onsdag 28 november 2012

Building a home media center, part 0


Starting today, I will make a series of posts about the progress of building a media center. The thoughts, tests, links to interesting articles, and other stuff I try during the build of a complete Linux-based media center. This first post, I will concentrate on the plans, the hardware I have, and the hardware that needs to be fetched.

I have been thinking about building a media center for some time, but I realized I now have almost all the required hardware, when my CuBox arrived about two weeks ago. What I have, that might be used:

  • CuBox, an ARM-based microcomputer with a great potential and an eSATA port, capable of full-HD video playback. 
  • Mika, an old Acer laptop cirrently standing behind the printer and supplying our home with shared music. 
  • Alice, my old workstation laptop, with a broken gigabit ethernet and an overheating problem probably caused by a four-year intensive use and excessive dust in the fan. 
  • Native Instruments komplete audio 6, an external fully Linux compatible sound card I bought when I realized the Tascam US-144mk2 had no Linux support whatsoever. 
  • A complete 2.1 music system, with good speakers and a NAD amplifier. 
  • Two external small hard drives, retrieved from laptops. 500GB and 750GB in size. 
  • An almost complete scrapheap of old computers, and lots of really old but mostly working mixed-size hard drives raging from 10GB to 250GB. 

My brother and I will invest in a used plasma TV also, we're looking for one which cost 3 000 SEK or less with good picture quality. 

So, what to do with this? 

The expensive stuff, the audio hardware, is already in place. I tested the CuBox on our other TV a couple of days ago, and XBMC worked like a charm after I installed Arch Linux to the SD card and ran a full system update. Installation instructions for Arch Linux here, and then you can install the xf86-video-fbdev package for video drivers, and xbmc-cubox-git to get XBMC working. XBMC is version 12.0 "Frodo", meaning it's the first version to support live TV and PVR, which is great. XBMC is not as fast on the cubox as it was on my new Lenovo W530, but remember we're comparing a device 2"x2"x2" in size supporting an 800MHz ARM CPU with a workstation-class laptop supporting an Intel Core i7 3610QM here. They are NOT supposed to be equal. 

The test of XBMC was successful. However, I have not yet tested playing video on the device, since my external hard drive is now encrypted with truecrypt, which is currently not installed on the CuBox. So, that is still to be tested. 

My plan is as follows:
I will use the CuBox as a media center, and supply it with a 5-disk external SATA hard drive cabinet, connected via eSATA. The CuBox will run XBMC, a SAMBA file sharing server, and MPD (music player daemon) so I can play music without having the TV turned on. 

XBMC was a success, SAMBA will most probably work, and since the ALSA drivers for my sound card is in the Linux kernel, I don't expect any issues with MPD either. However, there are still potential issues with the device and the use I am planning. 
  • Capacity. Playing a full-HD movie, while streaming to another computer in the house over network, requires a lot of juice. The CuBox might not be able to provide both of these services at the same time. That will have to be tested. 
  • The lag in XBMC. It is not a real issue, however it is noticeable. How will it perform while browsing the menus, when a movie is playing in the background?
  • Encryption. The Truecrypt AES encryption I use also require some juice, and I am not sure whether the CuBox can do that while playing 1080p content. This can become a problem, and I will have to test it. Encryption can be done in the external cabinet, but that requires more expensive hardware. A test with my USB drive is to be done. 
Separating the media center and the server is an option, but that requires me to get another microcomputer. Preferrably an OpenRD Client or OpenRD Tasman (link) is an interesting option, but they seem almost impossible to get at the moment. I have tried, believe me. I am yet to determine a better file sharing server than the CuBox (gigabit ethernet and eSATA is heavy), but regarding media center capabilities, the Mele A1000 is an interesting option. It does not have eSATA (though it has normal SATA), but it does have wireless network built in, which makes deployment as a media center easier. Also, it is not very expensive. I tried to get one, but got problems with the payment, so it is yet to be done. 

Another option is the Raspberry Pi, but it is limited to h.264 encoded video, and the amount of XviD in our library is too great to be converted easily. The Mele A1000 is capable of as much as the CuBox, and has an even more powerful CPU. It is also cheaper. So, as a media center, it is definitely an option. Stay put for part 1, which will probably be about truecrypt. 

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