MediaServer8

So it's almost done!

Spent the weekend modding some fans into my unRAID system and I'm pleased with where it's going. This machine has consolidated at least 3x machines that were previously running almost all the time, including a VERY power hungry Asus PCH-DL dual Xeon based system. unRAID 6 has facilitated this so a big thanks to Tom.

Specs are;

SYSTEM:

Zalman ZS1000 case (modified somewhat!)

Gigabyte SKT-AM3+ 990FXA-UD5 Motherboard

AMD FX8320 Black Edition 8 Core (3.5/4.0GHz)

Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 CPU Cooler

Corsair RM650 80 Plus Gold 650W PSU

16GB RAM

EXPANSION:

2x Asus ATI Radeon HD 5450 Silent Graphics Cards

ATI Radeon X1300 Silent Graphics Card

Syba SATA III 4 Port PCI-e x4 Controller Card

Digital Devices Octopus PCIe Bridge

Digital Devices DuoFlex Twin DVB-T Tuner

Digital Devices DuoFlex Twin DVB-S2 Tuner

SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II 2 Port PCI-e x1 Controller Card

M-Audio Delta 410 multi-channel PCI sound card

STORAGE:

7x mixed brand 1TB drives as unRAID parity and data array

1x 500GB Cache

1x 3TB Seagate TV Recording storage

1x 75GB WD raptor TV timeshifting

OS, VMs & SOFTWARE:

unRAID 6.0b4

Win 7 VM running MediaPortal 1.6 & ArgusTV servers with TV tuner passthrough

Win 8 VM running MediaPortal 1.6 Client with GPU passthrough

Win 7 VM running SqieezeSlave instances and audio card passthrough

The main functions of this machine are;

-6TB unRAID storage array (due to be uncreased soon)

-Whole House TV/Video server supporting up to 8x simultaneous view/record channels across DVB-T and DVB-S2

-Whole house audio controller supporting 5x discrete zones

-2x TV client systems (MediaPortal over HDMI with IR control)

Not too shabby!

Most recent blog entry and lots more photos here;

http://mediaserver8.blogspot.ie/2014/04/more-case-mods.html

Great setup!  What's the power usage for this setup?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Just curious, what is this:

-Whole house audio controller supporting 5x discrete zones

(Sorry if it's a stupid question - I'm rather new to this and it sounds like it could be an interesting feature I want to add to my build too )

Great setup!  What's the power usage for this setup?

 

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

Hi

~240W during boot

160W no VMs, all discs spun up

120W no VMs, unRAID array spun down

160W VMs running, unRAID array spun up

~135W VMs running, unRAID array spun down

Peter

UPDATE: Keeping an eye throughout the day, the Watt meter hit 240W during periods of heavy usage.

Just curious, what is this:

-Whole house audio controller supporting 5x discrete zones

(Sorry if it's a stupid question - I'm rather new to this and it sounds like it could be an interesting feature I want to add to my build too )

Hi

I have Logitech Media Server running in a VM. This serves locally stored music and Spotify to several Logitech SqueezeBoxes I have.

I have an M-Audio 410 PCI sound card in MediaServer8. This provides 4x stereo analog outputs and one SPDIF output. I have this card passed through to a Windows 7 VM where I run several instances of a small utility called 'SqueezeSlave'. This emulates additional squeezebox devices in software and allows me direct them to discrete outputs on the M-Audio card. In essence, this allows me have up to 5 software-driven  'zones' in addition to the physical squeezebox devices.  (of course, I need to add amps and speakers)

The nice thing is that these software players can be controlled remotely from iOS or Android apps just like hardware devices etc. A poor mans sonos system, if you like.

I have a detailed post on setting it up here;

http://mediaserver8.blogspot.ie/2014/04/whole-house-audio-step-2.html

OP, how have you configured your TV tuner passthrough? Do you see any issues with dropping packets when tuned to HD channels?

OP, how have you configured your TV tuner passthrough? Do you see any issues with dropping packets when tuned to HD channels?

Devices are passed through Manually in vm configure file.

I've never tracked dropped packets per se. Usually playback is rock solid. I do get occasional bursts of pixelation but I think it's related to the tvserver switching time shift files, it's never bothered me enough to investigate.

Sorry to be a pain, but can I ask how you've configured your VM? I've tried this and Win7 seems to have latency issues and ends up just dropping lots of packets making it unwatchable.

No Problem at all.

I've attached my Win7 VM XML here for your perusal. Here's the segment near the bottom where I pass through thehost tuner card to the VM;

    <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>
      <driver name='vfio'/>
      <source>
        <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x0b' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
      </source>
      <alias name='hostdev1'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0'/>
    </hostdev>

Inside windows, I have drivers installed for this and use MediaPortal TV server as my back end. This is configured to save recordings to an unRaid share (R:) and time shift to an SSD drive I have passed to the VM (not part of the array - drive T:). This T: drive is shared with the network so clients can access it.

See attached files for screenshots of how I've configured the relevant MediaPortal setting as well as a grab of the mounted drive configuration.

I used to use a ram drive for timeshifting and this was successful - you can't get faster than RAM, right? However, I wanted to reclaim the memory for other VMs and Dockers so opted for the dedicated SSD instead.

Can I ask, what setup do you have? What tuners and software? Do you have all the VirtIO drivers installed in Windows? Where do you save timeshiftimg and recordings to? There could be any number of reasons why you're seeing dropped frames from tuner card drivers to storage location to network issues.

Try recording something, copying the resulting file to your local machine and playing it in VLC. Do you still see the dropouts? If yes, it might help narrow things down.

Win7_VM.txt

-Whole House TV/Video server supporting up to 8x simultaneous view/record channels across DVB-T and DVB-S2

How are you achieving 8x simultaneous TV streams with only two TV tuner cards?

IF using DVB-T it's easy as each multiplex contains more than 1 channel. Depending on bitrate you could easily have 10 channels per multiplex.

-Whole House TV/Video server supporting up to 8x simultaneous view/record channels across DVB-T and DVB-S2

How are you achieving 8x simultaneous TV streams with only two TV tuner cards?

The digital devices octopus is a single PCIe card that supports up to 4x daughter cards. Each daughter card contains 2x tuners, either Dvb-s or Dvb-t/c. Total 8 tuners. As allanp81 points out, just a single dual tuner Dvb-t card will allow me watch/record all 8 channels on Irish Saorview as they're only on two muxes.

Well that's interesting. I have a Digital Devices DuoFlex CT PCIe DVB-C TV Card in my HTPC. Do you know how many channels I could watch/record simultaneously with that one? I always thought I can only watch OR record at the same time but not both...

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I don't know if DVB-C works in the same way. I know that when I had a DVB-S2 receiver I could only tune 1 per channel per tuner.

Likewise, I cannot speak to DVB-C as I don't use it. DVB-T works like this for me.