Subsonic Forum

I'm currently looking into building a HTPC/Subsonic Server/DVR before the summer's up, but I'm kinda lost on the specs I'm going to need. I'm looking for this computer to:
-Store Music/Movies/TV shows and be able to stream them online [preferably hi-res]
-Record TV shows off the air a la DVR
-Play DVDs and BluRay "natively" (so I can move the BluRay player downstairs) [so no Linux builds for me]
-[low priority] Backup some files from computers on my home network
-[Maaaaayyybe] very light and sporadic gaming (ie, Audiosurf)

At most, I'm going to have 3 users (me + my parents), and I find it unlikely that there will be more than 1 person streaming video at a time. It could be possible that, at the same time, a show is being recorded off the air, while elsewhere HD video is being streamed.

Here's my speedtest.net results: (taken from a laptop connected to the home network via wifi)



Here's the pile of hardware I'm looking at buying:
-nMEDIAPC Black Aluminum panel & Steel HTPC 1000B Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case [w/Programmable LCD Screen]
-BIOSTAR A880G+ AM3 AMD 880G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard [has integrated ATI Radeon HD 4250]
-AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor
-LG Black Blu-ray Drive SATA Model UH12LS28 OEM LightScribe Support [may or may not come with BluRay software, gauging by the reviews]
-Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT25664BA1339
-Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250 Hybrid TV Tuner /Video Recorder 1196 PCI-Express x1 Interface
- 4X Seagate Barracuda Green ST1500DL003 1.5TB 5900 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
-hec HEC350TEWX 350W ATX12V Ver2.2 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
(+ all necessary cables)

The hard drives are going to be set up as RAID 10 (so 3.0TB usable), but will it be sufficiently fast at 5900 RPM and 3.0Gb/s (SATA transfer limited by motherboard)? Or is that all irrelevant given my internet upload speed, anyways?

If I hook the Hauppauge WinTV card up to an antenna (not satellite or Cable), I won't need a DTV box for it, right? (description says "Receive ATSC digital TV or Clear QAM digital cable TV, up to 1080i format")

Also, I have a few questions on the software front:
-Win 7 WMC records TV shows in a .wtv format. Is there A) a way to automate the conversion process to occur every night on new files at midnight and then add it to the Subsonic library, or B) a way to get subsonic to play these files without conversion.
-How should I go about partitioning my drives? I was thinking 1 for the OS/programs, 1 for media that's going to be shared, and 1 as a local network backup drive. Is there any way to better optimize this?
-There won't be any conflicts if a Subsonic user is trying to access the same file as a local user on the server, right?

Many thanks in advance to anyone who bother to read through all of this and help me out.

Gosh, where to start...

I have the same Motherboard in my homserver; it's a good board.
I went with the 65W quad core CPU

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103907

a bit higher priced, but the quad core will really make a difference with transcoding and multiple streams.

I'm using a 4 tuner Ceton card to capture TV off digital cable, but if I was just going for OTA capture, I'd probably look at the Silicon Dust products as they can be attached to a network for a bit more versatility.

I've owned the 5900 1.5TB Seagate drives and found them problematic, both in terms of speed and reliability. My favorite storage drive right now are the Samsung F4 2TB drives. Fast, quiet, cool running and ony $80 a piece which is $40 per TB. There is no real need for RAID as long as you plan another method for backup of any data you don't want to lose. I back up my HTPC to a WHS, but a spare drive or a mirrored drive would work fine.

For the Power supply I think I'd go with an Antec Earth Watts http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817371033

Software: WMC records in .wtv format which will play in Subsonic without too much set up pain. It can be transcoded on the fly by Subsonic or just replayed through WMC. Depending on how much data you plan to warehouse, there are many approaches to storage alignment that can work well. I'm not too fond of the NAS approach as you'll find many posts here regarding slow load and transfer speeds with some users who use Win 7 and a NAS that uses a Linix based file system. Depending on what you buy, it could be less than ideal. I'm also a bit leary of the NAS approach having read many reviews that point to poor heat dissipation that results in early hard drive failure. I like cheap servers in big boxes with lots of cooling fans that make hard drives happy. The hard drives in my servers usualy run at or slightly below room temperature.

A dedicated HTPC doesn't need to much sophistication as WIN 7 will automatically store the recorded TV in it's own directory. If you collection outgrows a single large drive, it's easy enoguh to add a new drive and move the recorded TV to the larger drive as an archive, thus making room on the original drive for more recording. I actually use seperate drives for TV, music, home photo/video, but mostly just because I have the capacity. If I had less data, I would be comfortable storing everything on a 3TB drive as long as it was backed up regularly.

That's about all I can think of.

HTH