Windows Home Server

With a desktop PC and a Media Center PC in my house, I've been contemplating a means of central storing for a while. With a wide array of NAS devices, what's to choose? And why not a full server? With the availability of Windows Home Server since last year, the answer is easy: Let's build a server!

With a broadband network in the house, separating the data from the user interface makes sense! A separate device in the house for storage of music, video and pictures is the future. More and more media-extenders are hitting the market that plug network data directly into your audio and video equipment. Many consumer electronic devices even come with a media extender included.
With a dedicated device, all this media is available instantly anywhere in the house. Or, anywhere in the world, if the device is attached to internet.

All of this can be supported by an off the shelf NAS device. A full server is only required to support tv server functionality. The MediaPortal community has been developing tv server software for a while now, separating the tv cards from the mediacenter pc. This, and the fact the hundreds of GB of harddisk capacity are no longer needed in the mediacenter pc, offers new potential for the ultimate sleek and silent htpc.
WHS makes RAID-like protection of your essential data easy. Already I have double copies of my pictures and music collections on different hard drives, but synchronizing remains a pain in the butt.

With that in mind, we're looking for an energy efficient and affordable server solution, with slots and room for up to 4 tv cards.

Microsoft released a hilarious "children book" about Windows Home Server:



Or view page by page, here.

FLAC test

What's the point of owning some fine loudspeakers and a matching receiver, if the set only gets to play crappy MP3 stuff? With todays prices for digital storage, storing music with a lossless audio codec has become affordable. Just exactly how crappy are those MP3 compressed music files?

To put this question to the test, I compared MP3 compression against a lossless format, FLAC. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, and that's exactly what it is. It's also open source and it seems to become a standard. I used Exact Audio Copy to generate a quality WAV file from 10 very different CD fragments and converted to FLAC. The same WAV fragments were compressed to 192 kbps MP3 files as well. In my experiment, the set of WAV files was compressed to 22MB, while FLAC needed 76MB for the same set.

The FLAC fragments and the MP3 fragments got the same names, so I couldn't tell the difference when playing them in MediaPortal. Using mediaportal, I loaded all 20 fragments in a playlist and had the list randomized. Then I manually put the fragments with the same name together and saved the playlist. The result is a playlist that plays each of the 10 CD fragments twice, without me knowing if the first is the FLAC version and the second MP3, or vice versa.

Sitting back on the couch, I quickly noticed it was damn hard to spot any differences. I wrote down FLAC or MP3 for each of the fragments. After checking with the extensions in the playlist file, I found out I guessed wrong 8 out of 10 times!

In a way that's a disappointing result: so much for my audiophile qualities. But, for now I won't have to invest a whole lot of time in re-compressing my cd collection to FLAC. I'll probably redo the test with 128kbps MP3 files and FLAC, because I definitely still have a serious amount of music at that quality.