HP Mediasmart EX495 and Windows Home Server Part 1 – Introduction

August 20 2010 by Jim in Audio/Video, Computing |No Comments

I have been a Microsoft Windows Home Server User for a little more than 2 years.  In that time, the vast majority of my experience has been centered on the Mediasmart line of servers from HP.  I started with EX470 – the lowest end system that HP ever offered, equipped with an AMD Sempron 1.8 GHz, 512 MB of RAM and a lowly 500 GB hard drive.  I recently replaced that box with the highest end in the line, the EX495 which features a Pentium Dual Core 2.5 GHz processor, 2 GB  of RAM and a 1.5 TB hard disk drive (to which I added two 2 TB drives).

The Home Server platform is quite possibly Microsoft’s most underrated consumer products with the possible exception of the Zune HD.  As with the Zune, ask the average consumer if they’ve even heard of it.  Chances are that they have not and even if you take the time to explain what it is, you are still likely to get a blank stare.

One of the reasons for this is that Microsoft’s basic Windows Home Server product is simply not all that compelling.  It is built on a modified version of Small Business Server 2003 making its code base about seven years old – in fact, it is only two years newer than Windows XP, a product that Microsoft is desperate to convince you is obsolete.  The basic home server really does two things well – first of all, it provides a centralized network attached hard disk that enables you to store all of your files in one place and access them from anywhere on your home network.  While this may sound like nothing more than a glorified Network Attached Storage device, the Home Server does add one nice feature – it makes it very easy for the average user to make use of redundant storage.  What do I mean by that?  Well, put simply, Home Server can be configured so that the files on each of its network shares are actually stored on two different hard drives (assuming that you have more than one drive in your Home Server).  This prevents you from losing your files in the event of a hard disk crash.

What makes the Home Server rather special is that this ability to “mirror” your files onto more than one hard drive requires almost no configuration on the part of the user.  In the old days you would be messing with things like RAID arrays, drivers, etc.  Not so with Home Server – you simply install more than one drive and then use the very user-friendly home server software to configure your network shares as either mirrored or not.  The Home Server takes care of the rest of the work of finding space on a second drive for the mirror and writing a second copy of the files to it.

The second thing that the stock home server does very well is that it automatically backs up up to 10 computers (PC only) in your household.  When you configure your Home Server, you have the option to install what is called a “connector” onto each of your computers.  Any system with the connector installed can be configured for automatic backup.  This can prove to be a big boon in the event that the hard drive on your local computer dies.  You files would be safely on the Home Server and can be recovered at your leisure.

The basic problem that the Home Server faces though is that this stock behavior is simply not all that interesting.  One can simply purchase an external hard drive to handle backup, and its easy enough to buy a hard drive that connects to the network if you want to centralize your storage (which you may or may not want to do).  Sure, the Home Server is extensible with various applications that can be installed to expand the features, but by and large, many of these add-ins have been created by and for geeks and have little appeal to the broader segment of the population.

So, how to remedy this?  Well, among the makers of the Windows Home Server products, HP has really gone to the front of the line in adding features and functionality that make the Home Server product far more interesting than what Microsoft’s stock offering affords.  HP launched with one of the very first Home Server products (the aforementioned EX470) three years ago and has since refreshed the line twice – first with the 480 series and now with the 490.  Each line has contained two different model numbers (EX470, EX475, EX480, EX485, etc.), with the difference being the size and number of hard drives offered.  With the 490 series, HP has gone one step farther.  Not only does the 495 contain a larger hard drive than the 490, it also replaces the 2.2 GHz Celeron with a Dual Core 2.5 GHz Pentium.   Why a more powerful processor is a big deal will be something that I address in Part 2.

In addition to HP’s phenomenal packaging, they have spent a fair amount of time on the software bundle.   A Windows Home Server from HP adds a number of enhancements not found on a stock Windows Home Server including a DLNA-compliant Media Server and Apple Mac Support featuring the ability for a Mac to see the Home Server as a Time Machine backup target.  The HP Server also offers a “Media Collector” function in which it will automatically scan any computer that has the “connector” software installed (both PCs and Macs) and pull down Audio, Video, and Photo files for centralized storage and backup.

While Windows Home Server itself might not be particularly compelling, when it is offered with HP’s well-thought out package, it becomes a very interesting choice worthy of consideration as part of your home media solution.

In Part 2 of this post, I’ll get into some of the practical things that I’m doing with mine.

Fast Eddy FEC100 BBQ Smoker by Cookshack

July 23 2010 by Jim in BBQ |No Comments

Being a bit of a gadget guy (okay, being a major gadget guy), you can probably understand that I like to incorporate technology wherever I can.  Besides being into tech, I’m also somewhat of a BBQ fan.  I own four BBQ grills; a Weber Summit 6 burner Gas Grill (my main workhorse), a Weber Performer Charcoal Grill, A Big Green Egg, and for my smoking needs, A Fast Eddy FEC100 Smoker.

I’ve been a big fan of smokers for many years.  It began with a Brinkman water smoker (one of those grills that looks like R2D2), then moved to an offset smoker (otherwise known as a “stick burner” which looked like one of those 55 gallon drums turned on its side.  It had a separate compartment for the fire and the meat would sit in the main cylinder.   Man traditionalists will tell you that this is the only “true” way to smoke, but it can be a bit labor intensive.  To keep a constant temperature in the smoking compartment, you need to feed logs into the fire chamber every couple of hours.  This is fine if you are smoking something that takes a relatively short amount of time such as ribs, chicken, or a roast which are usually done in 4-6 hours, but it can become a bit of a hassle if you want to smoke something that takes a lot longer like a Pork Butt (12 hours) or a Beef Brisket (up to 16 hours).  Essentially, when using a stick burner for an overnight smoke, you need to plan to not get a lot of sleep while the meat cooks.  Additionally, as I live up in the Northeast, weather can play a major role in my smoking process as most stick burners are made of relatively thin metal and if you want to smoke a brisket when it’s 20 degrees F outside, you are going to be feeding in a lot of wood.

Since I’m a hardcore BBQ guy, I grill and smoke year round, so I needed a solution that had some insulation built in so as not to have to burn a small forest just to keep a consistent temperature  for 16 hours.  Back in early 2008, I began my search for a better smoker to replace the cheap offset that I had.  I looked at a number of options and in fact summarized the players at the time on The Mind of Men Blog.  You can get the details of that search here.  I finally decided on the Fast Eddy FEC100 Smoker, primarily as it could be shipped to me relatively cheaply (some of those heavy-duty stick burners would have cost in excess of $800 to ship to me).

The Fast Eddy is one of the new generation of Smokers that is based on the technology that Traeger pioneered.  Namely, the smoker uses pellets – much like the pellets that the current crop of pellet stoves and fireplaces use.  Pellets are simply short tubes of pressed wood about an inch or so in length.  They used to be made primarily from the sawdust left behind by sawmills, but as pellet stoves gained in popularity, that supply was not enough and now pellet companies grind up whole trees to make the pellets. The pellets used by smokers are different from pellet stoves in two main ways.  First of all, the machinery that makes the pellets requires a fair amount of lubrication and while the pellets intended for stoves are made on machines oiled by standard petroleum products, pellets bound for cooking purposes are made on machines that are lubricated using food grade oils.  This is an important distinction as you should only use food grade pellets in anything you plan to eat later on.  The second main difference is that BBQ pellets come in a variety of woods such as oak, hickory, cherry, pecan, etc. so that BBQ aficionados can choose woods that compliment the meat that they are smoking much the same way that the stick burners use logs made from specific woods.

The Traeger mechanism consists of a thermostat, fans, and an auger that feeds pellets into a burn cup as needed.  The fans and the auger speed are what maintain the target temperature.  You simply dial in your desired smoking temperature, tell the grill how long to run for, push the start button and sit back.  The computer control takes over and you can go to bed, mow the lawn, or go live your life while the smoker takes care of the cooking for you.  While Trager makes some mighty nice smokers themselves, I was attracted to the FEC100 for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, the FEC100 is very well insulated all the way around meaning that no matter what mother nature throws at you, its going to be able to maintain a fairly consistent cooking temperature without burning through a ton of wood pellets.  Furthermore, the computer that controls the FEC100 is one of the best in the business and you can rely on it to do what it needs to do every single time.  Secondly, the FEC100 is friggin’ huge.  You can cook for a small army or you can cook for just your family.  Granted, most people are not going to need to smoke five or six port butts at once along with a couple of briskets or racks of ribs, but its nice to have the option when you need it.

If you are into a competition BBQ , you can rest assured that the FEC100 is fully sanctioned by all of the major BBQ sanctioning organizations as while it does use electricity to turn the auger, spin the fans, and run the thermostat, the actual heat is provided by burning wood pellets, so it is legal for competitions whereas cookers that used electricity or gas to provide the heat source are not.  Many top BBQ teams use FEC100′s in competition and FEC100 users are winners of top BBQ competitions such as the Jack Daniels Invitational, and the American Royal.

As a home BBQ guy, you might think that the FEC100 is a bit of overkill, but when you consider the advantages that I just mentioned, you can see that it has a place in the upper echelons of the home BBQ chef as well.  It’s price of around $3,500 delivered may seem a bit steep, but when you compare it against some of the top stick burners and consider the shipping charges, you see that it is priced competitively.  Plus, its “set it and forget it” functionality makes it stand head and shoulders above any stick burner that I’ve ever looked at.

On top of this, Cookshack, who distributes the FEC100 is a top notch company to deal with.  Your FEC100 will come bundled with a goodie bag containing rubs, sauces, and 40 lbs of pellets to get you started.  Their customer service is also superb.  I once had a problem with my FEC100 and called at 4:50 P.M. on a Friday afternoon during the summer.  After a very short wait, I was put through to one of their tech guys who troubleshot the problem in about five minutes and had me up and running almost immediately.

No fair review of this smoker though would be complete without a discussion of some of the minor problems that I did experience with the smoker.  The first problem was that the smoker simply shut off one time.  After talking with Cookshack tech support, we determined that the high temperature sensor had been tripped.  While the smoker is rated to cook at up to 450 degrees F, it does have a sensor that will automatically shut it off should something go wrong and the temperature get too high.  The simple solution was to hit the reset button, which is annoyingly inside the computer control panel and required removing some screws to get at it.  The Cookshack tech acknowledged that this is a problem and that he had suggested a small redesign that would move the reset button to a more accessible location.  I don’t know if that change was ever made, but even if not, it is a minor nit to pick at best.

The second problem that I experienced was when the main fan went dead.  It was a pretty simple fix – the fan is mounted on the outside of the smoker and easy to change simply by removing 4 screws, but I learned from that experience that I should have a backup fan sitting on the shelf as it would be a pain should this happen during a smoke – you are essentially dead in the water without the fan.  I would recommend ordering a second fan from Cookshack.  If your fan dies, they will replace it for free, but it might take a week or so to get the new one.

The final disadvantage of the FEC100 is that it does run on 120V AC, so you do need to have electrical power handy if you are going to use it.  There are of course solutions for using it in the field such as deep cycle batteries, but unless you are going to do a lot of cooking away from AC power, this is probably not going to be much of a problem for you.

So, how to get it?  Well, if you are lucky enough to live in BBQ country, you may very well have a local distributor in your neck of the woods.  If not, I can’t speak highly enough of The Charcoal Store.  The owner, Dave Naas is a great guy who is very knowledgeable about smokers and has owned a used a number of different ones himself.  Being in Minnesota, he has the same weather issues that I have and he uses his FEC100 year round – even during the coldest time of the Minnesota winter.  Dave spent a bunch of time with me on the phone answering my questions both before and after the sale and provides stupendous customer service.

All-in-all, I’ve owned my FEC100 for more than 2 years and have been delighted with the consistent results that I get every time I use it.  I’ve smoked all kinds of meats in it and even cooked a pizza or two (that 450 degree maximum setting does come in handy from time to time).  I highly recommend it to anyone who likes BBQ and tech.

Best Practices: How to Rip Bluray DVDs

July 10 2010 by Jim in Audio/Video |No Comments

Ripping

Blu-ray DVD’s are an entirely different ball of wax.  For home theater purposes, we need to look at them a bit differently than we do for regular DVDs.  First of all, there is the size element.  While a regular DVD will take around 7 GB give or take on your hard drive, it is not uncommon for a Blu-ray DVD to occupy in the neighborhood of 40GB.  Can we save space by compressing a Blu-ray DVD the way we compress regular DVDs?  The question is not whether we can, but instead, “why would we want to?”  The whole point of the Blu-ray format is to provide a high quality audio and video experience.  Since compression really reduces the quality of both the audio and video streams, compressing a Blu-ray DVD does not make sense.   For this reason, I have not been able to find any programs that purport to compress Blu-ray movies, but in truth, I have not really looked all that hard since I couldn’t see anyone wanting to do it.  After all, if you want to make a compressed version of a movie, you’d just rip the regular DVD version.  It would also take a lot less time for a ripping/compression program to chew through 7 GB than it would to get through 40 GB.

A second consideration is the tradeoff between the cost of a Blu-ray DVD and the cost of the hard disk space a ripped Blu-ray DVD would occupy.  A check of NewEgg.com offered a Western Digital 1.5 TB drive for $110.  This works out to a storage cost of about $3 give or takes to store a 40 GB Blu-ray DVD image versus only 51 cents to store a 7 GB DVD movie image.  Since you want to protect your ripped movies, you would probably use a mirrored drive that would double the cost the space taken, so the Blu-ray would cost $6 to store versus a little over $1 for the regular DVD version. This may not seem like much, but it means your 1.5 TB drive will only hold about 35 Blu-ray movies give or take.  This is a consideration of sorts if you plan to build a large movie collection since most consumer level NAS devices top out at about 4 times the largest available hard drive, which works out to about 8 TB at the time of this writing.  Granted, it’s probably not as big a factor as it might have once been as hard drives get ever larger, but it is something to consider nonetheless.

Fortunately, your ripping process is going to be very similar to the one used for regular DVDs, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.  First of all, you are going to need to use the more expensive version of Slysoft’s AnyDVD – AnyDVD HD, which is 30 Euros more than the basic version you used for ripping regular DVDs.  Fortunately, Slysoft offers purchasers of the regular AnyDVD version a 30 Euro upgrade option to the HD one, so there’s no real cost associated with buying the cheaper non-HD version and then upgrading to the HD one at a later date.  Secondly, while you will use the same My Movies program to perform the rips as you did with your regular DVDs, you are not going to be able to do it for nothing anymore.   While the basic version of My Movies is free, certain advanced features are only available to people who have contributed to the My Movies project.  Ripping Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies is considered an advanced feature.

My Movies works on a “pay to play” scheme that awards points for contributions which can take two forms; cash contributions via PayPal and contribution of movie information to the My Movies Internet database.  As you may have noticed when you first fired up My Movies and put a DVD in it, chances are that it recognized the DVD and when you did the rip, it populated the movie file will all kinds of background information and created a JPG file of cover art.  All of this information comes from users like you.  Users are awarded points for contributing this sort of information to the database.  Check out the My Movies website for information as to what each type of contribution is worth.  It is entirely possible to amass enough contribution points simply by contributing information and thus get the full functionality of the program for free.  In the interest of time, I took the fast track and made cash contribution to unlock the Blu-ray ripping features.  The cash cost for Blu-ray ripping functionality is $50.  One nice thing however, is that the My Movies folks offer a free 21-day trial of the software with 2,500 points enabled.  This lets you try out all of the features to see if you are going to use them before you commit the cash.  It is also important to note that you can use either or both methods to build up your contribution level, so if you have the time, you don’t have to pay for all of the points needed.

In the end, consider this – the developers of the program work pretty hard and it does some really amazing things.  I, for one, have no problems with kicking some money to people like that to keep them writing cool software

As with regular DVDs, you have the option to rip your Blu-ray titles to either File Structures or ISO files.  In contrast to regular DVDs however, the recommendation when dealing with Blu-ray movies is to use the ISO format.  There are a couple of good reasons for this recommendation.  As of right now, there are no standalone hardware players that I am aware of that are capable of playing back a ripped Blu-ray DVD in any format, thus the argument we used for using File Structures for regular DVDs – namely that hardware players support it – doesn’t apply here.  The second reason that I recommend using the ISO format for Blu-ray ripping is that today, you need to use a third party Blu-ray player program to play a ripped Blu-ray DVD since Windows does not offer a native Blu-ray playback support  as part of the Operating System.  There are three major players in the Blu-ray playback market right now (we’ll cover them in detail in the next section on Playback) and all three are capable of playing a file in ISO format., but only one of the three is capable of playing back a File Structure Blu-ray rip.  You will need one other piece of software that mounts the ISO image, but we’ll cover that as well in the Playback section.

Assuming you have sufficient contribution points, ripping a Blu-ray DVD using My Movies is no different from ripping a regular DVD.  You can choose to rip it either from the Collection Management interface or from the My Movies strip inside of Windows Media Center.   If you choose to use the Media Center method, all you have to do is to choose the Copy DVD option from the My Movies strip.  Choosing this will prompt you for the drive/directory where you want to copy to go.  By default, My Movies only supports the root level of your drive however you can configure subdirectories by changing the options in the My Movies collection management application that you can access via the Collection management tray application on your Windows desktop.  Choose options from the tools menu and select the Media Center Disc copy option.  Towards the bottom you will see a box labeled Target Folders.  You can then click the Add button and add any folder you like.  Note that you will need to have already created the folder as My Movies does not give you the option to create one.

Once you have chosen the destination, click OK and then simply sit back and wait.  Depending on the speed of your Blu-ray drive, you should probably plan on roughly a 1:1 ratio between the movie’s length and its copy time.  So, a one hour movie will take roughly 1 hour to copy, a two hour movie, two hours, etc.  Since you are doing an uncompressed rip, there is not much processing going on here, so the speed of your CPU and number of processor cores really won’t have much bearing on your ripping speed.

Best Practices: How To Rip Your DVDs

July 5 2010 by Jim in Audio/Video |No Comments

Copying DVDs is one of those things that most Home Theater enthusiasts want to do.  You might want to copy your movies to a hard disk for any number of reasons.  Perhaps, you want to put them on your laptop or some kind of portable video device.  Another reason is that you might want all of your movies on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) that you can access from your couch without having to get up, find a DVD and put it in a player.  Perhaps you have children who literally can destroy a DVD in seconds if they get their grubby little fingers on it and you want to be able to play Barney does Dallas or whatever for your kids 100 zillion times without worrying about damaging the media.   Whatever the reason, sooner or later, you are going to be faced with the prospect of wanting to copy or rip a DVD to digital format.

Regular DVDs

I’m going to cover regular DVDs first and then deal with Blu-ray in a later post.  The nature of the Blu-ray technology presents some additional considerations which I’ll cover later.

The first thing that you need to decide is what format you wish to rip a DVD into.  To simplify our discussion, I’m going to break things down into two general groups; complete DVD rips and compressed movie files.  In the first case, the complete DVD rip, you are going to copy everything on the DVD to your hard drive.  This means that when you access the movie, it will for all intents and purposes behave as if you had inserted a physical DVD into your computer.  You will have access to the full DVD menu, original surround sound audio, alternate language tracks, director’s commentary, extras, etc.  You will even get the ads and previews that might play on the regular DVD.  The second option is to compress the DVD into a single file.  There are pros and cons to both approaches, so let’s look at each of them.

Dealing with Copy Protection

One of the things you will need to address before you use any of the software and techniques that I’m about to discuss is the matter of the CSS decryption.  None of the software programs that follow have CSS descrambling capability and will in fact pop up an error if you try to copy a disc that has been protected with CSS.  The solution is to use a program that handles the CSS decryption transparently on the fly so that the ripping or copy program only sees a clean unencrypted stream.  The best program that I have found for this is AnyDVD by Slysoft.  With AnyDVD loaded, you can use any ripping program of your choice and the program will think it is dealing with an unencrypted DVD.  AnyDVD really is the industry standard in this category and most discussions and articles around DVD ripping that I have seen reference this software.  The bad news is that it is the only software in this section that you actually have to purchase and it does not come cheap.  A license plus two years of updates will set you back nearly $70 US, but the price tends to fluctuate as it is denominated in Euros.  The updates are important because from time to time, disc producers make tweaks to the copy protection algorithm in a vain attempt to stay ahead of software like AnyDVD.  The folks over at Slysoft however are very good at what they do and as soon as a new variant of copy protection hits the streets, there is a new version of AnyDVD that cracks it.

If, down the road you want to add Blu-ray or the now defunct HD-DVD format ripping to your arsenal, then you’ll be looking at the AnyDVD HD product that runs about $112 US.  The nice thing is that you can always start with the basic AnyDVD program and upgrade to the HD version for a total price of about what it would have cost you to buy the HD product in the first place, so there’s no reason to spring for the HD version unless you have an immediate need to rip HD-DVD or Blu-ray titles.

Two things to keep in mind about Slysoft; one is that they let you download a fully functional copy and use it for 21 days before you have to register it, so you have ample time to ensure that it works for you.  Secondly, they seem to always be running a sale, particularly around most major U.S. holidays that will get you 20% or more off the price, so it may make sense to wait before you buy.

Full DVD Rips

The advantage to the full DVD rip is that you get everything that was on the original DVD.  A big plus here is that you get the full audio soundtrack encoded using whatever surround sound technology the DVD producer chose to offer (Dolby Digital, DTS, etc.).  You also have all of the extras that came with the original DVD including things like the Director’s commentary track and any kind of “behind the scenes” features that the DVD may offer.  Perhaps most importantly, since you have access to the full DVD menu, you have the ability to jump to specific scenes.  The big disadvantage to this is that there is no compression, so a movie ripped this way takes up a large amount of space on your drive.  Commercial DVDs are double layer and can hold a little over 7 GB of data.  This means that if you plan to build your library using full DVD rips, you are going to want a lot of hard disk space.  The most common use for this approach is people who want to fully archive their DVD collections on magnetic media and be able to choose the movie they want to watch from a menu rather than having to flip through their DVD collection.

So, how to do it?  Well, the simplest program that I have found is My Movies.  This is a program that was developed as a plug-in to Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition 2005.  Media Center 2005 was a special version of Windows XP that had the ability to (among other things) record television and came equipped with a so-called 10 foot interface, meaning that it could be navigated from 10 feet away (your couch for example) with a remote rather than a keyboard and mouse.  My Movies was intended to be installed on the Media Center PC and would allow you to not only rip complete DVDs, but it also featured a database to store details about the movies and a plug-in for Windows Media Center that let you browse your movie collection by its box art.

With the advent of Vista and later Windows 7, Microsoft built the Media Center capability into regular versions of Windows.  Media Center is available on Vista in the Home Premium and Ultimate Editions, and is available in Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate Editions.  These later versions of Media Center did not require the special My Movies Plug in to browse your movie collection as they had their own menu item for movies specifically.

If you don’t care about the background information that My Movies normally stores about each movie, you can just install it on a workstation, rip the movies, and copy them to your NAS.  You then can point your Media Center PC at the movie share on the NAS and browse your collection.  The My Movies application is simple to install and use and runs on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows.  Once installed, you simply pop a DVD into your computer, run the My Movies application and it will ask you if you want to copy to DVD.

One note here – there are actually two different formats into which you can rip a DVD; File System & ISO.  The File system essentially duplicates the file system on the DVD into a folder with the same name.  The ISO option rips the entire DVD into a single ISO file.

There are pros and cons to both approaches.  The ISO version is handy if you think you might someday want to burn a physical DVD of the movie.  You will need a Double Layer DVD drive and media, since most commercial movies are larger than the 4.7 GB that standard DVDs top out at but otherwise you should be all set as most current burning applications can write any ISO as long as the destination DVD-ROM has enough space.  If you have no interest in being able to burn movies back to DVD and just want to play back the digital version, the ISO format is probably not the best choice as playback can be a bit tricky.  Since your computer can’t directly access the inside of an ISO file, you will need a program that mounts the ISO image.  This will create a virtual DVD drive on your computer and your DVD player application will see it as simply another physical DVD.  An ISO mounting application is available for free from Slysoft, the makers of the AnyDVD program.  I’ll cover the specifics of this in the Blu-ray section as my recommendation will be to use ISO format for those types of disks.

For regular DVDs, I recommend using the File System option.  Most DVD player applications can directly load and play back a movie in the File System format.  A second consideration is that Hardware players that I have tested generally work well with File System based rips, but can have problems with ISO ones.

Compressed Movie Files

The second alternative is to compress a DVD into a single file.  This has several advantages.  First of all, there is a wide variety of formats that you can use to compress the movies, so it is possible to create a movie file for playback on just about any device imaginable (iPod, Zune, PSP, Xbox 360, etc.) .  The size of the movie file is entirely up to you – all you have to decide is the degree of tradeoff between quality and storage space required.  The smaller the file, the lower the quality, but if you are going to be playing it back on, say, an iPhone, you are dealing with a small screen, so a highly compressed file is not going to be that much of a problem.  I generally choose a format that represents a good balance between size and quality.  In my testing, I have found that a standard feature length film (approx. 2 hours or so) compressed down to about 1.3 GB of space yields an acceptable enough image to be played back on a 46” LCD TV without a serious hit to the quality of the video.

There are several key disadvantages to compressing a movie file versus performing a full DVD rip. First of all, you are making a tradeoff between storage space and quality.  Not only will the video quality be lower, but you are likely to have to give up the advanced audio encoding (Dolby Digital, etc.) of a full DVD rip.  Secondly, since you are essentially re-encoding your video, you are going to need a fairly powerful computer.  It is not uncommon for a moderately powerful computer to take an hour or more to copy a DVD into a compressed format.  If your computer is underpowered, it could take considerably more time.  Third, there are a number of different formats you can encode into, not all of which work with all video players.  If, you know for example, that you will only ever want to play your video files on your Zune, then, you can use a Zune friendly format.  If, however you later decide to switch to an iPhone, you may find that your chosen file format is not compatible with the iPhone and you will not be able to watch any of your older movies anymore.

Assuming you wish to proceed with creating a compressed movie file, your first decision is which video codec to use.  One of the earlier codecs that is still fairly popular is the Divx format.  Divx has been around for a fairly long time and is a fairly stable codec.  The company makes player software for both Windows and Macs freely available.  On the other hand, some standalone players won’t play Divx.  One such example was the Xbox360.  For the first couple of years or so after the Xbox 360 was released, it did not support Divx.  While most players will likely be able to handle Divx files, it pays to check before you go down that road.  One other issue is that the Divx folks are forever revising their codec.  The current version is 7.0, but there are still players out there that can’t handle anything newer than Divx version 5, so using Divx will require some thinking as to which version of the codec to use. In addition to Divx, which is commercial software, there is also an open source version called Xvid.  The two are somewhat interchangeable in that the latest version of the Divx player should be able to play any Xvid-encoded file, but the reverse is not necessarily the case.  Divx continues to evolve their codec and Xvid does not always keep up.  Early on, I worked with Divx, but now recommend the more industry standard h.264 codec for video encoding.

The basic h.264 codec is widely supported not only by operating systems but also by many devices.  Zunes, Xbox 360s, and Apple iPhone/iPods all offer native h.264 support.   You can encode a movie file in h.264 and can play it back on pretty much any device that you own or could contemplate purchasing in the future.  In the past, I experimented with Recode by Nero.  Recode is included in Nero’s suite of burning and ripping apps.  I really liked version 7 of the software.  I could install it as much as I liked which was handy since I rebuilt my computers on a fairly regular basis.  Newer versions of Nero unfortunately became increasingly large, unwieldy, and worse, added onerous copy protection.  Starting with version 8, you had to activate the software and there was no way to de-activate it so you could move it to a new machine.  If I rebuilt my computer, I got a warning that my serial number had been previously used.  To Nero’s credit, it let me continue after warning me that I could not have it installed in more than one place at a time, but it left me wondering how many reinstalls I would get before it locked me out.  Suffice to say, the copy protection was the final nail in Nero’s coffin as far as I was concerned.

My search for an alternative took me to Handbrake, an application that had begun as a DVD ripper for the Mac, but later moved to Windows.  Handbrake is drop dead simple to use.  Once installed (and it too works on both 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Windows) all you need to do is to point it at the source DVD, tell it where to store the encoded file, choose a format from a list of presets, and let it rip so to speak.  I recommend the Normal preset under the Regular heading for ripping.  I have found that this preset creates an h.264 file that can be played on pretty much any device that I have seen.  Granted, if all you use are Apple products, one of the Apple specific presets might be more appropriate, but you run the risk that the file you create might not be playable on non-Apple software or hardware.  In addition to the Normal preset, there is also an option for High Profile; however all that this appears to do is to add an additional AC3 Dolby Digital soundtrack to the movie.  Since many playback devices don’t know how to handle the AC3 track anyway, you run the risk of including something that only bloats your file size and may also not be compatible with some playback technologies. The main disadvantage of the Handbrake presets is that they do not give you quite the same level of control in terms of the tradeoff between file size and video quality as Nero did.  Nero offered a slider that let you choose the bitrate you wanted to encode the video to; higher bandwidth meant larger files and vice versa.  On the flip side, the Normal preset seems to do a reasonable job and produces a reasonable size, so it’s probably not something to really sweat.  If you are a hard core videophile and know what all of the various encoding settings do, Handbrake will allow you to tweak things to your heart’s content, but it is not particularly user friendly in this mode and assumes a fair amount of knowledge of the video encoding process, so for most casual users, the presets will be the way to go.

Proliphix Uniphy NT10e and NT20e TCP/IP Enabled Thermostats

June 24 2010 by Jim in Home Control |No Comments

In my search for ways to save money on home energy, I’ve tried a number of automated thermostat solutions.  Most of them are pretty limited in that while they will let you set a schedule for the set temperature for your heating and cooling, they lack much flexibility if you want to get very customized.  For example, the very cheap ones don’t distinguish between weekdays and weekends even though you are likely to have very different climate control needs between these two.  The more sophisticated might add a weekend program, but again no way to distinguish between Saturday and Sunday, which might well be on different schedules for your household.

Even if you get a more sophisticated one that does separate the two weekend days, you have other headaches.  For one, they can be a pain to program and if you let the battery get too low, they tend to reset themselves meaning time to program them all over again.  Ditto if the battery is out of the unit for too long when replacing it.  One other annoyance, at least for me is the hold button.  This is a great feature if you want to lock in a specific temperature for a longer period such as setting your heat to 50 degrees while you are on your skiing vacation or something like that, but at least in my house, it is all too common for someone to use the hold button to lock in the temperature to increase heating or cooling  for “just an hour or so” and then forget meaning that we burn a lot more gas and use a lot more electricity than we intended to do.

I have always been intrigued by the idea of the remote control thermostat that allows you to check and set temperatures without needing to be standing right in front of the thermostat.  Since I’m a computer guy, the idea of being able to remotely access it via one of my computers or even better, over the Internet held a lot of appeal.  I’ve admired some of the HVAC control systems that one sees in the higher end Home Automation rigs, but have generally been put off by the cost (thousands of dollars) plus the fact that most of the really sophisticated systems require that I hire a certified tech to come out and set it up for me.

I recently did a search for IP enabled thermostats and stumbled upon Proliphix’s web site.  They make a line of TCP/IP enabled thermostats for home and professional use.  I decided to pick one up and see how I like it.  In short – I love it.  For the home market (which is what this blog is aimed at), Proliphix makes three different models.  The Uniphy NT10e and the NT20e are siblings in that they use the same casing, are both hardwired, and as far as I can tell, use the same interface.  The $45 higher price for the NT20e model gains you the ability to add up to two hardwired remote temperature sensors that you can place in other rooms.  The NT20e can then average the data from all three sensors (the two remotes plus the one in the thermostat itself) to adjust your heating and cooling to a consistent level throughout the house.  Both of these thermostats are hardwired meaning that in addition to the standard HVAC control wires found on every thermostat, you will need to run a CAT 5 Ethernet cable to wherever you have mounted the thermostat.  The Ethernet cable provides both data connectivity back to your LAN as well as power to the thermostat.  The power, incidentally, is provided by an Ethernet Power Adapter – either the two port EPA20 ($45) or the six port EPA60 ($115) that can provide power to 2 or 6 thermostats respectively.  The Ethernet Power Adapter is intended to be located near your LAN switch and plugs into both the switch and A/C wall jack to provide power and data connectivity.

Proliphix also offers a wireless model – the IMT350 which does not require hard wiring, but does require being placed on your wireless network which, depending on how secure your network is and how flexible the IMT350 is, could be more or less of a pain than the wired NT models.  (Plus, the IMT350 costs $100 more than the most expensive NT model, which may be a factor).

Once you get it wired up, the thermostat will automatically pull an IP address from your DHCP server (or you can manually assign one).  You can then either change most of the settings using the thermostat’s controls or choose to make your life easier and log into the web interface.  The web interface is pretty decent, but it looks like it was designed by folks with little sense of aesthetics.  It is obviously a Freshman effort and reminds me of some of the web interfaces you found on Wireless Access points ten years ago.  While it gets the job done, one very lacking feature is context sensitive help.  A reasonably sophisticated user should be able to get most of the basic stuff configured without help, but some of the options are relatively cryptic and you need to download the reference manual from the Proliphix web site to understand what they mean.

That said, you have access to a wide range of control.  Proliphix provides three separate control themes that allow you to create three customized on/off schemes.  It also offers a calendar view that lets you alter specific days of the month.  For example, you could set up Labor Day Monday to have a different schedule than a regular Monday when when everyone is away at work or school.  Another cool feature is the custom period for  the Hold button.  You can configure it to be permanent – ie: when you press the hold button, the set temperature will remain locked in until you release the button – or you can set it to work for a specific time period such as 1 hour.  This means that if someone makes a “temporary” adjustment to the temperature, it really is temporary and reverts back to its programming after the hold period has elapsed.

One way that I see myself using the system, particularly in the summer is to program my thermostat to keep the A/C off while my family is away on vacation.  I can then use the calendar mode to set the A/C to turn on a few hours before we get home on the day we are scheduled to return so that the house is nice and cool when we walk in.  If our plans change – say we are going to stay an extra day- it is very easy to simply log in via the Proliphix web site and adjust the schedule to reflect our new return day.

Proliphix also offers a web site that, once you register your thermostat with, allows you to remotely log in from anywhere in the world to check and manage your thermostat(s).  The Proliphix web site interface is identical to the one that you get when you log directly into the thermostat in your home, so there is no additional learning curve.

One final nifty feature is the programmable high and low temperature alarms.  Once you have registered your thermostat with the Proliphix web site, you can program it to automatically email you if the temperature exceeds either the maximum or minimum temperature you specify.  This can be a boon if you are away on a vacation and the heating system breaks down.  The email would give you the heads up necessary to dispatch a friend or family member to your house to determine what the situation was.

All-in-all, the Uniphy series of thermostats is a good alternative to a full blown home automation package.  That said, the product is not without its shortcomings, which we’ll discuss next.

First of all, as this thermostat does require a hardwired connection to your LAN, this means that unless you are putting it into new construction where you can easily wire things, you are going to be faced with snaking an Ethernet cable from your switch to the Thermostat.  This may be a deal breaker for some, but snaking wires is generally not that hard and you can always pay an electrician to do it for you.  Proliphix’s newer IMT350 connects to your wireless network and presumably does not require any kind of hardwired connection (other than the HVAC control wires).

Secondly, Proliphix has taken a hybrid approach to the Ethernet wiring.  The Ethernet power adapter sports a standard 110 punch down block, which makes terminating that end of the Ethernet cable very easy.  They even include a wire stripper and punch down tool in the box to make your life simpler (although I did choose to use the more robust professional equipment I have).  On the thermostat end of things however, it got a bit stickier.  All of the wires in the thermostat (HVAC control, remote sensor, Ethernet) are secured using screws.  Now this makes sense for the HVAC control and remote sensors, but it does not make sense for the Ethernet wires.  It was a real pain getting just enough Ethernet cable untwisted so as to get them all connected without untwisting too much (this could compromise the Ethernet connection).  Once connected, you are all set, but it took me more than an hour of troubleshooting back and forth to get everything up and working.  It would have been much simpler to have found the standard 110 punchdown block for the Ethernet inside the thermostat.  This is the most serious of the nits I have to pick and while it does seem minor, you try explaining to your wife why the air conditioning is still off after a couple of hours on a hot day.

The third negative is the price.  At $250 for the NT10e plus $45 for the non-optional 2 port EPA, you are into the system for close to $300 for the base model.  This seems a tad high for what is essentially a $40 thermostat plus maybe $50 of networking hardware.  Clearly you are paying a premium for the R&D.  Granted, this is after all, not a device with mass-market appeal, so you are not going to realize any economies of scale on this one.  Suffice to say, that trying to justify the cost on a pure ROI basis is not going to work, particularly when you compare it to the $45 programmable thermostat that offers most of the same functions.  On the other hand, there is a premium that I am willing to pay for the enhanced program-ability and remote access features, so I’m not unhappy with my purchase.

If you are in the market for a smart device like this one, I highly recommend that you check Proliphix out.  As soon as I can free up some cash, I’ll probably be picking up a second one for my upstairs HVAC system.

Proliphix Uniphy Thermostats Web Page

Getting This Thing Off The Ground

June 14 2010 by Jim in General |No Comments

Hey Folks,  I’m just getting this blog off the ground.  Watch this space over the next couple of weeks for changes in site design, new features, and most importantly, content.  I’ll explain more about me and what this blog is about as I get things up and running, but to give you an idea of where I plan to go with it, I’m a big gadget and tech guy, but I really like to find solutions that solve problems around the home.  In this blog, I plan to talk about some of the solutions that I have found to deal with various problems that I come across.  I’ll be spanning all areas of home tech from audio/video to computers to climate control to BBQ technologies.

I welcome anyone and everyone on this journey and hope we can all learn something.

-Jim