Compact Flash

Media Centre on Compact Flash
by Graeme Clark

Welcome to another Kustom PCs article – following on from our previous ‘Build a HTPC’ article which demonstrated how to upgrade an old PC into a useful Media Centre, this time we’re showing how to produce a diskless media centre system.

Removing the hard disk from a media centre can have a few purposes – firstly, it removes a device from the PC that generates noise, heat and uses power. Secondly, if you already have a PC / Server or network-attached-storage device holding your media (such as theICYBox NAS2000), it makes sense for this to be shared rather than trying to maintain two separate collections. Certainly, the latter can become an important point if you wish to use multiple systems in the house – having a media centre for the bedroom, living room and one for the kids would mean that video and music content could be shared easily from a central location.



This is the computer that runs the adverts and media system in our shop front – it’s a mini-ITX Commell LV675 motherboard / Celeron M 1.5Ghz 370 Processor in a Silverstone LC09 case. I removed the Samsung hard disk and fitted aCompact Flash to IDE adapter (note that this model requires a laptop style 44-pin IDE connection so make sure to use a suitable cable) with4Gb AData 266x Compact Flash memory card. It would have been great to use one of the newSATA adapters, but unfortunately there’s no SATA ports on this older motherboard – but we’ll try those out in another PC later on.



First up, we can see that the drive has been successfully detected in the BIOS. Make sure that your boot priority allows the CD drive to boot first before attempting operating system installation.



Insert your Windows XP MCE CD and boot from it to start the operating system installation. The Compact Flash interface will not need any additional storage drivers to be installed and should be picked up as normal. The only circumstance this would be required would be when using a SATA > CF Adapter on a motherboard with an earlier SATA controller, in which case drivers would need to be provided on floppy disk to see the controller. Select the drive to install to and the Windows installation will continue as normal. We’re using a 4Gb card here – MCE can just get by on a 2Gb installation but 4Gb is a safer bet. For Vista you would likely need an 8Gb card although we’re not working with Vista at this stage since network based recording (covered below) has not been figured out at the time of writing !



With the installation completed, the first thing we want to do is cut down on the amount of writes Windows will make to the card, so as to extend the life of the card. Go to the System Control Panel, Advanced Tab, Performance Options and click ‘Virtual Memory’. Set the page file to disabled so that the operating system does not write information back and forth from a page file. Your PC should be equipped with 1Gb RAM for running MCE this way, potentially 512Mb could become unstable.



After installing video, sound and LAN drivers along with an MPEG2 decoder, we naturally find that space for TV recordings on the card is somewhat limited.



The plan here though is to store all information on another PC – either a desktop system already in use, a central server or a network attached storage device. Firstly, set up some shares. This may be your existing ‘My Music’ and ‘My Videos’ folders on your server or you may create new folders for this purpose – right click on the folders, choose Properties and in the Sharing tab choose ‘Share This Folder’ and then enter the ‘Permissions’ section to ensure that full access is allowed to the other users.



Sharing music and video content is fairly simple – just open Windows Media Player, and choose Options from the Tools Menu. In the ‘Rip Music’ tab browse through ‘My Network Places’ to locate your networked Music folder or type the network path in the location box.



Repeat this in the ‘Monitor Folders’ section of the Library tab, for the music and videos folders on your network so that Media Centre will immediately locate any media added to these folders.



All being well, if you launch Media Centre you’ll now see the media files located in your share folders are present, and adding any files to these folders on your server will be updated on the Media Centre library within seconds. If you specify multiple monitoring folders, they’ll all be shown together.



Recording TV via the network proves a little more complex, but a great utility called MCE Customizer 2005 makes this a simple operation. Visit the link above, register your details and then download the beta MCE Customizer software. Installing this will add a new option in the main Media Centre menu, where all sorts of previously hidden options can be adjusted.



Click the ‘Recording’ Tab and then ‘Choose Temp & Store Path for Recordings’ – here you can specify the network share paths so that recordings are recorded to the network share and ‘My TV’ displays these available to watch later.



Another useful utility to add to the setup is ‘DVRMSToolbox’ - this can be set to schedule conversion of DVR-MS files (the format MCE uses for recording) to MPEG and / or snip out adverts to save disk space. This can take place overnight so as not to slow the system down during normal use , and could be either setup on the server system or on a Media Centre PC accessing the files over the network, although the former will be noticeably quicker since network bandwidth could potentially be a limiting factor in speed.



In terms of performance, all media playback and recording performed fine over the network. We ran some performance tests on the system - previously the system would boot to the MCE menu from power-on in 56 seconds with the hard disk. Using the 266x flash card turned out to be slower, with a boot time of 2 minutes and 7 seconds. This was a surprise since the speed of the card suggested performance should be near that of a hard disk. So we tried it with a SATA adapter in another PC and then bootup of the same operating system install was reduced to 1 minute and 10 seconds.

So there we go - stay tuned for our next article where we delve into how to transform the MCE terminal into a home automation hub ! As always, if you have any questions regarding this article feel free to email us !

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