I will probably keep adding stuff to this post even after it's "Finished". If you want to see some topic added, leave me a note. e-mail: pstagman (at) nedmug.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/tyrstag

Table of Contents

Installing Windows

Prepping Windows for Media Center

Enabling AutoLogon

Disabling User Account Control

Creating a stripe set

Changing RecordedTV location

Install Windows Home Server Connector Client

Configuring Media Center

Checking ATSC Signal and Removing Channels

Windows Home Server / Media Center Integration

Increasing the LiveTV buffer Length

Increasing Analog Recording Quality

Enabling Concurrent Connections

Future Topics

Installing Windows

The first thing you need to do is install Windows. I installed it from a USB Thumb drive. If you don’t know how to make a USB Windows installation drive, check here.

Essentially the Windows 7 install is pretty straight forward. The only thing you may want to change is which drive you want to install to.

In my Media Center PC I have 2 – 250GB drives in a RAID1 that will be for Windows. The RAID1 is to protect the Operating System from a Hard Drive failure.

I then have 2 – 500GB drives that I’ll stripe with RAID0 to help bring up the drive speed for recording multiple HD streams.  

After Windows has installed, you will be presented with a couple configuration screens.

The first screen asks for a username. Since this is going to be a dedicated Media Center PC I just use the Username MCE (It’s from the old WindowsXP Media Center Edition name, it’s how the account was setup originally on my network, so I keep it.) That automatically creates a machine name of MCE-PC, which is how my Windows Home Server will recognize it.

The next screen is the Password Screen. Again, since this is a dedicated Media Center, so I just give it the password “password”. You need to have a password if you are going to connect to a Windows Home Server. Later I’ll show you how to use the Windows7 AutoLogon so that you won’t have to enter a password every time you start the PC.

The next screen asks you for the Installation Key. You can enter your key now. I prefer NOT to enter the key now. If I do something that I didn’t like while configuring the PC, I can rebuild it again without having to call Microsoft to enable the key again. I wait until the PC is configured the way I want and then enter the key. To bypass the key, just leave the entry blank and Un-Check the “Register automatically” check box.

The next screen asks you how you want to Protect your computer and handle Updates. I just hit “Use recommended setting”.

The next screen is the “Time and Date” Here you enter you correct Time and Date, also enter your timezone and whether you want the PC to automatically change for Daylight Savings.

If you had a network cable attached while installing, the next screen will ask you what type of network you are on. I use “Home”.

That should be all. Windows is now installed!

After install: Prepping for Media Center

The first thing I do after the install is to get the latest video driver for my video card. In my case I went to the Nvidia website and downloaded the latest driver.

If you’re using Media Center on a TV, you may need to resize the desktop so you can see the entire desktop on your TV screen. With Nvidia, you Right-Click anywhere on the desktop and select “Nvidia Control Panel” then click on the “Resize Desktop” option in the left hand pane.

This will bring up the Resize Desktop Tool. You move the sliders around to get the 4 arrows in the corners as close to the corners of the TV as you can.  

Then make sure that Windows is totally up to date. You can get to Windows Updates by clicking on the Start Marble, hover the mouse over All Programs and Windows Updates will appear in the list.

In my case there were 20 important updates and 37 optional updates.

Check the “Optional Updates” to see if there are any drivers for your hardware that you may need. Most of the Optional Updates were language packs that I don’t need. But I selected the Hauppauge drivers for my ATSC tuner cards. I didn’t select the Network Driver because I never have good luck with the network drivers from Windows Updates. I also didn’t select the Nvidia Driver because the one I manually went and downloaded is newer than the one on Windows Updates.

After the updates install, you should restart your PC. I’d recommend restarting even if the install didn’t tell you that you need to restart. Installing updates can leave some stuff in memory that can play havoc with a Media Center PC.

Now that I rebooted, Windows wanted me to enter my password. Let’s get rid of that now.

Enabling AutoLogon

To enable AutoLogin in Windows7 you click on the Start Marble and type netplwiz in the search.

That will bring up the “Advanced User Accounts” control. Un-check the “User must enter a user name and password to use this computer” check box and click apply.

A pop-up will appear asking for the current password for the user. Enter the password you use to log in to windows and hit OK. Then hit OK in the User accounts window.

You’re done! No more password prompts to log in to windows!

Disabling User Account Control 

Another thing I like to shut off on my Media Center is User Account Control (UAC). That’s the annoying Pop-Up that shows up every time you try to install something or make a change to the system. Again, I’m ONLY doing this on my dedicated Media Center PC, I keep UAC running on my other computers. (Disabling UAC makes you PC less safe! Only turn it off if you understand the risks.)

You get to UAC by clicking on the Start Marble and then selecting Control Panel.

Click on “User accounts and Family Safety”, “User Accounts”, then “User Account Control Settings”.

I move the slider to the “Never Notify” setting. You should decide how much you want Windows to notify you of changes.

Click OK, Windows will pop-up the UAC notice for the last time! X out of Control Panel.

Creating a stripe set

I said earlier that I had 2 – 500GB drives that were going to be in a stripe set for recording HD streams.

Why would you want a stripe set? Because of the performance increase that being able to write to several drives at once gives you. If you only have one Hard Drive, then all the data that you are writing to disk has to go through 1 controller and be written to 1 Hard Drive. If you are recording several High Definition TV streams at one time, that's an awful lot of data to try to cram to a single Hard Drive. You may end up with a "Bottleneck", where all your tuners are trying to send TV to the Hard Drive but the drive can't keep up, your video or audio may start to skip or freeze because the drive couldn't keep up.

With a stripe set, you have 2 or more Hard Drives acting as if they are a single drive. In the example below, I have 2 - 500GB Hard Drives acting like a single 1TB Hard Drive. When the tuners are recording the TV streams, the controllers will write the data to each drive in "Stripes". It will write a small amount to drive 1, then a small amount to drive 2, alternating back and forth between the drives. Data can be written to the drives almost twice as fast as a single drive. If you have more than 2 drives, the same striping occurs, the drives will be written to in sequence as fast as the tuners can send the data. The dis-advantage to a stripe set is that if ANY 1 drive fails, ALL the data on the stripe set is lost.

To create a stripe set, you have to add the drive to a set in Disk Management. To get to Disk Management you Right-Click on MyComputer and select “Manage”, in the Left hand Pane click on Disk Management under the Storage heading. Here you will see all the drives you have on your computer, including CD/DVD/BD and USB.

But first, I want to move around some Drive Letters. I want the new volume I’m creating to be “D”, so first I have to move the DVD an BluRay drive to different letters. Right-click on a drive you want to reassign a drive letter and select “Change Drive letter and path” Select the new drive letter. Say OK to the pop-up that asks if you’re sure about changing the drive letter.

Now we can create the stripe set

Scroll you drive list down to your first Unallocated drive, Right-Click on it and select “New Striped Volume”, that will bring up the “New Striped Volume Wizard”

Click Next, the Select Disks windows will pop-up showing you any unallocated drives that you have installed.

This screen can be a little confusing. When you add more disks, the Volume size changes, but not the “Amount of Space”. The Amount of space refers to how much OF EACH DISK should be used in creating the stripe, not of the entire volume. This is useful if you have different size disks. Say you have a 1TB disk and a 500GB disk. You want to create a strip set with these 2 drives, the MAXIMUM amount of space that can be allocated is 500GB which is the size of the smallest drive. So, the stripe will use 500GB from the 500GB drive, and 500GB from the 1TB drive. Hope that clears up that . . .

Once you have added all the drives for your stripe and set the drive space allocation, click next, here you can name the volume click next, select format options and drive letter.

Once the format is complete, you can close the disk management window.

You will probably want to create a folder on the new drive to store your RecordedTV in. Double-Click MyComputer, Double-Click the “D” drive you created. Right-Click in the Right Hand Window and select New -> Folder, Name your folder “Recorded TV”.

Done.

Changing RecordedTV location

Now that we created a stripe set, we want Media Center to actually use it. To do this you need to do a little bit of registry editing. (Be careful what you do in the registry, changing something you are not sure about can lead to VERY BAD THINGS!! And you could end up reinstalling windows again.)

To edit the registry, click on the Start Marble and type “Regedit”, hit enter. This will start up the registry editor. Now, if you’ve never been in the registry before, this gets tricky.

You will often see registry locations shorthanded as something like this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording

What that means is to navigate through the registry like this:

Click on the + next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then SOFTWARE, then Microsoft, then Windows, then CurrentVersion, then  Media Center, then Service, then Recording.

Navigate to that Registry key using the left hand pane.

When you get there, Double-Click on “RecordPath” in the right hand pane. Enter the path to your “Recorded TV” folder. “D:\Recorded TV” and click OK.

Close out of the registry editor.

Install Windows Home Server Connector Client

If you have a Windows Home Server, now is a good time to install the connector. You can install it from a web browser, but I prefer to just install it from the “Software” folder on the server. Clcik on the Start Marble and in the search box type \\”name of your server”\software. My server is named “WHS” (original huh?) so I would type \\whs\software then double click on the “Home Server Connector Software” folder. Double-Click “Setup”. Follow the prompts for the wizard. It’s pretty easy, no screenshots here.

The Windows Home Server Connector also installs new Media Center Integration, when we start media center, we’ll be prompted to install it then.

Configuring Media Center

OK, so now we have all the preliminary stuff done. Let’s go ahead and fire up Media Center and do the basic configuration. What I have installed in the PC at the moment are 2 – Hauppauge HVR-1600s and 1 –  Hauppauge HVR-1850. I also have the Media Center IR receiver/blaster and a Harmony One remote. For a keyboard I have a Microsoft Wireless Bluetooth Entertainment Keyboard and Mouse model 7000.

The Media Center Configuration Wizard will fire up the first time you start Media Center.

I clicked on “Express”. Now I’ll click on the “Live TV Setup”

The first Screen asks for your Region. I’m going to pick United States.

Next it asks for your Postal Code. I entered mine.

Next is the Program Guide Terms of service.

Next is the Microsoft PlayReady End User license Agreement. PlayReady is the DRM engine that determines whether a program you watch has the NoCopy, CopyOnce or CopyFreely flag.

After you accept the EULA Media Center will do a few things on it’s own, like installing PlayReady, checking your tuners, finding your TV signals. This will take a while. When it’s done, it will show you the Results window. In my case it was correct, I have 3 Digital ATSC tuners enabled. So I hit Next and then Next again to confirm.

Media Center then does some magic on it’s own again, Updating PlayRead, Downloading Guide Data. When it’s done, you’re all set! Media Center is configured to use your tuners!

At this point I only have an antenna connected to the tuners, later I'll add 2 DirectTV Set Top Boxes.

That matches what I have in my system. So I'm going to check Yes and hit Next.

Checking ATSC Signal and Removing Channels

BUT! Media Center configured your tuners based on the guide, it setup all the channels that are in your area, whether or not you can actually receive them (or want that channel). So, we are going to go into the setting and see what we have for signal strength and remove any channels that are not strong enough or we don’t want.

From the main Media Center menu, go to Tasks, Settings

Then scroll down to TV

Then TV signal

Then “Digital TV Antenna Signal Strength”

Here you will see all your tuners listed. Select your first tuner and hit Next.

On this screen you will see all you guide channels and their signal strength. (Be aware that signal strength changes during the day due to weather and even the position of the Sun and Moon. No really, it does!) Try the signal test at different times of day to see for yourself. Your best signal will probably be early evening just after the Sun goes down.

Uncheck any channels that show a weak (Yellow or Red) signal. You can try to keep the channels in Yellow, the signal may get better at different times of day. Also uncheck any channels that you don’t want in your guide. Shopping channels!!! Eesh . . .

I also uncheck the “Apply changes to the remaining tuners in this group” Check box. I find that different tuner models get a different enough signal that some will receive a channel that another won’t and vice versa. So if you have a tuner that shows a weak signal on a channel you want, check your other tuners, they may have a better signal!!

Your Off-Air ATSC tuner setup is now complete!

Media Center Only Mode

If you’d like your Media Center to act more like a Set-Top-Box, there’s a couple settings you can make.

Go into Tasks, then Settings, then General, then “Startup and Windows Behavior”.

If you check the Always keep Windows Media Center on Top, then users won’t be able to get out of Media center to get to the desktop. If you need to get to the desktop, go back in and uncheck the box, then you will be able to use window like normal.

The other setting is “Start Windows Media Center when Windows starts”, which means that as soon as windows boots to the desktop, Media Center will start. If you check both of these options then Media Center will behave like a Set-Top-Box and will start up on windows boot and will not be able to get to the desktop. I usually check the start Media Center with windows option, but not the keep Media Center on top.

Windows Home Server / Media Center Integration

I missed grabbing a screenshot of the pop-up in Media Center, But it just tells you to go to Start, All Programs and find the installer. Click on the connector and it will bring up the installer wizard.

The first screen asks for your Home Server Administrator Password. Type it in and click Next. The install will take a little while to find your server and install the connector.

When the install is complete, you will be asked to restart the computer. The install makes several registry changes and also some Media Paths. Click Done to reboot or check the “Do not restart now” box to keep the installer from rebooting your PC. I let it reboot.

To see what the Media Center Connector does and how to use it, see this post.

 Increasing the LiveTV buffer Length

If you're like me, you're a busy person. You may get caught up on the phone doing family tech support or have to go run an errand for a period of time, you come back to watch tv, only to find that you can't rewind the TV back to where you first got sidetracked. The LiveTV buffer in Windows 7 Media Center is only around 30 minutes. If you're gone longer than that . . . oh well, guess you miss whatever ever happened on Lost!

But, you can do a little registry hacking to increase the LiveTV buffer!

Open the Registry Editor by clicking on the Start Marble and typing "regedit".

Navigate to the registry key:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners

 You're going to add 3 new Values

"BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds" - Defines how many seconds of TV each buffer stores. Default is 300
"BackingStoreMaxExistingBackingFiles" - Defines how many files to create. Default is 8
"BackingStoreMaxNumBackingFiles" - Defines the max number of files. Default is 8

Add each of the values to the Registry key by Right-Clicking in an empty spot in the Right Hand pane, Select "New" -> Dword. Either type in the Value Name exactly as it appears above, or Copy/Paste it directly from here.

 To increase the Buffer time, you can change either the seconds for each buffer file, or the number of files. personally I like to keep the number of files down so I keep it at 8 and increase the time to 900 seconds per file. Giving me  2 hours of buffer. 900seconds * 8=7200 seconds / 60=120min

Double-Click "BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds", Change the "Base" to Decimal and enter 900 in the "Value Data"

Double-Click on each of the other values you created and change them to "Decimal" 8.

You need to reboot for the changes to take effect.

You're done! You now have 2 hours of LiveTV Buffer!

Increasing Analog Recording Quality

In order to make Media Center compatible with as many systems as possible, Microsoft sets the default recording bitrates a little lower than the optimum. If you want to get better quality out of your Analog recordings (S-video, Composite, Coax), you can change the default bitrates.

Open up the Registry Editor by clicking on the Start Marble and type "regedit"

Navigate to the registry key:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording

That's the same key that you set the RecordedTV location. Instead of modifying the location we're going to modify the BitRates by changing the value: EncodingQuality

 The 4 values that are listed here equate to the 4 "Recording Quality" settings - "Fair", "Good", "Better", "Best". The numbers are in BPS or Bits per Second. So, when set for Best quality, you are getting a bitrate of 7.5 Megabits per Second, that's not bad, but most high quality analog streams are more in the range of 9 - 10 Megabits per Second. I like to increase the Best quality to around 9.5 Megabits per Second.

The easiest way to make this change is to Double-Click on the "EncodingQuality" value in the registry, adding 9500000 to the bottom of the list, and deleting the top value. That increases all the values by 1-2Mb a Second!

The new settings should look like this:

Close out of the registry and reboot!

 Enabling Concurrent Connections:

Enabling Concurrent Sessions allows you to Remote Desktop into a system that someone else is on, under a different user account, and access the system without kicking the user off.

This is really useful if you have Media Center running on a TV. You can use remote desktop from a laptop or another PC to remote manage your Media Center without interupting someone watching TV. Unless you do something that requires a reboot.

MissingRemote has been the leader in getting this to work and updating it whenever there's been a windows change that breaks it. So, rather than writing a whole new post, I'll link to their post.

Enabling Concurrent Connections in Media Center

Future Topics:

Adding a Set Top Box

Fake HD - Getting a 16x9 picture from an HD Set Top Box using S-Video

Adding a Media Center Extender

Install AnyDVD

Install Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater

Install MyMovies

Install HD-PVR

What's so cool about the connector? 3 words - "Automatic RecordedTV Archiving"! I used to have lots of very large hard drives in my Media Center, I would record many TV shows and watch them when I had time. Sometimes there would be Terabytes of TV on my Media Center. If I wanted to keep the shows, I would manually move the show to my Windows Home Server. Since installing Power Pack 3, I have moved all the large drives to the Windows Home Server and only have a few 500GB drives in the Media Center. I let the TV Archive function handle the moving of the files.

 In this post I'll go through all the new menus that are added to Media Center, what they mean and what the settings are for.

Installation

If you're familiar with Windows Home Server, you know about installing the Windows Connector software. What the connector software does is configure your PC for use with Windows Home Server. It configures Backups, Security, Library and Shared Folders. After the installation of the new Power Pack 3 connector, if you start up Media Center you will be notified by a PopUp that there is also a new Media Center Connector and you have the option to Install it or Cancel.

What happens when you install it is not obvious at first. The first thing that happens is that the following folders are added to the Media Center Search folders.

• Music Library --> \\HomeServer\Music
• Pictures & Video --> \\HomeServer\Photos
• Recorded TV --> \\HomeServer\RecordedTV

Whatever is placed into those folders on the Windows Home Server will now show up in the Media Center Menus. One of the things that may not be obvious at first is that ANY Media Center that is connected to the Home Server has access to the RecordedTV folder. That means that you can have one Media Center with multiple tuners recording shows and play them from other Media Centers on the network. Other PCs, Laptops, Extenders . . .

The next thing you may or may not notice is that there is a new "Home Server" menu strip. With 2 items, "TV Archive" and "Console View"

Console View

 I'll cover the "Console View" first. There is nothing you can "DO" in any of the Console View menus. It's informational only.

The first screen is the "Storage" screen. It shows you a pie chart of your storage usage on you Windows Home Server.

The next screen is "Drives", it shows you a list of the drives that are included in the drive pool and their Health Status.

Next is "Backup Status". here you can see a list of all the PC's on your network that are configured to be backed up. Whether the last backup was successful or a warning about machines that have no recent backups. (You can see here that I have a few PC's that have no recent backups. One is my daughter, who's away in college. The other is my wife's PC that she hasn't turned on since I bought her a laptop. I keep the backups Just in case)

Next is "Shared Folders". This screeen shows you the folders that are shared on the Home Server, if they have duplication enabled and the status of the duplication if you have it enabled.

Next is "Media Counts", this screen tells you how many media files of each type you have on the server and an estimate of how many more will fit based on an average of file sizes and remaining drive pool space.

The next screen is "Health", it will show you any warnings from the Home Server. Here you see that my Dell laptop hasn't been backed up in a while.

The last screen in "Console View" is the "Windows Home Server" view. It shows you the make/model of the Motherboard of your Home Server and a serial number if supported by you MoBo.

TV Archive

This is the real brilliance of the Home Server Connector! In these menus, you can define what programs are archived to the Home Server, manually or automatically, if they will be compressed and in what format they'll be saved.

The first screen is the "Series" screen. Here you can see the various series that you have selected to be recorded from the Guide. If you check the checkmark, any shows that were previously recorded and any recorded from now on, will automatically be moved to the RecordedTV folder on the Home Server.

The next screen is the "Programs" screeen. This menu shows you TV that you have recorded, but are not part of a Series. Here you can select an individual show to be archived manually.

The last screen off the main menu is "Settings". In this screen you define how the archives are treated.

If "Archive all recordings automatically" is checked. The "Series" and "Programs" setting won't matter. All recorded shows will be moved to the Home Server.

The "Move recordings to my home server" turns the archive function off. If neither of the first 2 options are checked, no recordings will be moved.

The "Create a compressed copy for:" option creates an additional Compressed copy of the program for use on the TV, Windows Mobile or Zune. The "Save compressed copy to:" option allows you to tell the connector where to save the new compressed file. The options are "Home Server Videos" Folder or the "Local Videos" folder.

The "Activity" screeen is available from any of the other menus. This screen shows you the activity of the Connector, any shows that are currently being transferred/compressed, files that are queued and any files that failed to transfer.

That's it for the settings and menus.

 Conclusion.

These may seem like very simple enhancements, but these are things that the Media Center community has been asking for and some of them were available previously with hacks. Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 shows what can be done with integrating Home Server and Media Center. I hope this is just the start of things to come!

clubhouse, media center-windows 7, settings

I don't rip EVERY movie I own, only movies that I like to watch a lot. I rip the movies that I do because I like to be able to play them at a moments notice, without having to search through hundreds of disks on shelves and in boxes. And it's pretty cool to have friends over, talk about some movie and be able to pull it up and play it within a minute.

Also, this is not the ONLY way to rip and play Blu-Ray, it's just MY way. If you know another way and it works for you, that's great!

A little about my system:

This is probably the first in a series of posts about my system. I'm planning on doing posts on building each piece seperately. Since this article is on ripping Blu-Rays, I won't be talking about Tuners or recording TV.

My Media Center is next to my HDTV, it's connected to the TV with an HDMI Cable, audio is connected to my Onkyo TX-SR703 with a TOSLink cable. Inside the Media Center:

• Core2 Quad 2.4Ghz processor
• ASUS GeForce 9600 GT EN9600GT/DI/512MD3 Video Card
• 1 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 250GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive for the OS
• 3 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive Striped RAID 0 for RecordedTV
• LG Black BD-Combo SATA Model CH08LS10 LightScribe Support BD drive for Ripping and Playing Blu-Rays

Windows Home Server

• 1 - DANE-ELEC DA-SDM25-80G-N-T-MK 1.8" with 2.5" adapter SSD Migration Kit Solid State is the way to go for a WHS OS drive! Boots in 15 seconds.
• 6 - Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• Rosewill RSV-S8 SATA 3G 3.5" HDD 8-Bay RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Storage Enclosure System 
• 4 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• FYI: Ripping Blu-Ray uses LOTS of drive space!!!

 Laptop - Asus G Series ASUS G Series G51Vx-X3A Intel Core 2 Duo 15.6" NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M NoteBook 

 My Network is wired and wireless. I have a GB switch in the backroom, Cat6 running around the house. I also have a Wireless N Access Point for Laptops and guests. I rip DVDs wirelessly, it works fine. There's no BD drive in the laptop so I don't know if ripping BD disks will work well over the wireless network.

What you'll need:

• SlySoft AnyDVD-HD (Pay)
• SlySoft VirtualCloneDrive (FREE)
• CyberLink PowerDVD 9 Ultra(Download) (Pay)
• MyMovies for Windows Home Server (FREE)
• MyMovies for MediaCenter (FREE)
• MyMovies Collection Management (FREE)

Install the various software on your computers, server and/or laptop as needed. I'm not going into the installation of each software. I'll do seperate posts for those.

Windows Home Server setup:

• MyMovies for Windows Home Server
• Created a share called "Movies"

Media Center Setup:

• MyMovies for Media Center installed as "Client Only"
• AnyDVD-HD
• VirtualClone-Drive
• PowerDVD 9 Ultra

Laptop Setup:

• MyMovies "Collection Management" Only
• AnyDVD-HD

Ripping and Managing the Movies

Ok, so once you have the Software installed as shown above. You can place the BD disk you want to rip into you BD-Drive. (Sometimes PowerDVD will start and try to play the disk, even if you have gone into options and disabled autoplay. I don't know why. It just does. Just close out of it.)

If you have AnyDVD installed correctly, you should see a balloon help saying "AnyDVD is scanning the inserted disk) Once it completes, you can Right Click on the Foxhead icon on the taskbar and select "Rip to image. . ."

Select the Blu-Ray drive you want to rip from and the destination of folder to place the ISO file.

Once you have selected the drive and folders click "Copy DVD". Depending on the speed of the drive, it could take an hour or more for the image ISO to be created.

 Once the image is created, you can click the "Close" button in AnyDVD. You're done with it.

Open MyMovies Collection Management and click on "Title"/"Add Titles"

Choose the search method, you can search by Barcode, Disc ID, Title or Type in all the information yourself. I usually search by Title.

 Select the correct Movie from the search results. (Here you see that there are 2 results that look the same, I think that's because 2 different people added the same movie to the MyMovies service with slightly different data. Barcode, format, edition or something else. You might have to preview the results to decide which one.) Click the "Add Online" button to add the movie to your collection. Choose the folder that you saved the ISO file to.

After the movie has been added to your collection, you need to change the disc location from "Online Folder" to "Online File" and choose the location of the ISO.

 Once you've changed the File location click OK, and "Save Title" at te bottom of the main "Collection" screen.

There are some other settings that you can change that affect the way Media Center will display your added titles. I'll go into all those settings in an upcoming post on MyMovies.

Once you've made any changes you want to make. You can start up Media Center and navigate to the MyMovies menu strip. It can sometimes take a while to load up the MyMovies database. The more titles you have the longer it will take.

Once you've found the title that you want to play. You can either hit the "Play" button on your remote, or you can click on the title to see the Metadata.

When you hit Play, MyMovies will automatically mount the ISO file using VirtualClone-Drive. (As long as it's detected. If you haven't installed it, you'll get an error message.) After the ISO is mounted, PowerDVD will automatically start playing the movie.

When the movie is over (or you hit Stop) you'll be be back at the PowerDVD PlayMovie screen. Hit the Eject button on the left side of the screen. (If you don't eject the ISO, and you keep playing movies, MyMovies will keep mounting the ISO's using new drive letters. E:, F:, G:, H: . . .)

That's all there is to it!

I hope this post helped!

Seeya in the next post.

clubhouse, media center-windows 7, settings

But then I started Ripping my DVD movie collection and that 3TB was being used up pretty fast. So I swapped out those 6 500GB drives for 6 1.5TB drives for a 9TB drive pool! That would surely last me for a long time!

But that was not the end! Oh no, then came 2 new drive space munchers!

1. Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 with it's new ability to automatically "Archive" recorded TV shows from Media Center. Since I'm an avid MC user and DVR damn near everything, every day more and more TV was being moved to the Windows Home Server.
2. Blu-Ray! I started getting all my movies in Blu-Ray High Definition, and since I hate having to handle disks when I can just keep them stored on a server, I began Ripping all my new movies to ISO files. Each movie takes approx 40GB!

Here we go again. That 9TB of drive space is nearing the end. But my 6 Hard Drive bays are full of 1.5TB drives. I could swap them out with 2TB drives, but that would be pretty expensive to only get a 1/3 increase in drive space. So I started looking at External Enclosures.

After looking at 10 or so different enclosures I settled on the Rosewill RSV-S8.

I purchased it on Newegg.com for $309.99:
Rosewill RSV-S8 SATA 3G 3.5" HDD 8-Bay RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Storage Enclosure System

It's an 8 bay SATA-II enclosure. It comes with a 2-port eSATA controller card and a Port Multiplying Backplane. The controller card is a PCIe x1 card, it comes with an optional half height bracket. Included in the box:

1 - RSV-S8 (Sil3726 chipset)
1 - PCIe x1 slot card (Sil3132R5) & Optional half height bracket
2 - eSATA Cable
1 - AC cable
32 - HDD Screws
1 - Setup installation & Driver Disk
1 - Software User Manual. (No hardware setup instructions)

The unit supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD. Since I was planning on using Drive Balancer, RAID didn't matter to me.

I read through the Reviews on Newegg before purchasing the unit. Most of the negative reviews dealt with:

1. Packaging - For me it came packed double boxed, with air bags all around the unit. Rosewill must have heard the complaints and redesigned the packaging.
2. Mac support - Not going in a Mac, so I didn't care.
3. RAID Management software - I wasn't going to install the software. I planned on using the Windows Home Server Drive Balancer, so, RAID wasn't important to me at all.

While unpacking, the first thing I was impressed with the unit. It was smaller than I thought it would be. It's only 13.5" High, 13.5" Deep and 6" Wide, which makes it only slightly larger than a Hewlett-Packard MediaSmart Server!

Here's a pic of an HP MediaSmart Server Next to a RSV-S8 in my Server Cabinet. (For Size comparison ONLY! You cannot add this unit to an HP MediaSmart Server! My actual WHS box is on the shelf above.) You need to be able to install a PCIe card in the server.

I pulled 4 of the trays out and put my old 500GB drives into them. There were some complaints on Newegg that the trays could be damaged by not lining them up into the tracks correctly. That was true, if you don't get the trays lined up just right, they can become wedged into the tracks and bent. I put them back in very carefully to make sure I didn't bend them.

(edit) Once I closed the drive tray lever I had to give the tray a gentle push to seat it all the way in. This seems to be a problem with all SATA drive trays, they don't seat all the way in unless you give them a gentle nudge. Thanks to whoever it was that reminded me of that!

I shut down my Windows Home Server and popped open the case. I installed the controller card with no problems.

Then I grabbed the 2 eSATA cables. They are about 3 feet long so I had no problem running them between the units. The Back of the RSV-S8 has the 2 ports marked "Port 1" & "Port 2" with Port 1 on the top. The back of the controller had no markings, so I decided to open the case back up and see if there were any markings on the card. Good thing I checked, on the card Port 1 is on the bottom.

Once I had the cables run correctly, I buttoned everything back up and turned the RSV-S8 power on. I waited a few seconds then turned the Windows Home Server on. No smoke or bright flashes so, I guess everything was hooked up right.

I popped the provided driver CD-ROM into the Windows Home Server and from my laptop I RDP'd into the Administration Console of the Windows Home Server. I cancelled the autorun since I didn't want to install the RAID Management software.

I went into device manager and found the RAID Controller listed under "Other devices". I clicked on "Update Driver" and browsed the CD to find the Driver/Windows/32bit folder. Installed the correct driver and within seconds the controller was correctly found and the 4 drives I had installed were detected.

I then opened the Windows Home Server Management Console, the 4 "New" drives were listed there as "Non-Storage Hard Drives, Not Added" I clicked on each drive and added them.

Total installation time from unpack to up and running was less than 1 hour!

Another thing to mention is how QUIET the unit is. It has a 300Watt power supply and a 120MM fan. With the 4 drives running I can barely hear it. When I first turned it on, I could hear the drives spin up, but once they were up, it was very quiet.

Since I never installed the RAID Software I can't comment on the ease of use or even whether or not it works. But the RSV-S8 worked exactly the way I hoped it would. It was easy to install, the drivers worked great and my Windows Home Server has more storage space and still some free bays for the future!

If the $309.99 price tag is too much for you, there are a couple of other Rosewill options:

The RSV-S5 5-bay unit for $199.99 :

 And the RSV-S4-X 4-bay unit for $149.99:

clubhouse, media center, windows media center, how-to, Tip

This is great news and has been a very long time coming.

I’m not going to get into all the details as to why it has taken so long, but what I will say is that the guys in the Windows Home Server team have been working very hard for a very long time to make this happen. Well done guys!