The end of an era: Vista on a dev box, and wintermute's retirement
This weekend marked the end of a long era, and the beginning of another, presumably shorter one.
First, I finally decommissioned wintermute, the old Sony VAIO PCV-90 that’s been running OpenBSD and serving as my home network’s firewall for the last five years or so. wintermute has been in more-or-less continuous operation since I bought it, the first PC I owned, from CompUSA in Rockville, MD back in 1996. wintermute served me well for many years, including occasional car trips to visit my first geek crush for Linux hacking sessions and twinkies. After I moved on to greener pastures (boromir, I think), wintermute was handed down to my siblings, who used it until I took it back for use as my firewall.
It’s quite remarkable that it has the original mobo, RAM, processor, power supply, and network card. The hard drive was long ago replaced, and the CD-ROM stopped working somewhere around 2000, but the machine itself has been solid. Now it’ll go out to pasture in my server closet.
I didn’t want to be rid of wintermute, but my FiOS connection is just too fast for it to keep up with. During heavy torrenting CPU usage was around 60% interrupt, and its 64MB of RAM weren’t enough to handle thousands of NAT state table entries and run DHCP and DNS for my network. boromir has now filled the role, with a screaming Pentium II 300MHz processor and 160MB of RAM, which is likely to suffice for quite some time.
On another, more pathetic note, I repaved wyoh, my primary laptop, to run Vista Ultimate x64. I held out as long as I could, but Windows XP x64 edition’s crap hardware support and non-existent game support made it harder and harder to live with. As much as I’d like to sell all my earthly possessions and switch to Ubuntu, the people that pay me like me to develop Microsoft software, which is something of a PITA on Ubuntu, and before you suggest I do my development inside a VM, fuck yourself and go try it for a day before you get all high and mighty.
I already hate Vista’s huge performance penalty, and the Aero eye candy doesn’t make up for it. I look forward to inexplicable lags and sputters as all the various anti-piracy tilt bits wobble about, lest I use my computer how I see fit to use it, without regard for the wishes of my betters. Hopefully, in the future, Microsoft will dissipate into irrelevance and I can get paid to run Linux like all the cool kids, but until then, you run what you brung.
New Windows Media Center System
For a few months now I’ve been running Vista and Windows Media Center on prospertine, hooked up to a nice widescreen LCD monitor mounted to the wall in my bedroom. Whenever I want to watch movies or TV shows and I’m not working in my office, I play them on ‘prospertine’ over my GigE network from my NAS box. I even have the Vista IR remote control, and a nice little wireless keyboard complete with a trackball. I can sit back on my bed and watch my media and even do basic web browsing.
However, prospertine is four years old, and has some serious thermal issues which cause the ICH6R chipset to ‘forget’ about one of the drives in its RAID 0 volume from time to time, which causes the system to crash. I then have to turn it off and let it cool before it will work again. So, I set about to upgrade my HTPC without spending alot of money.
As luck would have it, around the time I started contemplating this project, I ran across a post on Coding Horror covering just this subject. Jeff Atwood put together a nice AMD-based HTPC with DirectX 10 graphics, HDMI output, and low power consumption for around $500 bucks. I already had a hard drive, keyboard, IR remote, and various audio bits, so I just did an incremental build. I put together a shared wishlist on NewEgg with the details.
Anyway, I bought the mobo, AMD CPU, case, DVD drive, and 4GB of DDR2 800 RAM (Jeff spec’d out 2GB but it’s so cheap I couldn’t resist). Grand total: $380. I slapped it all together, powered it up, and that was it. The Vista Experience scores Jeff posts are for real; once I installed the chipset drivers I got a 3.5 Experience score, compared to 1.0 on prospertine. I’m not a huge fan of the Aero Glass eye candy bullshit, but it’s good to know I have the option.
I still haven’t figured out how to get hardware-accelerated x.264 decoding working, and even w/ a reasonably powerful dual-core machine Media Player Classic has trouble decoding 720p x.264 HD video without skipping or artifacts, though VLC managed ok. As Jeff has noted, codecs are the new DLL Hell, so I’m sure I have some penance to do before it’s working properly.
I also love that the Gigabyte mobo has all the connections I need on board. For the first time I’m using the optical S/PDIF port on my audio receiver, and placebo effect or not it sounds great! I use a LCD monitor with DVI input for my display, but the board also has HDMI out for proper TVs. The box is silent as far as I can tell, and certainly uses less power. I am reusing a 350GB 3.5″ Seagate Baracuda 7200.10 SATA drive, so that’s more noise and power than I would’ve liked, but it’s such an improvement over what I had before that I don’t really notice it.
If you’re thinking about going the HTPC route or upgrading one you have, you simply must check out this build. For the money it’s the most featureful, quiet, and efficient config I’ve seen.
Vista Windows Media Center And Video Content on Network Shares
I just upgraded my media center box from XP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate. While I still believe Vista should be detected and reported as malware, I’m willing to acknowledge areas where it’s improved, and Windows Media Center is definitely a big improvement.
However, there’s one change in Media Center since 2k5 that really pisses me off. On my network, all of my video files are stored on an Infrant ReadyNAS box. The box, kassad, has a Windows file share called media. Within media is the videos folder, and within that are folders TV and Movies (as well as folders I do not want WMC to browse). Since I want to expose only some of the folders on the share, I can’t add the whole share. In 2k5, I could map drive letters to network shares like \kassad\media\videos, add the mapped drives as “local” folders, and thereby have access to just TV and Movies without any hassle.
Now, though, WMC is much better. Now it’s smart enough to detect when a drive is a network drive, and not let you map it as a local folder. That makes alot of sense! What’s worse, I couldn’t find any MS docs describing a workaround. Surely I’m not the only one who wants to access media on some nested folder within a file share!
Turns out, I’m not. I ran across this post, which revealed the secret handshake. In the C:\Users\Public\Public Videos folder, you add shortcuts to the folders on the network share that you want to expose, restart WMC, and voila!, they show up. Not a bad solution, I suppose, except that it seems to be woefully underdocumented.
As an aside, if you’re still using a keyboard and mouse to start and stop your video content, you really need to look into WMC. You can buy a remote for $30, hang a widescreen LCD monitor on the wall, and have a nice digital media center using an old (two years, not ten!) computer. Now I know what it was like for early television viewers when the remote control was invented.