Cisco Unity Tools

This page has a few pictures of my quest for a "from scratch" media center in my house.  I've been using TiVo and Ultimate TV with my DirecTV satellite system for a few years now.  Frustrated with DirecTV's efforts to keep the "room sharing" features out of the TiVo systems and the general weakness of the TiVo offerings for DVD burning capabilities and lame capacity, I finally decided to bite the bullet and do my own thing.

After looking at Microsoft's Media Center offering for, oh, about 20 minutes we canned that idea.  I spent more time looking at stuff like MythTV, Freevo, BeyondTV and others but I finally settled on Sage TV - primarily because it's support for multiple tuner cards was more sophisticated (although it looks like BeyondTV has caught up there now), it supports remote clients (for both playback and additional recording resources) well and the installation was head and shoulders above everyone else.   The user interface is OK but there are plenty of mods to the UI you can download and use or do yourself - see the "links" section below and head to the SageTV forums for more on that.

The choice of Sage TV meant I had to use encoding cards with hardware compression only since Sage doesn't support software based MPEG encoding - that's ok since the CPU load is light this way and the picture quality is excellent.  I tried a few different methods here, but the Hauppauge WinTV PVR cards were the obvious choice for this.

So, Plan A: Install a nice looking box in the living room with a Hauppauge 250 and 350 - equip it with quiet fans and the quietest hard drives I could get my hands on.  This is the primary viewing box, I was going to install two client PCs on smaller boxes (or using the MediaMVP unit) in other parts of the house which would stream media from this server across the gigabit wired network already in place.

This plan stunk.  Anyone who thinks they can have all that in a nice looking box and have it be quiet enough to sit 8 feet from your head in an open cabinet and stay cool is insane.  But, of course, I didn't know this at the time... so off we go. (click on the thumb nails to get a larger image)

The arrival of the first payload of equipment - an MSI motherboard with an AMD 64 3200, 512 meg of RAM and a couple of quiet Samsung 160 gig drives.  A Hauppauge 350 and 250 card came a little later, I had planned all along to use the 350 video out to keep the CPU usage down and the case temp under control so the video card was a low end fanless NVidia 5200. Then the arrival of the snappy looking "home theater" case - I went with a D-Vine V which looked reasonable good, however closer inspection showed a rather flawed drive cage placement that limited usable space needlessly (a flaw I notice they've rectified in later revs of the case).  Another gripe about the case is it used a custom power supply size - a regular power supply is about 1/4 inch too high to fit in the case.  This was entirely unnecessary and only complicated thing needlessly.  The moral to this story is to read the fine print when ordering equipment on line.  Short story is the case looks nice but is unnecessarily wide and deep (wasted space galore) but they saved themselves a 1/4 inch in height.  Well played.
Load everything in the case - kind of a tight fit on the drives.  This is a shot of me fiddling with the front of the case to get the cover on the CD drive to fit flush with the front - which took entirely too long as the steel "button" to hit the drive open mechanism was way too short and we ended up having to glue some rubber "tabs" onto the end of it to make it work properly.
Everything's in the box, two satellite boxes are hooked up and the testing phase begins.  the LCD display in the bottom photo is a fan speed and temperature monitoring tool - I fiddled endlessly with all the fan speeds but even with the quietest CPU and case fans I could get my hands on spun down it was too loud to sit in my living room without annoying me.  The drives were quiet but not _that_ quiet so the fan noise was kind of a moot point regardless.  As such, after a few days of fiddling I had to abandon the original plan A.
OK.  Playtime is over.  On to plan B.  I snagged a rack mount case that I could load up and stuff in my existing wiring closet and close the door.  I got another AMD 64 3200 and an MSI motherboard with a low end video card - same basics specs as the first box. The keen observer will notice that there's no power supply in the unit.  Newegg usually does a bang up job but they failed to deliver the power supply for this case that was supposed to come with it.  After 4 separate attempts over about 6 weeks to get me the power supply they just gave up and credited my card with the difference.  Lame.  Given that it's a 3 unit rack case, a normal power supply wont fit in it. As I found out, it's not a common item to find either on line or at Frys or pretty much anywhere else.
All loaded up and ready to party.  Notice the fine use of tie wraps to keep the full sized 400 watt power supply in place.  I had originally intended this to be just a temporary work around until the real one showed up, but it turned out to be more permanent than I had figured. As long as we were going big time, I stuck a 3rd 250 decoder card in there and pumped up the drive space with another 300 gig Maxstore to go with the two 160 Samsungs already in there.  The nice thing about the rack mount case is that there are lots of fans keeping things nice and cool - there are 4 case fans in addition to the CPU and mainboard fan along with the 120 mm fan on the power supply.  Sure, it sounds like a small plane taking off, but that's why it's in a closet with a door on it.  The other nice thing is plenty of room for drives - it'll easily accommodate 6 drives if I want to at some point. I also stuck a DVD burner in there while I had it opened (the NEC OEM version of the 5320a is under $70 - it's a rockin' deal) - I'm still working on getting a modified STV for the Sage system to let me burn DVDs from the TV interface and have it strip commercials and compress and all that good stuff.  It'll get there... Since the box was _so_ noisy (even with the door closed it could easily be heard walking by) I did end up replacing the four 80 mm fans in the case with quiet versions from the fine folks at Papst and, as you can see, I have a Zalman quiet CPU fan in there - coupled with the quiet power supply which I had originally purchased for the D-Vine case (and didn't fit in that box either - what is it with non standard power supplies on this project?)  the box was actually rather quiet.  The CPU still stays a comfortable 36 C and the case hovers right around 30 C.
After waiting several weeks for Newegg to get their act together and get me the power supply, and then looking around for another that would fit I finally gave up and cut a hole in the top of the case cover to let the supply poke through.  Excellent duct-tape technology.
Now for the placement into the home made "half rack" in my closet (I got a full sized 19" rack and chopped off the top so it'd fit in my closet on the shelf you see there).  Given that it's a "cheater rack"  with only one rack and no back rack, we had to get a little creative with mounting the PC.  I ended up mounting a 4x4 behind the rack which happened to be the perfect height to rest the server on the bottom of the rack.  More outstanding duct-tape technology. Notice the handy fire extinguisher within easy reach.  Safety first, people...
Then it was time to get cozy in the closet as I had to fiddle with all the connections for the 3 satellite boxes and such.  Good times. I used serial control to change the channels on the satellite receivers - this is definitely the way to go for multiple receivers, using IR is a massive pain in the butt since you get "cross over" signals if you're not careful.  A quick word about the serial control - just give in and buy the cables from SnapStream - the "low speed" connections on the back of the receivers are not your standard RJ11 inputs (they look like it but are just a tad skinnier) - by the time you get the right jack and manually do your own, you've wasted a bunch of time and money and it looks crappy.  The second thing to worry about with the serial control is that RCA changed their codes along the way so newer receivers are not yet supported by any of the major applications out there.  The folks out on the boards for MythTV have some scripts hacked together but it's not for the feint of heart.  I ended up just getting some older RCA receivers off EBay for $10 a pop - they work like a champ even if they are a bit slower than the new receivers you can get.  Just make sure they have the "low speed" connection on the back and check for compatibility with the software you're using to send the serial packets to change the channel.
The rack after getting everything hooked up.  From the top: the 3 RCA DirecTV receivers.  Under that is the cable modem and router for the network.  The box to the left of the blue router is an RCA video converter to route the video out from the 350 (which is composite/SVideo out) into RF to feed into the coax distribution to the rest of the house (see the next section).  Under that is the speaker distribution module so I can pump sound outside, to the living room, downstairs, into the hot tub room (watching TV from the hot tub rules, by the way) and all that fun stuff.  Under that is the 10/100/1000 switch with a 10/100 hub under that - I'm not using the hub any longer at this point but couldn't be bothered to take it out.  Under that is the two patch panels for the hard wired network and phone jack drops throughout the house.  Under that is a power distribution panel (the UPS is out of sight behind me as I take the picture).  And finally, our fabulous server on the bottom. You can't really tell but the entire rack is mounted to a piece of 3/4" plywood which is on sliding heavy-duty rails we got from Home Depot - so it can be pulled out to get behind it somewhat easier.  That said, I've seen some outstanding little media racks that have cool slide out and 180 degree pivot features that would have worked much nicer in this space (but cost much more) since we've done all this.  But then again it wouldn't have the awesome "we built it ourselves" feel... yeah, yeah - I know the wires to the left there are a tangle - I'll get to it...
(Update - 2/24/2007) Changed out the server and added a 2 TB NAS unit (in the lower left there).  So slick -
To the left of the rack is the coax center (which I haven't finished "dressing" yet).  The short story here is the 350 off the server sends an analog signal out to the distribution box you see there - I send this signal to up to 4 TVs in the house and there's an IR remote relay built in line to the cable itself (I used the "Xtra Link 2" package which works real nice).  These TVs have a little receiver on them for sending signals back to the closet to control Sage running on the server.  Below that you can see the RCA satellite multiplexer box - two signals come in off the dish and 4 come out - needed this to get to 3 receivers.  Works dandy.
Here's one of the TVs that watches off the main server out in the living room.  The picture is great and the remote responsiveness is very good - no delays or "missed" hits - you can see the little IR receiver on top of the set - the signal is transmitted via the coax to a receiver in the wiring closet - this works MUCH better than those goofy over the air transmitters you can get at Radio Shack and the like.  The range on the IR box is outstanding as well - I could hit it reliably at around 30 feet and at pretty high angles. Yeah, I know - now that I have the back end done I need to upgrade the TVs.  One thing at a time...
There are also 3 clients installed in other parts of the house - one on my wife's laptop, one on my main XP box and one on the D-Vine box from the original Plan A.  After stripping everything but the fanless NVidia 5200 video card out and putting a 40 gig laptop hard drive in there I was able to use one quiet 80 mm case fan and another Zalman CPU fan and spin everything down - it's very quiet and works well as a client in the back room we use for the exercise area.  At some point I need to upgrade the video card in there - it does a respectable job but it's not fabulous... Notice that I finally got the DVD drive door cover flush with the front of the case.  Very nice. Also notice the lack of an LED display on the front - the goofy drive configuration resulted in me busting it in half by accident while trying to get the 2 180s in there during the Plan A misadventure.  That's ok, it worked through a _parallel_ port with a cable snaking out the back which was exceedingly lame to begin with.  Apparently USB is too cutting edge...

I had also tried to get a "low end" box to work as a client by using a fanless Mini-ITX 600 Mz box (which you can get for under $300 in a very slick looking, super-tiny HTPC case) - however, it wasn't quite up to the task - It has on board MPEG hardware decoding but it only works with a few applications such as PowerDVD, I couldn't get it to fly for me with Sage.  If you put a 350 in there to do the decoding it'd work great but this requires a slot for it (not available in the case I got) and you wont be able to play DVDs off of it (which we wanted to do) and even then the menus and remote responsiveness are a little chuggy - so I ditched it.  Truth be told we only ever use the main box in front and the D-Vine client in the back - although I tested the system recording 3 shows and playing back 3 recorded programs at the same time and it all worked flawlessly with the CPU on the server hovering right around %40 - so if I ever have a TV blow-out party, I can handle it.

So - it all worked out reasonably well although I crushed my original time and budget estimations (go figure).  I ended up with a bunch of miscellaneous junk (including the aforementioned 600 Mz mini-ITX box, Firefly remote, fans, heatsinks, cables, adapters and, of course, a TiVo and Ultimate TV box), but this is the price of learning for projects like this.  Being able to archive hundreds of hours of movies and TV and easily rip DVDs right off the archives, have commercials automatically skip, be able to customize the interface to my liking and drop kick my TiVo made it all worth it as far as I'm concerned.

HTPC related links I used:

BYO PVR - this is a really good site to start with - lots of "how to" info and links you'll find useful if you're just trying to get your brain around where to go with this.

SageTV (Frey Technologies) - the forums out here were very helpful (one of the reasons I went with Sage - you can always tell how good a software company is by how well they respond to public forum questions...)

BeyondTV (SnapStream) - I ended up getting the kits for satellite receiver controls here - not real sure why Sage doesn't offer the same thing, but hey...  By the way, I do NOT recommend the Firefly remote - use Girder and the USBUIRT unit (link below) - you'll be much happier than being locked into their goofy remote scheme.

MythTV WIKI - for DirecTV setup info, this site was useful.  They are also on the cutting edge of all the commercial detection stuff (SageTV can use this via custom mods to the STV - Cayars "Ultimate STV" is by far and away the most powerful - it's what I use.)

USBUIRT.com - these are nice little units for sending _and_ receiving IR remote signals into your PC.  I tried the Firefly remote system from SnapStream and was very unhappy with it - I ended up just using the 45 button remotes I got with my Hauppauge cards and this unit with Girder to send the signals to Sage.  I'm much happier with this setup.

Girder (Promixis) - You use this in conjunction with a remote system (such as the USBUIRT unit above) to send windows signals to any Windows package from your remote - there are nice plug ins available for the USBUIRT and pre done mappings for just about everything (including SageTV server and clients).  Definitely the way to go for remote functionality as far as I'm concerned.

New Egg - got most of my basic equipment here or at Fry's.  I've got lots of stuff from them and they normally do a real nice job and the prices are good.  That said, the whole episode with the power supply on that rack mount case really chapped my hide so I've started spreading my business around a bit.

EndPCNoise.com - nice place to get quiet fans, hard drives and such - and they over night their stuff to me for no extra charge since they're only a couple hours away - good deal.

Logic Supply - some nice HTPC cases - this is where I got the tiny case for the mini-ITX system I setup.

PC Alchemy - not the best prices but certainly a good selection of HTPC related items to browse through.

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