Multiple PC setup with central server

[atamas]

This is an announcement that I was able to set up a client-server environment with multiple PCs connecting to a server which has two tuners and does the recording.

The server is sitting in my basement with a couple external USB 2.0 hard drives hooked up for additional storage.

In all, counting all the laptops, I have 6 machines connected to the server and can display its content.

I am not able to display live TV in any of the PCs and never tried. I am not sure if that is possible. I'd like to know if anyone tried and got it to work. I think it should be technically possible to do. Maybe I'll look into it.

However, the stuff that works... I shared drives and all client PCs display the same recordings as if they were local. The Pictures and MP3s are also accessible. One of my goals was to set it up so that the same UI is displayed on all PCs.

I have about 300 or 400 DivX movies, last I counted I am using up a little over 1 terabyte of storage. It is very nice to go to any PC and have the media available.

Two of the clients from above are Low Profile Tivo-like dedicated PCs. I bought them used for $150 but one had to have its power supply fan replaced because it was loud. That added $20 to the cost. In fact, I had to buy low profile 64MB Video cards with S-Video out which cost an additional $60 for both cards. I guess the total was about $250 which includes the remote controls.

I and can share more details if anyone is interested. I don't want to write too much if no one cares. I did a search and did not find too many postings on multiple PCs.

Keep up the nice work on GBPVR guys. It's a beautiful thing and getting better with every update.

I just saw the poll thing at the bottom and actaully wonder how many people would like more info or are interested. Thanks.

[gEd]

cool!

300-400 movies - that's insane (I though I was doing ok with my 1800 albums in mp3 format)

I assume that your clients are wireless. With divx files this can work ok (Even on the 1mb/s "B" connection I have on my IBM T41). However this network is too slow to watch an MPEG2 recording that has been made by gb-pvr. To play such a file atm, I have use VLC to transcode and stream a recording from the main pc to my laptop. It works well indeed but it is a bit of a hassle.


btw: have you read this
http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=6132

[atamas]

gEd, I did not see the previous post before. It does seem to have a method of setting up Live TV which is something I haven't tried to set up yet. I didn't leverage web servers, just shared network drives.

Also, my connections are using a LAN connection as I record in High mode and found that 802.11 cannot handle it consistenly. I'm running both 802.11a and 802.11g in the house. Wireless is great for web browsing but a single glitch in a stream of an hour of video can mess up the whole experience.

I'll follow up with my setup shortly.

[blader_se]

Thanks for sharing. I'm interesting in your setup.
I curently run GB-PVR on my main computer, but want to have one dedicated for recording, and use MVP/PC clients to watch. So some ideas for setup would be great.

How do you find the movie you want?

[atamas]

Okay, here’s my setup.

First let’s begin with my requirements:
1. Ability to record Cable, likely with two tuners to minimize conflicts.
2. Ability to make available my MP3 collection (about 7K songs at 41GB).
3. Ability to make available all my pictures (about 8K pictures at 20GB)
4. Ability to make available my DivX movie collection of about 400 Songs. This is probably 500GB, maybe more because a lot of them are on two CDs sizes (1.4GB)). This was important for my little boys who love the Disney movies.
5. Make this entire media available to all PCs and have the same look and feel when accessing it! In other words, accessibility needs to be identical and easy enough for anyone that can handle a remote to use.
6. Ability to schedule TV recordings from remote.
7. Cost effective – can’t spend too much past what a networked Tivo setup would be otherwise this wouldn’t make sense to do.


THE SERVER
I bought a cheap Dimension 3000 P4 with 512MB of RAM to do the recordings and assume a “server” role. I messed up because that PC does not have an AGP slot so I had to buy a PCI video card. The server sits in the basement right underneath my living room. As such, I pulled an S-Video cable upstairs to the living room and plays the media there. It’s nice because the PC is not seen or heard at all. I am using an ATI radio frequency remote and it works well. I should upgrade to 1GB of RAM but it’s another $100 which is not absolutely needed to be spent so it’s hard for me to make a valid business case for it (with my wife).


THE REMOTES
I settled for a different remote that the ATI or Hauppauge as the standard because it is cheaper and can have many more buttons programmed. I chose the Packard Bell PC remote which connects through a COM port. http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/pack/ . They cost roughly $10 each. I haven’t seen or used the Hauppauge remote and that has given me a few problems trying match the buttons with some of the plugin features but I’m surviving. I like the HP remote because it controls the mouse as well. The only issue I have with it is that it can’t control the sound on the TV so I always need the TV remote too.


CLIENT PCs
For the two bedrooms upstairs I bought two Dell GX-150 Low Profile PCs. They did not have a CD or floppy drive, 256MB of RAM 10GB hard disk and ran at 1Ghz P3. Cost was $150 from eBay including shipping. Unfortunately one had loud fans so I had to replace the power supply for $20. I also found that I needed more RAM which cost I think another $60. I knew I had to buy Video cards to get a video signal out (S-Video) which cost $60 for both. A total cost of about $300 if you include the remotes. I think it’s not bad for two PCs but the thought of just buying TIVO crossed my mind.

The PC noise is bearable but I did some searches on the internet and found some reference material on it. I would love to have quiet PCs but that costs a bunch of money. See this link: http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/buildaquietpc.html

I removed the keyboard and mouse on these clients. I am using a remote control application called “Remote Administrator” to log into them and make changes to the setup when needed. Terminal Server or pcAnywhere or any other program will do the trick.


THE NETWORK
I have cable internet connection which kicks ass at 6Mbps down and 800Kbps up. I work from home three days a week so this was a necessity. I’m using a Netgear Router and a couple of switches. The media PCs are networked through a LAN but I do have 4 laptops through Wireless A and G connections. I found that for video streaming it is best to have a wired connection.

I used static IP addresses for the server and the clients. This is so that I was able to find them easily again on the network. I called them TV1 and TV2.


GB-PVR
Now the good stuff… the server has GBPVR installed. I took the approach to share network drives and hoped that the client PCs would be able to connect to the GBPVR.MDB database. I figured out that in order to make this happen, a key requirement was to make sure that video files that are created and saved by the server will be seen by the clients in the same way.

The hardest thing was to keep everything consistent! This means all the drives and the media sources.

I shared the GBPVR directory on the server and with the name GBPVR. I then mapped the server itself to its own network share to the G:. The key is that from this point on all PCs will use the GBPVR database on the G:.

In order to eliminate Windows XP’s netowkr security warnings I had to add each PC that contained media as a trusted PC within the “Trusted Sites” Security tab in Internet Explorer. You add each IP address in there.

The next key thing was to identify where the video recordings are saved to. For me that’s the F: which happens to be a 300GB internal hard disk on the server. This drive is also shared so every other PC in the house has its F: mapped to this 300GB location.

Here is the line I placed in all PC’s config.xml. You can see that the GBPVR database is on the G: for all PCs. Also, note where the location of the DivX Movies.

<DatabaseConnectionString>Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0; Data Source="G:\MyDatabase.mdb"</DatabaseConnectionString>
<VirtualRoot>Kids~DIR~E:\Movies\Kids\|Concerts~DIR~E:\Movies\Concerts\|Movies New Arrivals~DIR~P:\Movies\Movies New Arrivals\|Movies A-J~DIR~P:\Movies\Movies A-J\|Movies K-S~DIR~Q:\Movies\Movies K-S\|Movies T-Z~DIR~Q:\Movies\Movies T-Z\|BodyBuilding~DIR~E:\Movies\BodyBuilding\|</VirtualRoot>

[atamas]

I found that if this drive is ever not accessible by one of the PCs, but the G: was, GBPVR loads successfully and then it deletes all recorded information. To mitigate this and prevent loosing the information I created a nightly backup batch file which copies the GBPVR database to a different location on the server.

Other things to keep consistent are the paths to the other media files, which includes the Pictures, MP3’s and Movies. It doesn’t matter which PC on the network these files are at as long as every PC accesses them on the same network letter drive!

On the client PCs I removed the GBPVR tray from startup and made the recording service manual. The recording service can even be disabled but I found that I if I ever make a change to config.exe, it throws an error when OK’ing out of it. I left the service on a Manual status and make sure I stop it if I edit Config.exe.

Weather and Theater listings were left at default on the client PCs. They are served up from the local disk not the server if I check them there.


RESULTS
This setup met all of my requirements. All the media is available on the big screen TV in the living room and the two bedroom TVs. It is very nice to be able to play any MP3 or look up any picture taken in the last six years (since digital pictures became mainstream).

We have very little time to watch TV because we try to spend as much time with the kids as possible. It was very irritating to not be able to watch anything when we did have a few moments. Now it is great! A nice feature is that we can start watching some recording on one TV and finish it on the next. No tapes, no CDs or DVDs. No transfer times, it’s all truly “On Demand”.

I bought a $100 set of Logitech PC speakers for the main TV which added the highs and lows to it. The MP3’s rock the whole house when I play them there. The kids have a ball when I play some of the Shrek songs or videos.


KNOWN ISSUES
Laptop connection sometimes messes things up - Because the network drives are not opened automatically on boot-up, the laptops don’t think the 300GB recording F: drive is available and GBPVR therefore thinks all the recorded material is gone. It subsequently deletes all saved recording reference. A workaround that I thought about but I haven’t created yet is to place batch files on every shared network drive and have each file go to the next and finally launch GBPVR.exe. I’m hoping this would activate all the drives and ensure everything is connected. But as I said before the laptops don’t stream flawlessly so it is just bells and whistles. I don’t watch too many recordings on the laptops. It impresses the hell out of my friends when they see all the media available on a laptop wirelessly including the recorded TV (about 250GB worth at this moment).

Error Messages in GBPVR - While I can browse TV listings which come from the server GBVPR.mdb, and I can perform all the functions such as scheduling and deleting recordings from the clients, I get an error message. The error is something to the effect that “the remote PC closed the connection actively” but like I said the action I took went through. GBPVR then sends me to the GBPVR home screen. An error is not displayed when I delete a recording though which is actually very nice because that’s what is done after something is watched. The recordings are deleted from the server; a beautiful thing.

Slower GBPVR browsing – because of the network connection as well as the client PCs not being as powerful as the server, it does take about 8 to 10 seconds to display the recording listing when accessed. This isn’t too much of an issue, but I wanted to put it out there. While all is local for the server, it does take it about 3 seconds. So the difference is not too bad.

Server performance – I am not sure how many PCs could be served up in parallel. I haven’t tested that yet but I haven’t seen any conflicts with two playing at the same time. I did start to notice that when comskip.exe runs on the server after a recording, the clients start to jitter. I found a workaround which seemed to work yesterday. In PostProcessing.bat I placed the following line. “start /low /MIN /SEPARATE comskip %1”. This started ComSkip in a low priority and I the client PC subsequently worked just fine.


LIMITATIONS
Live TV – this setup does not allow for Live TV to be displayed on the client PCs. I’ve seen

No DVD – I happen to have DVD players by the TVs in the rooms so I didn’t care for DVD capability. Also, you could probably guess by the jukebox-like setup on movies it is my goal to not handle CDs or DVDs. I convert them to MP3 and DivX.

[atamas]

IMPLEMENTATION SUMMARY
Here’s the to-do list of setting this up:
1. Install same version of GBPVR on all PCs.
2. Make sure GBPVR works locally. EPG and Live TV is not needed to work on the clients, just make sure GBPVR starts up well.
3. Share the GBPVR directory on the server. That’s sharing “C:\Program Files\devnz\gbpvr”
4. Map a drive to the server’s shared GBPVR directory. Keep consistent. I called it G:. If you have a local drive on the server that you want to share, say you want to share the D: because it has movies, share it and then map back to it on the server to something like the M:. You can mp to its own IP address and share. This will ensure that the M: is the same for all PCs including the one that is doing the sharing.
5. Change config.xml to point to the G:\GBPVR.mdb database.
6. Make sure the rest of the video, audio and movie paths are consistent on all PCs.
7. Back up config.xml and gbpvr.mdb before starting a client to see if it works. My nightly backup of GBPVR.mdb saved me from loosing my recording references a couple of times. Consider putting a backup on gbpvr.mdb too.
8. Make the recording service on the client PCs to start “Manual” instead of “Automatic”.
9. Remove the GBPVR tray from starting in the client startups.
10. Start GBPVR in High priority – I created a batch file and placed the following line into it: “start /high GBPVR.exe” within the GBVPR directory. My shortcut to start GBPVR was made to this batch file so GBPVR starts in the highest priority. This helps performance.
11. Comskip usage in low priority - this is something new as of yesterday but it seems to work, I placed the line in “Postprocessing.bat”: “start /low /MIN /SEPARATE comskip %1”


I can’t remember any other details right now. I think this covers the main concept.

IN CLOSING
I'd be interested if anyone finds this useful. I'd also love to know if anyone has any solutions to the limitations I described or any enhancements in general. Let me know if there are any questions, thanks.