Moral-Flexibility.Net

It should come as no shock to you, loyal readers, that we are heavily reliant on our home network for our digital entertainment (tv and internet), gaming, telephony and even the new surveillance cameras sit on the end of a length of Cat5.

The router is the heart of this, and recently the heart of our home network began beating erratically.

A few times an hour the router would reset itself disrupting telephone conversations, movies, and internet connections. Not fatal, but certainly irritating (the only thing I hate more than something that doesn’t work, is something that cannot be relied on to work consistently).

Our router was an old D-Link WBR-2310, and it had served like a trooper, but it was undoubtedly time to replace it.

Given the service we had received from the WBR-2310 I went down to the local technology store and bought a D-Link DIR-655, hooked it up and immediately our VoIP began acting strange (every second phone call would lack audio on one end of the conversation). I spent about 5 hours trying to trouble shoot this (problem experienced even in the DMZ) and finally gave up dragging the thing back to the store, where I was upsold to the Linksys E3000.

The extra $30 must have been worth it, because the linksys worked right out of the box (an attribute I can appreciate).

(There is some irony in that the E3000 comes with a USB port and built in UPNP support)

A stand alone NAS using multiple USB HDDs, providing UPnP/DLNA service and a bit torrent client for under $50CDN, the WLX652 USB Network Server bills itself as the piece of hardware for the job, but is it?

At a cost of $40CDN shipped the units description suggested it would easily deliver all the features that I needed right out of the box with no hassle on my part. Sadly the reality entirely failed to live up to the promises, and worse the units hardware had been “upgraded” and the firmware could no longer be easily updated with a third party solution.

The unit appears incapable of running for more than 48 hours without requiring a manual power cycle to clear some sort of catastrophic failure.

While it does what it says, and it required much less hacking than my “in use” NAS, the reliability is just not there. I would not recommend this unit to those shopping around for options.

(annoyingly detailed information on this NAS below the cut, continue at your own peril)

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I was about ready to trash the Network Attached Storage devices and their attendant media servers when I observed a strange message flash on the corner of the screen while I was playing a PS3 game.

“The network cable is not attached”

Over the two hours I was playing the game the same message flashed twice more. Now as I was not playing online I really wasn’t concerned about internet connectivity issues (which is what I believed this was), but as I went back later to resolving the stuttering and freezing issues with multimedia playback it occured to me that this random disconnection issue was probably exactly what I was hunting for.

You see the backbone of our home network is a 2wire 2701 modem/router arrangement, and while this has carried the burden for a few years now I supposed it is possible that it is starting to give up the ghost.

I still have a couple of Dlink routers in my random electronics box, and I’ve just ordered another DSL modem, so I’ll swap the pieces around and see if there is still a problem.

Might be able to leave the NAS stuff as it is after all.

Unless you want to maintain separate storage for each Player/TV in the house, the NAS (Network Attached Storage) is the key element in actually distributing your media to each individual player.

There are almost limitless options when it comes to NAS, and as I was getting my feet wet I went with the least expensive option (a BT861 NAS). A generic NAS with no onboard storage, but two USB connections for external HDDs. It was found on Ebay for approximately $35CDN. The NAS doesn’t come with very reliable software, and needs to be reflashed to Snake OS (a painless and simple process) before you invest any energy in the crap it ships with.

Out of the box you can now share files across your network using Samba and network media tanks (like the Patriot Box Office and Egreat Media Tank) will be able to play videos off the NAS.

If you want to stream movies from the NAS to your PS3 however another step is involved, the installation of MediaTomb. This process is a little more complicated, but with a little perseverance you will be able to stream movies to any UPnP / DLNA compliant devices (such as your PS3 or Network Media Player).

An added bonus to Snake OS is that it comes with a Bittorrent client (transmission) which allows you to shut down your desktop or laptop and leave the NAS running in the background chugging away at your file list.

There are also FTP, Webserver and Dynamic DNS options, but I really haven’t mucked around with them as of yet.

(I have ordered a second NAS like this one, and will post detailed instructions and screenaps of the process of switching it to Snake and installing MediaTomb once it arrives in the mail).

Ok, so I promised pictures but I’m sure you guys have seen enough of the “Stuff screwed to a board” pictures so heres a diagram of the television distribution system presently installed in my home.

It’s important to note that I am not using all of it. The SATV integration features are for future expansion as is the run for the cable modem that I do not have.

At this point however I don’t think there is a whole lot else I need do to call this one complete.

Thoughts? Did I forget something?

Ok, so my first stab at a low-tech home media distribution project has met with success.

We presently have two sources of entertainment in the house (and in fact the home media server can amuse two of us at once).

UPnP – Universal Plug’n'Play – Using MediaTomb I can presently watch any videos hosted on the server from the comfort of our living room via the PS3. We’ve already discussed that one so I’ll move on to the new adddition.

MeTV (Channel 73) – A small widget converts the VGA output from our media server into a composite feed which is then modulated and inserted on channel 73. The media player has a playlist from which it randomly selects movies and television episodes when not “specifically” directed to play something we want to see.

Any TV in the house can tune into this program and it has no impact on the streamed video being viewed by the PS3 in the living room. (the video is occasionally slightly “jumpy” although I am given to understand this is a problem with Ubuntu 9.04 and hopefully will be cleared up soon).

At present movie selection for this channel can only be accomplished using remote desktop from either of the laptops, but I’m curious to see what other options are out there.

In the meantime I’ll try to get some pictures online to spice these dry entries up a bit.

It didn’t work at all the last time I tried.

This time I mostly followed some online directions for installing a bare-bones Ubuntu media server running MediaTomb and modified things only slightly to get a result that more closely matched my requirements.

It worked (the third time I tried actually).

I celebrated my success by watching Without a Clue streamed to my PS3 directly from the new media server I had just finished configuring (plus I had time to kill while copying everything over – who knew 100gig took a while to copy).

Instructions are saved for posterity below the cut (more for my reference than yours).

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The most recent upgrade of my surveillance system was a surplused DVR unit which has rendered my home-built DVR largely superfluous, I’ve been considering using it as the basis for a home media distribution system but have been having some issues figuring out how I’ll be organizing this.

I’ve decided that I will install Mediatomb on the computer (once we’ve covered a period of time running both DVR systems to make sure the new one is reliable) allowing for streaming video for UPnP devices on our home network, but for the televisions NOT equipped with UPnP I’ll be adding a cludge to allow us to access a library of movies and music from any TV in the house.

The plan is to make use of remote desktop features of Ubuntu, playing movies or music on the “server” will allow me to pipe the monitor (and audio) feed along another custom channel (like our surveillance system feed) and thus any TV in the house can whatever media is selected.

Truly MeTV. It won’t be as user friendly as I would like and will rely heavily on laptops/desktops to get the movie/music started, but once it’s rolling it should be easy enough to enjoy, no?

Someone have a better idea? I’m all ears.