A Tuner farm with pc client extenders is without out a doubt the very first things that should be done in my opinion. Alot of other requests on this thread are noble ideas but lets get microsoft to work on a core idea that can be built on. IF they DO decide on a tuner farm and PC client extender (softsled) then everything else that was requested can come on top of that. PC clients are easy to upgrade with codecs etc and hopefully some of the new v2 extenders will support alot more codecs than the x-box. This is turn might get microsoft to upgrade the codecs in xbox

buffering of all media from the whs is a feature that i'm hoping for.

JessZahn:

Some ideas: A tuner farm, where all your tuners are stored and you watch TV on other Media Centers or Extenders throughout your house?

A single location (basically, a network share) for recorded TV, music, photos, etc, and your tuners are on other Media Centers in your home?

Do those two things right (eg, no lame tuner limits), and people on TGB will probably buy out the entire initial pressing of WHS. :) It'd also cure that whining for softsled, I may add, since the shared storage would make any WVMC a de facto extender.

What else?

MCXs should be able to use WHS as their host.

Some sort of "schedule a recording" web page hosted by WHS with appropriate guide information.

Transcoding and streaming on the fly to a Windows Mobile Device, ala Orb.

I don't need the UI on WHS - you guys do understand WHS is supposed to run headless, right?

I would REALLY like to see the "tuner farm" type of implimentation!  But also allow v2 extender AS WELL AS other media center PCs to connect to the content with live TV and guide sharing.

xxxmethos:

Agreed.  That's why the minimal system requirements for like 4 extenders is something like a 3.0 ghz p4 with 1 or 2 gigs of ram.

Someone posted earlier about needing gigabit network for that many extenders...  are you really going to have 4+ people watching 4+ HD content at the same time???????  But agreed, if that is the case, you'll need gigabit network, but extenders like the 360 won't support it.

Well, 2 things: one, the recommended specs for WHS are a P3 class CPU with 512MB of RAM, and it's intended to be expanded via USB storage - so the idea of recording 4 shows at once on one isn't going to happen without a new spec.  Second, the extenders don't need gigabit, only the server would - it's only the outbound from the transmit side that has to be high speed, the receive end is still getting the same amount of data.

Given that, my suggestion stands - either you need a much beefier box on the WHS, or you need to move the data over from a machine (or machines) that can handle the load.

JessZahn:

Your turn: I want to hear how you want Media Center to integrate with Windows Home Server.

Some ideas: A tuner farm, where all your tuners are stored and you watch TV on other Media Centers or Extenders throughout your house?

A single location (basically, a network share) for recorded TV, music, photos, etc, and your tuners are on other Media Centers in your home?

Other ideas?

If it can't stream DVDs and HD DVD/Bluegray to the extenders including XBox 360 then I don't see a benifet of havng a server of any sorts for my media.  We watch very little TV and have recently dropped our DirectTV for only broadcast TV (It's free as higher quality picture, and has 85% of the shows we was watching).

illrigger:

Well, 2 things: one, the recommended specs for WHS are a P3 class CPU with 512MB of RAM, and it's intended to be expanded via USB storage - so the idea of recording 4 shows at once on one isn't going to happen without a new spec.  Second, the extenders don't need gigabit, only the server would - it's only the outbound from the transmit side that has to be high speed, the receive end is still getting the same amount of data.

Given that, my suggestion stands - either you need a much beefier box on the WHS, or you need to move the data over from a machine (or machines) that can handle the load.

This is not correct.  The published Recommended Specs for WHS RTM are a Pentium 4, AMD x64, or newer processor with 512MB of RAM.

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Chris Lanier
The Green Button Forum Moderator

Requirement	Minimum Requirement	Recommended
CPU	1 GHz Pentium 3 (or equivalent) or higher	Pentium 4, AMD x64, or newer processor
RAM	512 MB or more	Same as the minimum
Hard Drive	80 GB (or more) internal (ATA, SATA, or SCSI) hard drive as the primary drive and any number of additional hard drives of any capacity Note The largest hard drive should be configured as the primary (system) hard drive.	At least two internal hard drives with a 300 GB or greater primary (system) hard drive.
Network Interface Card	100 Mbps (or faster) Ethernet network interface card from the Windows Server Catalog (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/catalog/server)	Same as the minimum

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Richard Miller Media Center MVP 2006

I had to look at the date to make sure it wasn't april 1st


WHS = headless Tuner farm, and storage of ALL media (with ALL media streamable to any extender, or MCE/VMC box)


that's it, that's all that has to be included to make me happily forl over the cash for a WHS licence

(I honestly don't even care about WHS's backup and raid ability even tho I'll make use of them)

My bad - I was remembering the beta 1 specs.  Still, there's a HUGE difference between a P4 2.0GHz like I'm running my WHS on at home (or the C7 1.2 GHz procs that will be in retail ITX based WHS systems) and the specs needed to run a 4-tuner MCE solution.  You're talking about the difference between buying a machine you have lying around at home a new hard drive for $100, and buying an entirely new mid-range box for $1000.

The fact that WHS storage is expected to be expanded via USB will be a bottleneck as well - there's simply no way a 5400RPM external drive on a USB 2.0 bus will be able to capture and/or stream multiple ATSC files reliably.  I'd be surprised if it could do it on a 7200RPM drive as well - USB2 just wasn't built to do AV work, it's a burst transfer prototcol.  You'd need to expand via firewire or eSATA to make this work.

* Allow all PC’s to extend from the WHS/MCE solution (aka softsled). Allow me to extend from the WHS/MCE machine and play the radio/tv/music in the background on anyone of the 5 PC’s in my home.

* Get rid of tuner limits, switch to a tuner farm model. It’s not uncommon for 3 TV’s to be running and sometimes 4 in my household. If I add 6 tuners and I have the horsepower to use them all let me use them without resorting to registry hacks and other backdoor shenanigans.

* Allow streaming of all media content. This includes DVDs, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, MP4, OGG, I already bought/locked into the Microsoft model, so why am I being screwed by not being allowed to watch what I want where I want.

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http://blog.manghera.com

Ideally I'd like this.

Specifically, I would like to see more of a peer based architecture for media center with whs acting as a broker.  Unless multiple EPG could be built into the platform (single STB with mulitple analog cable tuners).  I like the functionality/flexibility that a PC provides at each point of consumption, the current hub/extender model is too limited.

In the short term, I'd love it if WHS could detect if a pc is a MC and expose the EPG through the website for remote recording. 

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DVRMSToolbox, Recording Broker, LcdWriter, and more software
babgvant.com

Personally, I've always thought that the way MythTV does things is pretty elegant. It basically consists of a server process (source) that does the tuning and recording, and a client process (sink) that does the viewing. The cool thing is, it's network-aware. So that would allow pretty much all of the scenarios people have mentioned:

1. Single PC - Server and client run on the same machine (client loops back to the server running locally)

2. Central server + extenders - Server process runs on server, extenders run only client

3. Multiple PCs - Each PC can run both the server and the client process; you can mix and match PCs with tuners (which would run the server and client processes) and those without (which would only run the client)

Or maybe WHS could be the "broker" that would aggregate all of the running servers out there and present them to the clients. If the WHS box also happens to have tuners built in, it can run the server process and add its own media resources to the pool. Networks without WHS would just have to choose which "server" they'd want to connect to on the client (if there are multiple ones). That would allow people to just have a MCE box for those that don't necessarily want WHS.

Just throwing ideas out there. I don't know if MCE already does some of this.

babgVant:

Ideally I'd like this.

Specifically, I would like to see more of a peer based architecture for media center with whs acting as a broker.  Unless multiple EPG could be built into the platform (single STB with mulitple analog cable tuners).  I like the functionality/flexibility that a PC provides at each point of consumption, the current hub/extender model is too limited.

In the short term, I'd love it if WHS could detect if a pc is a MC and expose the EPG through the website for remote recording. 

I was waiting for you to show up Andy, and see if you could get your Recording Broker to work with WHS.

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Richard Miller Media Center MVP 2006

Look no further then SageTV:). It has network encoding , traditional client/server, placeshifting and has versions for Linux, Mac and Apple. I beleive it has support for WHS as well.

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MissingRemote.com