Media player in the home network
Watching movies on a computer does not have the convenience, not all TVs can display video content from external media or over the network, and you want to sit comfortably on the sofa in front of the TV and watch a freshly downloaded movie in good quality. Even if the TV supports external media, the inconvenience arises - you first need to rewrite the film on it, and only then watch it - the unnecessary manipulations with time are straining. In addition, very often the format of the downloaded movie can not be played by the TV and you have to download something else or convert.
Exit - media player.
Some time ago, the term HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer) blew up the home user’s world — shells appeared that provide convenient access and navigation to media content using a remote control, Barebone systems appeared in the form of more or less beautiful cases for decent money, even standing next to A MiniTower TV, MidiTower, or even BigTower was already considered a home HTPC.
Together with the HTPC, the buzz of coolers and the sound of heads of hard drives came to our home media world. At night, the download of media content was strained with the same buzz and thump. So the obvious decision came - to carry apart the playback device and the storage device. In addition, if the playback device should be turned on while watching a movie, the storage device should always work and upload media content on demand.
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The playback device is the media player . Requirements are made to it:
With a media player, everything seems to be clear - it could be Iconbit XDS1003D , Iconbit XDS73D , Iconbit XDS8003D , Dune HD Max , Dune HD TV-301 and others like them. Choosing a media player is a difficult task and depends on many factors and requirements that a user places on this device - the choice is discussed in many forums.
Some of these devices have a built-in hard disk, some do not, some have the ability to install, for those who have it, you can turn it off (I’m not sure about Dune players) for silent operation.
The storage device can be a NAS. He must:
The NAS is a bit more complicated - here the choice is wider - starting from a regular computer in the storage room (so that it doesn’t disturb the noise at night) and ending with single-board options on the Intel Atom . If in the first case, it is very difficult to achieve positive options for power consumption, then in the case of single-board solutions on the Intel Atom there is an opportunity to meet all the requirements. There are no special requirements for processor power due to the lack of transcoding - the proposed media players support almost all possible formats anyway. I will not dwell on the choice of the operating system - it can be either freeNAS, or Windows or Linux. The only important thing is to be able to install a Torrent-client with the possibility of remote control.
Why did I include support for a gigabit network in the requirements of both devices? It would seem that even Full HD 3D content has a bitrate of less than 100 Mbit / s (for example, Avatar 3D in peaks has a maximum bit rate of 48 Mbit / s), why gigabit? Everything is very simple. All network devices, such as network cards, switches, hubs with a maximum speed of 100 Mbps, have a frame size for transmitting a network packet ( MTU - Maximum Transmission Unit ) of only 1,500 bytes. What does it mean? The fact is that after the packet is sent, the checksum is sent, which you first need to calculate on the transmitting device, and then to verify it on the receiving device. If a powerful computer copes with this without problems, then, unfortunately, the processor of the media player is already tough - consider it yourself - at a speed of 50 Mbps it will have to calculate the checksum 3333 times per second and compare it with the transferred one. More details about this analysis and comparison of the behavior of the Iconbit XDS1003D media player in different local networks can be found here .
In Gigabit network devices, the so-called Jumbo frames , which support a packet size of 9000 bytes, have become almost standard, which reduces the load on processors from both sides by 6 times . Therefore, when purchasing network devices, pay special attention to the support of these packages and their size.
It remains to deal with the disk subsystem. Of course, it's best if it is a RAID-0. This type maximizes volume, recording speed and reading speed (the loss of downloaded movies is not critical). As practice has shown, if you watch a Full HD movie (not necessarily a Blu-Ray disk, even less - about 25-30 gigabytes) from a single hard disk (not in an array), then if you even happen at that time not downloading, but just distributing a couple of torrent s from the NAS, you will feel the brakes when watching the video. Why is this happening?
Despite the fact that the linear speed of reading from the disk - sequential read / write (about 100 MBytes / s) is enough to transfer the video stream, in the case of simultaneous reading and reading / writing from / to various sectors - random read / write, the speed is essentially decreases - down to the units of MBytes / s, which is not enough to transfer the media stream to the network. If you can install a solid-state drive, then you will not have this problem.
Thus, buying a media player and NAS, take care also of a high-quality local network.
Exit - media player.
Some time ago, the term HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer) blew up the home user’s world — shells appeared that provide convenient access and navigation to media content using a remote control, Barebone systems appeared in the form of more or less beautiful cases for decent money, even standing next to A MiniTower TV, MidiTower, or even BigTower was already considered a home HTPC.
Together with the HTPC, the buzz of coolers and the sound of heads of hard drives came to our home media world. At night, the download of media content was strained with the same buzz and thump. So the obvious decision came - to carry apart the playback device and the storage device. In addition, if the playback device should be turned on while watching a movie, the storage device should always work and upload media content on demand.
')
The playback device is the media player . Requirements are made to it:
- Omnivorous formats
- Noiseless operation
- Gigabit network support
With a media player, everything seems to be clear - it could be Iconbit XDS1003D , Iconbit XDS73D , Iconbit XDS8003D , Dune HD Max , Dune HD TV-301 and others like them. Choosing a media player is a difficult task and depends on many factors and requirements that a user places on this device - the choice is discussed in many forums.
Some of these devices have a built-in hard disk, some do not, some have the ability to install, for those who have it, you can turn it off (I’m not sure about Dune players) for silent operation.
The storage device can be a NAS. He must:
- Consume little electricity
- Have a gigabit network interface
- High-speed disk subsystem
The NAS is a bit more complicated - here the choice is wider - starting from a regular computer in the storage room (so that it doesn’t disturb the noise at night) and ending with single-board options on the Intel Atom . If in the first case, it is very difficult to achieve positive options for power consumption, then in the case of single-board solutions on the Intel Atom there is an opportunity to meet all the requirements. There are no special requirements for processor power due to the lack of transcoding - the proposed media players support almost all possible formats anyway. I will not dwell on the choice of the operating system - it can be either freeNAS, or Windows or Linux. The only important thing is to be able to install a Torrent-client with the possibility of remote control.
Why did I include support for a gigabit network in the requirements of both devices? It would seem that even Full HD 3D content has a bitrate of less than 100 Mbit / s (for example, Avatar 3D in peaks has a maximum bit rate of 48 Mbit / s), why gigabit? Everything is very simple. All network devices, such as network cards, switches, hubs with a maximum speed of 100 Mbps, have a frame size for transmitting a network packet ( MTU - Maximum Transmission Unit ) of only 1,500 bytes. What does it mean? The fact is that after the packet is sent, the checksum is sent, which you first need to calculate on the transmitting device, and then to verify it on the receiving device. If a powerful computer copes with this without problems, then, unfortunately, the processor of the media player is already tough - consider it yourself - at a speed of 50 Mbps it will have to calculate the checksum 3333 times per second and compare it with the transferred one. More details about this analysis and comparison of the behavior of the Iconbit XDS1003D media player in different local networks can be found here .
In Gigabit network devices, the so-called Jumbo frames , which support a packet size of 9000 bytes, have become almost standard, which reduces the load on processors from both sides by 6 times . Therefore, when purchasing network devices, pay special attention to the support of these packages and their size.
It remains to deal with the disk subsystem. Of course, it's best if it is a RAID-0. This type maximizes volume, recording speed and reading speed (the loss of downloaded movies is not critical). As practice has shown, if you watch a Full HD movie (not necessarily a Blu-Ray disk, even less - about 25-30 gigabytes) from a single hard disk (not in an array), then if you even happen at that time not downloading, but just distributing a couple of torrent s from the NAS, you will feel the brakes when watching the video. Why is this happening?
Despite the fact that the linear speed of reading from the disk - sequential read / write (about 100 MBytes / s) is enough to transfer the video stream, in the case of simultaneous reading and reading / writing from / to various sectors - random read / write, the speed is essentially decreases - down to the units of MBytes / s, which is not enough to transfer the media stream to the network. If you can install a solid-state drive, then you will not have this problem.
Thus, buying a media player and NAS, take care also of a high-quality local network.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/145828/
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