Alright, I know I had an interesting time getting together all the facts I would need to do this project. Basically I got the idea that I wanted to stream hd movies from the nas (network attached storage) in my office to my home theatre via my ps3 in the living room. I had toyed with some of this stuff before but I had some more resources at my disposal and a bit more motivation (as this is my first project in my *new* house.) This is long and I wanted to offer some discussion of my choices so I'll chop this thing into sections. I guess if I stay up too late I'll just make this a multi-part blog. No worries... I won't leave ya hanging.
## It all boils down to... the *wireless* network.
Anyhow, long story short - I needed some serious bandwidth if I was going to stream hd movies. In the past I've played with mediatomb and the ps3 over a wireless g network. Things worked... kinda. It didn't really stick at the time, but it helped me to understand the reality of wireless networking. Even crappy videos stutterred - I definitely knew what I was in for.
Without a solid network I've got no chance with this project. I did tons of research and decided to go with wireless draft n. I did plenty of research on home routers; lots of crap if you ask me. Some were, ok, I guess, but nothing really stood out as the product of the year. At the end fo the day I went with the apple airport extreme base station. It had plenty of modes and other goodies - I figured i'd have a good shot at accomplishing my mission if I could muck with the settings and it seemed to really stack up to most every other router (plus I get a discount on apple shit working at pixar).
"But wait, back up a second... did you say wireless n? You know the ps3 has wireless g right?"
Well, yes, I do know that. I guess I should mention what we'll put on the other end. Its part of the motivator for the airport extreme base station and it gets us around our 54mbps limitation (although g networks rarely operate anywhere close to 54mbps irl - the best I'd ever gotten was maybe 12-16mbps). Ok so, to get past our issue of wireless g only on the ps3 we'll... go wired... kind of. Apple makes a cool little device called the airport express. It plugs into your wall and into your wireless network. It offers all the modes and goodies of the base station plus... you can use it as a wireless-to-wired bridge.
Pop that bad boy on the network and run a cable to the ps3. If you want to hook up multiple devices to your network just go buy a 4 port 10/100 switch. They are around 40 bucks and we'll do the trick. In my case I've also got my 360 hooked up and its way better than the 360's wireless adaptor.
Now instead of 11mbps or 54mbps we're running anywhere from 120mbps to 300mbps. I found that the only way to really get fast speeds was to configure the aebs (airport extreme base station) to use a 5ghz "n-only" network. There are a couple reasons for this, and they are damn good ones:
1) In the case of the aebs: 5ghz mode also includes channel bonding, a feature that combines channels of a band and ultimately gets you higher throughput.
2) The ps3 uses bluetooth; bluetooth uses the 2.4ghz band - yes, the same band as wireless b, g, and in some cases, n. Bluetooth can be fairly devestating to wifi, it doesn't follow the same rules and tends to hop all over the band. This means that bluetooth data "collides" with your wifi data and retranmission occurs, slowing down your network significantly. I found many interest posts on apple forums of people fighting with their bluetooth mice on their laptops.
Now there are couple bits that come with 5ghz that aren't so hot. First 5ghz also means lower range. If your office/server room is far from your home theatre you might need a repeater somewhere. Second, if you make your core router run 5ghz n-only mode, a good portion of your devices could be offline for good. If you are like me, you might have a wii or a gf with a laptop. Just go get another router or access point. Basically you establish a second, slower network, but that also isolates that traffic such that its not bringing down your n network (you could try to run n in 2.4 mode, just make sure you have no b or g devices online at the time - wifi slows everyone down for the little guy).
With that being said - test your network if you can. If you check stats on all the various devices the numbers should look reasonable. IF they aren't, see if you might have something interfering with the signal, maybe a 5ghz cordless phone. Anyhow, that's that for getting the wireless network going.
## Storing and serving the goodness - the dns-323
I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great if there was a little low power device that could keep my data safe and serve it up to whatever device I wanted to in my house. Well, there are a few. After talking with some friends, I went with the dns-323. Mostly because it runs linux. Its a little arm box, not too powerful, but there's a port of mediatomb (upnp server) to it (via a little download called ffp).
Its also got a gigabit port - with normal frames that will operate maximum around 400-500mbps. Plenty of room for hd video and our 300mbps wireless-n network. The extra bandwidth comes in handy if you have any other devices on the wired network, in my case I do a lot with my work station and videos from my camcorder and the quick transfers make life better. In terms of raw performance numbers, gigabit to my desktop (through the aebs) I was able to transfer about 12.3MB/s with a raid 1 configuration (or ~100mbps, we probably only really need a steady 3 or 4MB/s for 720p, we're probably doin alright). If you felt you really wanted more, convert your dns-323 to raid-0, let me know the numbers.
I should mention too that I'm running two 7200 rpm sata disks in it at 1TB each. I'm using raid 1 as I'm trying to protect photos and all that. This particular box doesn't have a hardware raid controller, looks to me like it uses linux's softraid (mtd). Now that little arm proc isn't to punchy, I'm not sure what the overhead there is, but it *should* be enough.
In terms of serving we'll go with mediatomb. There are a number of other upnp servers out there, all of them are fairly early in their development and many also have a lot of promise. For the dns-323 specifically there are mediatomb and twonky (which is not free). In addition there are things like fuppes, which if you can get to compile yer in good shape. I found mediatomb precompiled in the ffp package (which ultimately is some linux goodies in a tarball that installs itself for the most part, all you have to do is reboot the nas). And since mediatomb was free... it seemed a good choice.
I had also played with mediatomb before. The developer is fairly active in the project, I liked that. When i was playing with my g network I used it to stream mp3's to my ps3. The ps3's software needed to mature quite a bit at that point but mediatomb worked pretty well. It didn't take too much to configure it and came with a nice sql driven web interface. With mediatomb on my nas I just needed to modify a few lines. I'll just save me the trouble of re-typing it and post it tomorrow. Guess you'll just have to wait ;) One thing to note about the config file is that we are specifically choosing to add lines for vob support - those are going to be the containers of choice for wifi hd streaming (why? the forums say they work). If you don't have any vobs, its cool - there are ways to convert things. I'll post that shit in another blog too (mkv2vob!).
Mediatomb will scan your nas and populate its db with all your media. You can also manually add and subtract things via the interface. If you install ffp on the nas then mediatomb will start when the thing boots. You'll need to restart mediatomb and rescan the disks once you update your config file.
Btw, if you don't need tons of instruction to do this shit, really setting all that crap up and powering up mediatomb should get you damn close to where you want to go. Mediatomb broadcasts itself so the ps3 usually just detects it. If it doesn't you can manually scan. At that point its all about providing media and testing various things. All the std def dvix xvid stuff works alright, for hd I've can stream 720p videos no problem (vod, x264). Unfortunately I haven't tested ac-3 yet because my stereo isn't hooked up, I'll post an update when I have some more data.
I think i'll post a less discussion more howto later too if anyone wants it. This was really to talk about the parts that were necessary to pull this type of thing off. I'll summarize, then its off to bed:
WiFi - 5ghz N
* Apple airport extreme base station
* Apple airport express
* 10/100 4-port switch
* cat 5e cables for all that shit
* extra access point for wireless b/g devices
NAS
* d-link dns-323
* 2 7200 rpm 1TB disks
* ffp
Software:
* mediatomb (via ffp or whereever)
* mkv2vob (on your workstation!!!)
Ok that's it - howto coming another day! See yas.
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