guess that’s why.)
So that leads me to the next conundrum. Two, actually. Requiring further hardware upgrades. The first is that I’m quickly running out of space. So that necessitates adding a hard drive. I’m looking at either a 1TB disk or a 2TB disk. Each has their own advantages. Unfortunately, I think that I’m limited for space at the present time. I’ll need to check, and make a decision from there. I have a 320 and a 250GB in my server already, so my preference would be to just add an additional drive. If I have to drop one and add, that means I have to go with the 2TB. I’d really prefer, with this amount of data, to do two 1TB drives. We shall see.
The second is that I need a Blu-Ray drive, just to transcode correctly (include chapters, etc.) The drives really haven’t come down much in price, as it’s still a good $75-100 for a decent drive. The cheapest burners come in at $130. It almost makes sense to get the burner. But, I can’t really see buying a BD burner, as media is still expensive ($3-4 per disk, a few as low at $2). Single and Dual Layer DVD’s are pretty cheap for a fair amount of data backup.
For the additional money I’ve invested in this thing, I could have built a barebones system and hooked it into my existing stereo without issue. Considering that I have no problems running Linux flavors (and would if I didn’t have so much invested in terms of MS-only software), the final verdict is that the Revo wasn’t quite the cost savings I’d hoped it to be. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a viable platform, but between the stereo updgrade in March and the Revo this month, that’s a lot of money that went out for hardware that still needs additional investment.
Lesson learned, I suppose. In fairness, I’m pretty sure I needed a stereo system upgrade anyways, but I think, in hindsight, that I should have done more research and found a better way to spend $850.