Monday, January 24, 2011

Windows 7 and external Sata drives

So tonight i finished the install of essential apps on Windows 7 and disconnected the old xp machine. Since all the work files are on the external western digital 1 terabyte external i thought it would be simple to unplug from xp and plug into windows7. All the other computers (mac/linux) have external e-sata drives (so much faster than slow USB), so what could go wrong.

Fire up windows 7 and it doesn't mount the external drive. Go into Administrative Tools, Drive Management and it still can't even find the drive. Weird. After wasting a lot of time poking around windows and looking on the internet it looks like lots of people have similar problems. This boggles the mind. Just to make sure i haul out a second e-sata hard drive, a LaCie this time. Same problem - not mounted. I booted windows with both drives just to be sure.

I goto western digital's site and they have a firmware update and some wd drive management software. Yikes, if i install the firmware what if it bricks the drive? Especially since the backup drives got cleaned and moved to the living room to connect to the Oppo BDP-93 (which btw had no problem mounting the drive, Steve Ballmer). Best to back up the course files.

So i plug the drive into the USB port (all my externals are 4 interface drives, usb/e-sata/fw400/fw800) and windows recognizes it and starts seaching it for music and other files. I put a stop to that right away. Now we start up the copy operation and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait...i said USB was slow, right?

Might as well go and see if the HDCD burning problem with Brasero is fixed....i suspect optical drive has gone bad...i see i/o errors in the log...

To Be Continued

Ok firmware update worked ok but drive still not recognized when plugged into e-sata
Next we install the WD drive manager setup software - installs but no menu item??? and it is not a control panel...

We decide on a low tech solution, grab and old firewire pci card from the box 'o parts and put that it.....OK windows recognizes the card. Let's shut down the external and plug in into there..ok it immediately installs the 'device driver software' and the stupid auto search for content comes up. Gee, in the days of mega terabyte externals maybe the default should be NO auto....

And the drive is there. So let's see - a modern e-sata interface that should be plug and play does not work in Windows 7 but an ancient technology going back to early macs works automatically. Lesson - don't discard your old firewire stuff yet...

PS

Multi-tasking in windows still sucks badly. Doing any kind of large scale file operations ties up the computer completely until the task is done. I am so not used to this. Linux and OSX are so much better at multi-tasking. People focus on whether the OS is 'faster' and forget about all the time you spend waiting for windows. The more time i spend in Windows 7 the less i like it. Sure it is prettier than XP and is not as absolutely annoying as Vista but in reality it is no big improvement.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Media Center IV


The quest for the perfect media center setup continues...

So far we have been fairly happy with the combination of TVersity media center server and Xbox client. The only problems have been the poor support of Windows for such essential codecs as flac and mkv among others. However it does work ok, playlists seem broken and tagging is a pain but livable.

Today we hooked up the Oppo BDP-93, a player with usb/e-sata, wired and wireless network and a built-in upnp media client. First we downloaded and updated the firmware, a very easy process using a USB stick.

Next we access the Home menu which displays all the options.

Note the built-in Netflix client which works and the Blockbuster client which is banned by the Canadian Gov't (courtesy of the CTRC apparatchiks). These are useful services that are a lot cheaper than Robber's Cable but since your internet comes from Robber's Cable (ya gotta love monopolies) you end up paying through the nose anyway.

With an attached hard drive (USB or eSata!) the movies and music functions read files directly from the drive. This could be handy but then i've have to copy files to that device. I'm more interested in playing streaming audio/video from a media server in the basement. The My Network option lists any media centers on the local network.

One neat thing about TVersity is that you can add YouTube channels and then stream those videos to your TV. We decide to play Dire Straights, "Money for Nothing" because it has also been banned by the Canadian Gov't because 1 person complained. This file is in flac format but it is listed as WAV by the media player.

The audio files work well and sound great. Really cant hear a difference between Oppo and Xbox, which is as it should as the source files are just strings of bits. I didn't try some of the more esoteric files such as DTS and BD (blue-ray rips) yet.

Where there was clearly a problem is in streaming video. Some quicktime (MOV) and MKV and MPEG4 files would not play. When the software has problems with a file it keeps on trying to play it, the streaming does not stop. With one file it even managed to lock up the player, forcing a hard reboot with the power button. In fairness to Oppo it notes this is an experimental feature, albeit one i was very interested in and which partly influenced my purchasing decision. On the plus side, since this is software, updates may come along to fix problems, add codecs and features. I'll have to test all the MKV video files as the Oppo FAQ on the wiki indicates it does support mkv.

Conclusion

A nice upgrade to the old Oppo 980HD (i had two, going to keep one) but the streaming is still a bit rough. The blu-ray video and audio quality was excellent! Much better than it's predecessor, a consumer-grade $250 Toshiba that was really disappointing and turned me off blu-ray.

Postscript - while the streaming is a bit rough and doesn't support all formats, plugging in an external hard drive (i used e-sata) works wonderfully. The oppo plays just about everything including ape, dts, mkv, flac etc - it does all the things you want (which windows media center will not) and the sound quality is excellent - much better than the same track streamed from the media server. I couldn't believe it but they sound so much better non-streamed. Compression perhaps? Anyway, i think the search for the media center is over. So i shutdown the windows 7 media server, the mac pro connect 360 media server and the windows xp Tversity media server. They all worked, some better than others but none were universal. The oppo comes closest so i'm going to use the external hard disk option. This presents a few problems - how do you get the new stuff onto the external disk? The current solution is very low tech - new stuff goes to a folder and once a week unplug the external from upstairs and bring it downstairs and copy over the new stuff. Buy an Oppo-93, the almost universal machine.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Windows 7 and Essential Apps


The migration continues...

Firefox up and running - back up using the FEBE extension and restore to FF on win7 so your online life follows you.

GIMP installed. Love the latest version. It hung when first run and i let windows diagnose and 'fix' the problem. Ran perfectly the second time.

Audacity installed but the beta version. Nervous about beta but we shall see. Ran fine. The lame and ffmpeg add ons installed fine.

VLC installed and runs ok. We searched and found a windows 7 codec pack which looks like it could solve the media problem. Will test it out later.

Lightscreen - installed ok but took a bit of diddling to get the screen region set by default and keys that worked. Finally settled on CTRL aLT PgUp. Also have to create the Screenshots folder in My Documents. Which exposed one annoyance. When i click on the folder icon on the dock or taskbar it shows a finder-like arrangement with useful links to network, downloads etc, everything except your HOME. Must be a way to add it to the view...Another annoying problem is that while the Network bit shows the other machines which have shares, i can only copy files from the Ubuntu box, not the windows xp box. That's right, windows 7 works out of the box with Linux but not with Windows. All the machine are on the same workgroup and the win7 user name and password has share privileges. It is probably related to that new home group stuff, but wouldn't a better approach would be to respect what is working and then offer to migrate it to the new home group setup? So now if i want to network with xp i have to figure it out. Don't waste the time of the user!

WAMP - downloaded and installed and the wamp control panel works fine, it is under the little UP arrow on the far right tho, took me a few minutes to figure that one out.

Greenstone installed and ran fine. I'm running it out of the user folder to see how that goes.

7zip and clamwin installed no problem.

The scanners are a problem. The USB canon does not work but we expected that as it did not work with Vista. However, it works perfectly with Ubuntu so maybe it changes desks. The big HP scanner is more problematic as it is SCSI and there is no room in the case for a scsi card unless i take out the 64bit network card. Shame as this is a quality built scanner (I have two) and the HP software has worked flawlessly since i bought it 12+ years ago. It even acts as a copier.

Installed a new DVD burner but haven't tested it out yet. I used Roxio on windows xp because there is no port of Brasero. But it may not be a problem as most burning takes place on the Ubuntu desktop anyway because that is where Brasero lives.

And we need to install a lan scanner, i run one once a month just to check up on all the network devices and to make sure nothing is wrong...

Last to do is to install the network postscript laser, which i did for the test install, not intuitive but i think i noted the process here so that's ok. Of more concern is the not almost as ancient epson stylus photo 2200 printer, a real beast (one of the few firewire printers in existence) but a workhorse. I don't think the RIP software for xp will work on win 7. We shall see...

Summary

All my must need apps (which are all open source) installed ok which is a relief, if they do not work with Win 7 then there is no need for Win7 and i've have to downgrade. Since they do there are no shop stoppers so all in all, i should be ready to switch off the old xp machine next weekend...

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Windows 7 Media Center



Since i built a Windows 7 pc over xmas i decided to take another look at the windows media center. Last year when looking for media server we had installed and tested windows media center xp edition and found it sorely lacking. We ended up going with TVersity and Connect 360 as servers and an xbox 360 as the client.

Windows 7 ultimate has a UpNp media server included and it shows up on the list of servers on the xbox so we decided to give it a whirl. The shop stopper for the xp media server had been it's poor codec support. What's the sense of having a media server that won't play your media?

From windows 7 you can run the media server software and it asks for the 9 digit code that is displayed on the media client. Not sure why it does this, it requires a trip upstairs to run the xbox to get the number.

This is the first problem, while the xbox lists a windows 7 media server we cannot seem to connect to it. Even running the Test diagnostic fails to find a win 7 machine. The wizard suggests some options, one if which is the windows firewall settings.

This requires a trip downstairs to check out the firewall, which by default is not allowing media center connections. Why? We have to change the firewall settings to allow media extenders which is the microsoft name for media center clients.

Back up stairs and we still cannot get a connection. We run the network diagnostics, which is a pretty screen.

The wizard suggests creating a new connection. We do this an viola! - it has now found the Windows 7 media center and it gives us a 9 digit number. So now we go back downstairs and put in the number and the extender drivers are downloaded and the media center indexes whatever content is in the shared public folders. So now it is back upstairs again to check it out.

The GUI is ok but nothing special, no competition for XBMC here. Photos and music play fine and FLAC files now work. Adding media libraries is similar to other media servers but the GUI navigation is a bit annoying. As to movies, it played the AVI and MP4 but not the MKV, which is a show stopper. You need that codec support to play extracted blue-ray movies in high def.

What we need to do is to figure out how to turn off the media server service on Win 7 and replace it with TVersity media server which we purchased and that is currently running on windows xp.