WHS server advice, for NAS/HTPC

[KingGheedora]

I had extra hardware so I threw it all together to make a home server. I've wanted to make a home server for a while but never got around to it. This machine is pretty low power except for the video card (Radeon HD5830).

Uses:

• Online video:
• Netflix/Amazon VOD/Hulu
• Colbert Report/The Daily Show
• Various other online shows that are available via specific websites
  
• Ripping, storing and watching ripped/dl'ed videos
• Watch DVD's & Blu-rays (w/o ripping)
• File server
• Backups for other computers on the network. Ideally it could then backup those backups to some online service in case the home server dies.

I put the following machine together from spare parts:

• Antec tower case (big)
• Sapphire Radeon HD5830
• MSI 890FXA-GD65 AM3 mobo
• AMD Sempron 140 Sargas 2.7GHz Socket AM3
• Coolmaster 1200W PSU
• el cheapo Kingston 2x1GB
• Seagate 2TB HDD (swiped from a FreeAgent GoFlex Home unit)
• Logitech M310 wireless mouse, and a matching Logitech wireless keyboard
• WHS 2011

Server AND HTPC in one OK?
This machine is located next to my HDTV (a 52" 720p/1080i DLP which will probably be replaced with something thinner but in the same size range, with 1080p). Is there any reason I shouldn't continue to keep it next to the TV, and hook it up to the TV using HDMI? I'd like to play media direct off this WHS server on the TV.

Video Card
The server should be pretty low power except for the video card. I know if I built a machine for this from scratch I'd probably have gone with an ITX / i3 or i5 / integrated video, but I had all these parts already and I'm not looking to spend significant additional money (only on minor stuff to optimize the server as it is now, like RAM upgrade). I have the following Radeons as spare parts: 5570, 6950, 6870. Which is the best video card of those four to use in this system? The 5570 is the lowest power I believe, quietest (i modded the fan to lower voltage on the 5570), so I think I should swap out the 5830 that's currently in there for the 5570. Would there be any downside to this? The 5570 + Sempron can hardware accelerate video at 1080p without a problem right? (Both flash, video files, and DVD/BRD's).

Power Use
I want to keep this as low power as possible. Video card is the biggest power hog in this whole thing. There are long periods throughout the day where this will be idle. What can I do to cut down on power use during those times, but still be able to access the server remotely over VPN, or if I'm just on my local network, or wake it via wireless USB keyboard? I want it to go into lower power modes like sleep and/or hibernate when it makes sense to do so but I want it to automatically power on when someone needs to use it or access files on it. I don't want to have to walk over to the server to turn it on, and i'd like to not even have to be in the house to bring it out of sleep/hibernate. (I have VPN set up on my router, so I could potentially want to VPN in from a cafe or something to grab files off it.

The problem is that every motherboard I can remember having in the past 10 years has supported WOL, but I've never figured out how to use it. I enabled it on my desktop a couple years ago and the stupid thing would never stay in sleep mode. I think random network traffic from other machines on my LAN kept waking it out of sleep. Has anyone been able to set up a reliable WOL configuration on WHS (I know it largely depends on the NIC too, not necessarily WHS)? I know you need to send a magic packet to the machine, and there are presumably programs you can run to send the magic packet to the machine but I gave up before I could get that working in the past. I'd like this WOL to be easy enough for my girlfriend to use it as well. If waking it is as easy as running a program or script I think she could manage that.

In a perfect world the WHS machine would just wake up whenever another machine on the network requested it directly, but it would be smart enough to not wake up for traffic that's not from a user wanting to use the server. For example I don't want my GF's Windows 7 laptop to boot up and automatically try to discover machines on the network or something, and for that network traffic to trigger the wake-up event. More importantly I don't want totally unrelated traffic like using the PS3 or just web browsing from another machine to trigger the wake up event like it seemed to do when I tried this a couple years back.

Does the video card still draw power if the TV (connected via HDMI) is off? What about if the TV is on, but the input is not set to HDMI? (assume the TV is the only display connected to the WHS machine).

Unlock 2nd CPU Core?
My mobo BIOS supports the ability to unlock the 2nd core on the Sempron. Is it worth it to do this? Does the 2nd core go idle when not in use? How much additional power draw would this create? And would the stock CPU cooler still be enough to cool the processor with the 2nd core unlocked?

RAM
2GB is minimum. Since I will do * occasional* DVD ripping/encoding (like once a month or once every 2 months, after the initial batch of ripping my GF's workout DVD's to the hard drive), I think I might need a bit more. is 4GB enough, or should I do 8GB? There are a lot of cheap deals on RAM so it seems worth it to get as much as I need. I don't want to overspec it though, b/c that would contribute to power consumption and heat.

Remote Access / Dynamic DNS
I have VPN set up on my router so I can VPN into my home network from any location. That plus either always keeping the server on, or having reliable WOL functionality as discussed above would be fine for me since I'm more technical. However, my gf expressed interest in storing music on the server and either accessing it and/or streaming it while she's at work. There might be other remote access/streaming use cases i'm not thinking of now that could be useful too. I read that WHS has some kind of dynamic DNS and remote access functionality built-in. Does it also do VPN, or is the remote access all web based? How do I set this up?

HTPC Indexing / Menu / UI software
I know that people use XBMC for this but I'm not sure how good it is or if it does everything.
- I see in XBMC screenshots that it lets users browse through their DVD/BRD library with cover art, and descriptive info like movie summary and stuff like that. Where is that info coming from? Does XBMC only do that for DVD's/BRD's that are ripped onto the harddrive? What plain .mkv, .avi, etc files I have that I may have ripped myself, or downloaded -- does XBMC index and display those in a similar way? I imagine it would not have description, art, or any other info for those files. Does it let you input that manually, or does it have some way of downloading that info from online?
- How well does XBMC support (if at all) watching online content, like netflix, Amazon, Hulu (standard), Colbert Report, etc? Should I just access that stuff directly via web browser? Not a big deal if I have to since I have wireless keyboard and mouse for when we're watching from the couch.

Are there alternatives to XBMC I should consider? Does WHS have anything similar built-in, or as an add-on?

DLNA
I don't understand the point of streaming. Right now I I just navigate to the videos on the WHS server via Windows Explorer, and play them directly over the network. It works fine. What is the point of streaming then? I assume that when people do streaming in their own home they are doing something other than this. I'm sure I could continue ignorant of this knowledge but I'd like to know what it is, maybe I will want to make use of it once I know what it is.

[/B]WHS 2011 Add-ins[/B]
Are there any add-ins I should look into? Any online galleries of the available add-ins?

Verizon FIOS
FIOS will be available here soon, and I plan on getting it when it is. If I use FIOS for cable, is there any benefit to getting a TV tuner card for the WHS-2011 server, along with a CableCard from Verizon? I talked to someone with FIOS once and it seemed like it was a pretty good service on its own. You could control the DVR remotely, and the onscreen guide was way better than Time Warner Cable's. I might consider doing TV Tuner when I get to this point if there are any advantages to it. Is it cheaper? Tuners are pretty pricey so I doubt it would be cheaper than using their set-top box.

Codecs
-Are there any codecs I should install? The only 3rd party media related stuff I installed so far are winamp and VLC player. I ripped a DVD using VLC player and it played back slow as molasses on VLC, but played fine when I tried with WMP. I tried the same file served over the network from my laptop and it worked fine using VLC. I'm not sure why this happened, but I think it might be codec related? I'm using the latest VLC as of the time of this post (9/5/2011).

- Will VLC, and Windows Media Player automatically use my Radeon for hardware acceleration? (Even if I switch to the 5570?). Guess I should also make sure my version of Flash is using hardware acceleration (WHS2011 is 64-bit, not sure if Chrome is using the 32or 64bit Flash).

- THere is no hardware acceleration possible for Silverlight, correct? (Netflix) Regardless, it seems to play just fine. Is hardware accel. necessary at all if I can watch Netflix fullscreen w/o it? Does it only matter for blu-ray content?

Blu-Ray Drive
Eventually I'll want to get a BRD drive. I want to have the ability to rip BRD's if I choose. Right now I'm using my PS3 for BRD, but would like to consolidate to the HTPC. I don't use the PS3 for games, just netflix and BR watching. What Blu-Ray drive should I get? Should be able to burn and rip DVD's as well. Are there such thing as Blu-Ray burners?

 

[mfenn]

Wow, that's a really long post! I'll attempt to address your questions.

First, WHS is not going to work for what you want to do. It is meant to be a headless server OS. If you want to keep this to a single box, you will be better off just installing Windows 7 and sharing out the drives.

- For GPU, use the 5570. It can accelerate anything that can be accelerated, and it supports nearly all of the fancy post processing effects while fitting in the smallest possible package.
- A Sempron is going to idle pretty low anyway, and you're going to run into a ton of implementation issues with WOL.
- The Sempron is a locked Athlon II X2, so expect the power and performance to be that of the equivalent Athlon II X2 if you unlock the 2nd core.
- Something like Google Music sounds like the best bet for your GF and doesn't involve the server at all.
- XBMC uses a web service to try to guess what movie, etc. your file corresponds to and pulls down the info that way. It can work pretty well depending on your file naming scheme, but is of course limited to what's in the database online.
- XBMC does support steaming from online sources with plugins. You'll have to Google around for them and they are of varying quality
- "Streaming" just means that you are playing a media file without buffering the entire file locally. DLNA is a protocol designed specifically to provide a library of streamable content, whereas SMB (Windows file sharing) is a more general purpose protocol. They accomplish the same task but DLNA is easier for appliances to implement.
- CableCard tuners are indeed expensive. They are "worth it" if you want to have everything integrated into one box, but otherwise the FIOS DVR will do essentially the same thing.
- Just install CCCP and be done with it. It will handle everything that you need to do.
- Yes, there are Blu-Ray burners, but they are still somewhat pricy and their utility is limited to say the least. You can get a BD-ROM/DVD-RW combo drive for about $60 though.

 

[KingGheedora]

I saw some posts, I think on toms's hw board, where someone said the minimum Radeon card that supports image quality for hardware accelerated video is a 67xx series (forget exact model #).

If that were true it would indicate that I should go with the 6950 or 6870. Any opinion on that?

 

[SViscusi]

I saw some posts, I think on toms's hw board, where someone said the minimum Radeon card that supports image quality for hardware accelerated video is a 67xx series (forget exact model #).

If that were true it would indicate that I should go with the 6950 or 6870. Any opinion on that?

Complete overkill. Integrated video on motherboards years old support UVD which is Amd's implementation of video acceleration. Try something like a 6450 or similar http://www.anandtech.com/show/4380/discrete-htpc-gpus-shootout

 

[KingGheedora]

Complete overkill. Integrated video on motherboards years old support UVD which is Amd's implementation of video acceleration. Try something like a 6450 or similar http://www.anandtech.com/show/4380/discrete-htpc-gpus-shootout

Can you recommend something from one of the 4 cards I mentioned that I already own? I'd rather not buy yet another video card.

The 5830 adds about 40W to the idle power draw (measured at the socket). My guess is even the lower power cards like the 5570 might have similar idle draw.

 

[SViscusi]

Can you recommend something from one of the 4 cards I mentioned that I already own? I'd rather not buy yet another video card.

The 5830 adds about 40W to the idle power draw (measured at the socket). My guess is even the lower power cards like the 5570 might have similar idle draw.

Sorry I kind of skimmed a little bit, but of the ones you own the 5570 would be great and since you've already taken steps to quite it, I've seen a few other htpc builds with that in them so it should fit your needs perfectly.

In fact Anandtech did a review about it last year and while they weren't thrilled with it in comparison to other options, it still was a capable htpc card, just at a higher tdp. http://www.anandtech.com/show/2935/1

 

[KingGheedora]

UPDATE:

WOL/Hibernate Solved
Got hibernation working on WHS. Measured w/ kill-a-watt: ~0.3W during hibernate, ~87-90W idle at desktop.

Idle is higher than I'd like, but I hope to get this lower by tweaking BIOS and power settings. I haven't measured during video playback. Haven't unlocked 2nd core yet.

I set up a power plan: sleep after 20 minutes, and hibernate after 40 minutes, enabled hybrid sleep, WOL enabled, NIC advanced settings -> only wake on magic packet. I'm using a tool called wolcmd.exe to wake the home server up over the LAN. So far this setup seems to be working exactly as I wanted. The home server only wakes up when I want it to. This method also work when I'm away from home, connected to my router's VPN, though I haven't tested this yet.

XBMC Testing
Installed XBMC and chose a theme.

Interface
Seems pretty good and the UI might be acceptable for the gf. The UI is not the easiest to use, though it has a lot to do with which skin you're using. I've settled on MediaStream Redux for now, but hope to find a better one. The interface to find music and video to play is fine, but the interface once music or video is playing is not that intuitive. I think the issue might be b/c the skins I tried are designed to work with a remote. I'll check on the XBMC forums to see which skins work best with keyboard & mouse.

Performance
OK, but seems a bit slow; cursor movements, minor pauses here and there that most people might not notice but I'm used to systems with SDD's. Video playback once or twice lagged and then caught up.

GPU Acceleration
Enabled DXVA acceleration, so presumably video is accelerated. Need to verify this though. CPU utilization was higher than I expected. What is a reasonable CPU% during video playback in XBMC? Might need to play with post processing settings (edge enhancement, etc). Not sure I like the way the image looks. Seems very "computery" (not necessarily pixelated though) compared to the image you see on cable TV or a Blu-Ray on the PS3.

Audio
Hooked up to my receiver via SPIDF. Receiver is getting Dolby Digital / AC3 signal, so we're good there. Haven't tested bitstreaming, or playing back DVD's yet.

 

[mfenn]

I saw some posts, I think on toms's hw board, where someone said the minimum Radeon card that supports image quality for hardware accelerated video is a 67xx series (forget exact model #).

If that were true it would indicate that I should go with the 6950 or 6870. Any opinion on that?

There is a minimum card in each generation (1st digit in the model number). The 5570 will work fine.

Enabled DXVA acceleration, so presumably video is accelerated. Need to verify this though. CPU utilization was higher than I expected. What is a reasonable CPU% during video playback in XBMC?

Depends on the video.

 

[KingGheedora]

OK, I will try the 5570 sometime this week. The only downside to downgrading to the 5570 is that I would not be able to use one or two post processing effects (or have to dial them down a bit), correct?

 

[mfenn]

OK, I will try the 5570 sometime this week. The only downside to downgrading to the 5570 is that I would not be able to use one or two post processing effects (or have to dial them down a bit), correct?

That's correct. I should note that the effects we're talking about are the ones in the Catalyst Control Center, not any within an application.

 

[KingGheedora]

Update:

I went to the cafe today to test WOL from remote locations. I had to add a firewall rule to allow the multicast traffic for the magic packet to get through. Once VPN'ed into my home router I was able to wake the server from the cafe.