Be Excellent To Each Other

The NAS I bought ages ago has utterly failed to be useful for streaming stuff (specifically video) to my PS3 and 360; apparently the best option is Twonky, but they're now not supporting embedded builds. Yet, being cunts, still requiring the purchase of a full-price license. The various other options (latest firmware, mediatomb, ushare) all claim to support varying combinations of both but don't really succeed. Even then, transcoding is pretty much a no-no.

Then I found TVersity, which is quietly sitting on my laptop eager for any chance I give it to automagically transcode and stream whatever formats I ask it to either console, near flawlessly (and the flaws are buffering-related I reckon, being wlan-based at the moment - additional HomePlugs incoming), with no moaning about MS using some hacky UPnP variant or whatever. Not content with merely meeting every one of my needs, it's doing so with a nice UI and only 7-8% of my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo.

So here's the crux of my quandry - were I to scrub my NAS back to the base firmware and disable its media servers and buy an extra little box to stream stuff off it, what can I get away with?

Today I totted some stuff up; for about £250 I could get a little-ish, low power-and-noise box from mini-itx.com with an Atom 330 at its heart; 1.6GHz, dual core, hyper-threading enabled. Or, for £150-ish more, I could swap the in-one motherboard for one with a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo.

Now as I said earlier - my 2.2GHz laptop is barely aware that it's streaming an episode of Lost or Family Guy to either console, so a 2.8GHz chip is utterly mental - maximum overkill, as the US military so eloquently put it. This means a lot of power and noise to do nothing.

On the other hand, thus far I've only streamed one thing at a time; in theory, both consoles could be wanting data crammed in their holes at the same time. There's even the possibility of getting an Airport Express or whatever it is that can pull music from an iTunes server and pump directly into an amp - I'm hoping to find or build a way to convert FLAC to AAC on the fly, out of an iTunes-shaped hole. So more transcoding, and probably approaching 33-50% of my laptop.

My Google skills are weak, so when I try and find out how likely an Atom 330 is (or isn't) to be happy with this (and this only, although running uTorrent with the web UI on it directly for at-work warezing would be acebest), especially with the max 2GB the board I've been looking at supports, I am flummoxed. But not enough that I wouldn't rather spend 15 minutes typing an extremely long-winded question on a forum than just spend the extra £150.

Help me, Obe-wan Kebeexy, you're my only* hope. Please bring me your plans to the Death Staraudio/video codec benchmark finding keywords.

* first and I think most likely to succeed.

I'd say the Atom would probably do it but again depends on the complexity of the coding taking place and god knows what kinda mess could happen if you going to be serving more than one console. I'd try killing your laptop with load first. Might give you a better idea of how much CPU power you need... or it could just confuse matters more.

As for the rest I have nooo idea.

It is quite tempting to buy the Atom board and see, because that's only £75 extra if it doesn't work and then at least I'd know.

Which is stucking fupid thinking.

assuming that TVersity is intelligent enough to give each transcoding job a core each, you should be ok for standard def stuff.

I run it on a low end athlon x2 box through a 100mb network and SD doesn't even register. Hope that helps a bit.

Actually, don't some folks on here have atom based netbooks? the 330 is basically 2 single cores anyway isn't it?

I'd offer to run tests but my netbook has an Atom N270..

the 330 is essentially 2 270s on the same die (or so I heard)

Hang on, did you get a DNS323? Because mine is streaming to my PS3 without issues at all. I had to jump through some hoops, but I can help you out if you want.

The 330 is a pair of HT-enabled 270s, so it's 2 physical but 4 logical cores.

And yes, I got a 323. It's not the PS3 that's the problem, or even the 360 - it's both. As I said, so far only Twonky seems to be able to reliably support both, and it's got shitty licensing. Anyway, even if I could get that reliable, I don't think the Dlink has enough smarts to transcode properly. Is your hoop-jumping in your blog (or was that someone else)?

A friend of mine built some custom mediatomb1.2 binaries which have been stable for me. He's had audio transcoding (FLAC->mp3) working fine, although you are right, video transcoding is always going to be out. What are you trying to transcode for? I have very little video that won't play on the PS3.

It was me, and no, I haven't written a blog post about it although I bloody well should.

I've had a bunch of stuff recently (Lost S05) that wouldn't play on the 360 through Media Center (Extender), for some reason, even with the media update for DivX (and the files playing fine in Media Player). It just keeps crapping out saying it's "corrupt or something, like". It's why I installed TVersity. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem using the NAS, of course. The PS3 had similar troubles with ushare, but I understand that's down to needing to add some filters to the config file or something.

Additionally, I've got a bit of a "because I can and want to" mentality going on with it, like I did originally with the NAS. I was hoping ordering a bunch of CDs this morning would help, but no.

As an aside, I'm really really interested in the idea of FLAC->AAC because iTunes apparently won't store ALACs then transcode to AAC for sticking on my Touch, the bastard (also the Airport thing). Actually, now I want to be able to stream to the Touch as well.

My Homeplugs have arrived, hooray.

In a similar vein, is there a good way of batch re-coding weirdo video formats? Almost everything works first time on the '360, but I do have some MST3K episodes which don't work. Run 'em through VisualHub (mac) and they play in anything, but it's fiddly doing the files one at a time.

Re-coding and streaming on the fly just seems a bit like hard work, even if my computer theoretically can do it

MEncoder, which comes in the MPlayer zip, is a command-line jobby which you could write a batch file around. I've done it that way in the past (to turn horrible Robot Chicken .mp4s into DVDable MPEG2s, before I decided to get into streaming), I'm sure someone's written something to GUIfy the problem.

Ta, I'll have a look.

By the way, I find your views interesting would like to subscribe to your NASletter, Doctor.

I am, being I'm a mentalist, now considering adding a DNS-343 to my setup and loading it with 1.5TB drives, purely for the ripping of BluRays and DVDs, and keeping my 1TB 323 for music, TV and backups. This is because while I do love the BluRays (and ownership of the shiny discs they come on, instead of expensive rentals), it's a complete pain in the arse (relatively) having to go to the other room to get one. Also, technology for technology's sake will never stop being justification.

I'm still considering building that little box too, although if I want to play BluRays over the network I imagine I'll definitely want the Core 2 Duo, and probably not even the cheapest one.

Your newsletter is late, The Internet's Richard Gaywood.

Yeah I know. I will try and at least zip the binaries for you tomorrow.

For fuck's sake, I forgot to follow through with my terribly clever pun, didn't I?

Yeah, you did, and it really was an excellent pun too.

That hurts, man. That hurts.