Media Server

Right now I've got a hard drive in my desktop machine with a dozen or so TV Series, along with a bunch of music videos and music. I'm running TVersity and streaming them through my 360 to the TV in the living room. I'm looking for a solution where I don't need to have the PC running, and I'd still be able to access all the shows. Anyone have any ideas?

I'm thinking about one of these?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822155009

Throw two 1TB drives in there.

Why not just get a regular external hard drive and plug it into the xbox 360?

Where would I plug it in to?

Is the USB port on the back usable? I know a wireless adapter can plug in there but I've tried plugging a controller in there before and it wouldn't connect.

I want something that can be on all the time, and not use a lot of power. Something that doesn't need to be plugged in when needed. Right now if anyone wants to watch anything they have to ask me to turn my computer on and I have to run TVersity and start sharing...

Any external harddrive will work in any of the 360 usb ports (the 2 in the front or the 1 in the back)

I have a 320gig portable plugged into mine most of the time which is what I usually watch my TV shows from.


EDIT: The hard drive must be formated fat 32 though, not NTFS

Hmm, thanks for the info. I searched the net and didn't find anything about being able to plug an external drive in there. That'll be a lot cheaper than the above D-Link.

How's playback using USB? I've got some ripped Bluray movies I'd like to watch on there.

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=36609&vpn=POP...0&manufacture=Popcorn%20Hour

or

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=34777&vpn=WDA...%20Digital%20WD&promoid=1025

Playback is awesome. Quality is great for HD avi files. Not sure what file type a blu-ray rip is, might want to make sure the 360 will be able to play it.

I've been able to play it while streaming it using TVersity. Thanks for the tip. I think I'll get one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182144

YEa there is a certain type of external tho for the xbox... ide/sata or soemthing... ran across this problem a while back actually... I forget which way it was... and the files have to be edited a certain way as well ;(

I couldn't play the HD movies I download so I said F it... and just use the laptop to stream to the TV now...

Golfer wrote:

EDIT: The hard drive must be formated fat 32 though, not NTFS

Thats the issue right there!

Forgot ;/ It sucks when you go one way and have to start over trust me ;(

(Learned the Hard Way)

I'll definitely remember that when I get my drives.

Getting a 1080p version of Dark Knight as we speak. Pretty sure Kris is going to kill me.

I've never ripped a Blu-Ray DVD, but you may run in to problems with large files on FAT32.

Wikipedia wrote:

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte

Gah, are you serious? Not all my files are over 4 GB, but it would be nice to have some HD movies on there...

I guess I can just stream those from my computer, not have them on demand.

Okay, I just got an external case and drive. I tried to format it to Fat32 but the only options I get are NTFS and exFAT. I've tried XP, Vista, and 7 and none of them gave me the option to format to Fat32. Any advice?

you had to get a ide drive not a sata....

Do I have to use IDE? No one mentioned it had to be IDE in the posts above.

Just bought a 1TB Green Drive.

ok researched a bit more...

You can actually use a sata...

you have to do it manually tho and some fat32 are a punk to go over 40GBs...
So no you cannot right click and format... you have to cmd prompt it ;/

1TB is going to be a PUNK or a BESSCH to do in FAT32...

Ok so you need swissknife...



Do it through your command prompt;
/FS:FAT32 A:

A: = your drive letter...

Thats from memory... I do believe it is correct

SwissKnife will make it easier... satas are a beesh because they are so much larger ;/

I actually found that solution online, but it seemed like it would take forever. Took 20 minutes to advance 1 percent. That's a lotta GBs...

Thanks, I guess I'll set it up before bed and hope for the best in the morning.

EDIT

SwiffKnife doesn't seem to work in Windows 7. Oh well, command prompt it is.

Windows 7 is going to give you a little hicups here and there for fat32... just an fyi

Wish I saw this earlier.. would have highly recommended just doing a NAS. If you do a NAS, you can keep it NTFS, and any time you want to add content to it, you simply dump it over the network. With this, you have to unplug it from the xbox and take it to your PC to dump files, and then go back to the xbox with it. You can't just get any NAS though, as typical NAS' don't have the file feature you'd need for video streaming. They are merely meant for storage. HP makes a media server you can put 1tb drives in (I think up to 4 drives), and it has a built in OS that will allow you to configure media sharing. As for you using TVersity, you don't need to use that program and have it open all of the time. If you go into windows media player and go into the file sharing settings, there is an option to share media. It's actually an extension off of the OS, so once you configure that sharing, it shares the media with xbox 360 and/or PS3, even if you don't have wmp running. It's just a service that's always running in the background of the PC whenever you turn it on. You would of course need to have the PC on though. You could always do it with an ancient PC.. get an old P200 or something. Don't need a fast PC, and the slow PC's usually have smaller power supplies.. you can probably get one for cheap or free somewhere. Dump a few drives in there, plug it into the network card, leave it on, and don't worry about having a monitor, kb, or mouse hooked up to it. It'd just be a server to store your extra data on/data being shared for tv purposes. Low power draw, and can be even lower if you setup a power save mode where it spins down the HDD etc... after a certain amount of inactivity.

I started using TVersity when I was using Vista and media sharing with the 360 was a pain in the ass. Since upgrading to Windows 7, for some reason I've had no issues what so ever sharing files. I don't even use TVersity anymore.

As for the NAS, they can be quite expensive can't they? I was looking for a external HD case that I could plug right into my router, although now that I think about it that might not work without some kind of software.

I think I'm just going to connect the external drive to my laptop and leave that on if I want to watch something. Eventually I plan on building a HTPC with two 1TB drives in there that I'll stick under my TV. I don't really think I need a media server, just another power supply to feed power to ya know? I want something to record TV.

[quote="Tim"]As for the NAS, they can be quite expensive can't they? I was looking for a external HD case that I could plug right into my router, although now that I think about it that might not work without some kind of software.[/qoute]

You just described a NAS. An external case you can put hard drives into and plug directly into the router. NAS= Network Attached Storage.

Tim wrote:

Eventually I plan on building a HTPC with two 1TB drives in there that I'll stick under my TV. I don't really think I need a media server, just another power supply to feed power to ya know? I want something to record TV.

Only problem I see with this is you need to get a decent processor and video card if you want to be able to stream HD 1080P content. That kind of content takes a lot of processor power. I have issues playing 1080P content without it being choppy on my Athlon 64 3000+ with a geforce 6600GT. It's by no means a high end PC, but video's run choppy at best in 1080P, and often times will just play audio with an occasional frame update once every 10 seconds or so... Unless you want to invest a little into the HTPC, not including storage space, you may want to consider building your own NAS and using your Xbox360's powerful proccessor/GPU to play your 1080P content. If you've been successful streaming 1080P to it already, then setup an old PC as I suggested above.. You can get a PCI SATA controller card for it for under $30. Drop in 4 1TB SATA drives, and you have yourself a 4TB Server that can stream any content you need to your 360. Don't need to run additional video cables, and don't need to have the PC anywhere near the TV. Just have it on the network with no mouse, kb, and monitor, and whenever you want to, just start streaming content from it from your 360. When you burn/download something new, dump it across the network onto the inexpensive PC and gain access to it almost instantly on your 360.

The PC doesn't need to be fast as it's not processing video, or decoding video. It's simply streaming it over the network, where your xbox360 is then decoding the video, and acting as the power house. If you want to get even more nifty, you can setup that same system, but setup your drives in a RAID so that you have 3TB of data, and a redundant backup. If a drive fails, drop in a new one and you've lost nothing =) If you do I believe a RAID 6, and one of the drives die, you can even continue accessing the existing drives until you replace the dead one (although I wouldn't recommend waiting too long to install the replacement drive, but at least it gives you time to order a replacement without being down for the week of shipping).

I bet you could get a cheap PC in your local pennysaver for under $100 that would be more than efficient to fit your needs. Fresh install of XP, run WMP and tell it to activate media sharing on a movie folder and music folder, and then share those folders on the network, and dump all of your movies and music to those folders. Accessible at all times. Make sure you go into the bios and setup the system to ignore all errors (IE no keyboard error etc..), so if you ever have to reboot, you simply hit the reset button. No keyboard/mouse needed. If you feel so inclined, activate and configure remote desktop on the old computer too, so if you need to connect to it to make a change in the configurations, you can do so without dragging a keyboard, mouse, and monitor over to it.

Any decent motherboard these days will stream 1080p with no problems. As long as it as a Nvidia 8000 series NB or a AMD 790 NB. Lots even have HDMI out which would work perfect. You don't even need a dedicated video card.

I still need a computer with a dual tuner tho.

I have a AMD Tbird 2.6ghz 3gb memory and a 128mb card...

runs 1080p fine ;)

Where are you guys getting these 1080P videos? I want to have fun with my PS3 too!

Torrents man. I also use a private forum with RS links quite a bit.

When I say 1080p, I just mean high def, whether it be 720 or 1080.

I don't download many 1080p "rips" because they're 14+ gbs and I don't have the time.

Yeah, they seem wayyy too big to download. Maybe i"m just impatient or charter sucks, but I guess I'll stick with ripping my own DVDs.

No, I've got Charter too. They suck.

Some of those posts were long. Did you get it formated in fat32?

It is EXTREMELY easy to format a drive in fat32. Of any size.

Google: fat32format

Download the 100kb exe file. Then you just run the file by opening a dos cmd window, navigating to the folder, and doing a fat32format.exe D: (or whatever drive letter you want to format in fat32)

Takes about 10 seconds to complete.

Sorry it took so long to get in here. Remember that fat32 has a max file size of 4gb, may be an issue if you are looking to get 1080p sources. I would recommend doing 2 partitions in that case, 1 for HD sources over 4gb, and 1 for the rest.

O yeah, and just to clarify.

IDE and SATA have nothing to do with what format they can be formatted in. It only has to do with the connector and speed of transfer. You can format old 800mb HD's in NTFS if you so choose.

Works perfectly, thanks for the link Golf. Now is the fun part, transferring all the files over and renaming them.

Golfer wrote:

O yeah, and just to clarify. IDE and SATA have nothing to do with what format they can be formatted in. It only has to do with the connector and speed of transfer. You can format old 800mb HD's in NTFS if you so choose.

+1 - SATA IDE eIDE SCSI, doesn't matter. Just pins and speed as Golfer said

I just knew that formatting some of the IDEs vrs Satas take FOREVER ....

FAT32 is just goofy ;/ MS was kinda backwards by doing that to the 360

thesull wrote:

MS was kinda backwards by doing that to the 360

That's M$ new trend. Perhaps their trying to bring retro back?