theHTPC.net

There is a thread at the unRAID forums here that discusses increasing the read-ahead buffer in unRAID from the default 256KB to 2MB can drastically increase performance. I hadn’t tried it since I’m very new to unRAID and not very proficient in Linux, so I was unable to comment…until now.

A few minutes ago I felt adventurous and decided to do it. Effects are immediate, so there was no rebooting involved and it appears as there is also no risk involved…it either helps or it doesn’t.

Long story short, I test it at the default with a 2.1GB file and found I was transferring at 24.8MB/s. Not terrible for a light media server, but not that great either. I then, following the instructions from the thread, put in the following for each of my drives:

For disk1:

root@mediasvr:~# blockdev --setra 2048 /dev/md1

For disk2:

root@mediasvr:~# blockdev --setra 2048 /dev/md2

After testing again, I found that I had gone up to 61.4MB/s. Astoundingly, almost a 250% increase in performance.

Needless to say, I used an entry for the Go script to execute this modification at each boot. Please visit that thread for any discussion. Otherwise, your comments here are always welcome.

Gamacky (from the Mymovies forum) has created a hack for MyMovies 2.43PR4 that allows for 6 thumbnails per row instead of the typical 4 on a 16:9 display. You can follow the progress in this thread.

This is a great little hack. For those of us who have hundreds (I have over a thousand) movies in their database, it can take 30 minutes to scroll through them all when looking for something to watch. This puts more on the screen at once and should really help.

If you do this hack, make sure you backup all the .htm files that it replaces first. I’ve tried it on one of mine and it works, but it is a hack, afterall…

Update

Apparently, the thread has been yanked. I’m going to assume the developer for MyMovies pulled the thread. I don’t blame him for not wanting hacks posted on his own forum…they can lead to dirty support issues. If there is continued interest, I can provide the files necessary. Just register with a valid email and leave a comment requesting it.

Thought I’d share this since I’ve spent the better part of the evening trying to figure this out. Last night MyMovies started becoming unresponsive and browsing the movies share in Video Library was next to impossible. I have no idea what brought this on as this system has proven to be very reliable over the past few months of nearly 24/7 operation. The server wasn’t rebuilt until this morning, so it counted that out. The only real change has been the addition of the Intel Pro1000 NIC that was added. I’m not convinced by that theory, however.

The system could access all other shares (from other systems) with no problem at all, including the new unRAID server. Despite this, I figured I would do a complete reinstall. A week ago I had replaced the motherboard in this system without doing a reinstall afterwards. They were so comparable, I didn’t see the point (P5L-MX to a P5B-MX). Irregardless, they had the same Attansic/Atheros L1 PCIe adapter onboard.

Long story short, the reinstall did not help matters. I ended up disabling a pesky little Vista network “feature” called Receive Window Auto-tuning to get things working again. I’m not going to get into what this is because that’s not the point (if you really want to know, here’s a good article on it). The point is to make it go away.

First, I disable UAC on my HTPCs. If you haven’t, do it. If you don’t know how or don’t want to, then use RunAs to open a command prompt with an administrator account. If you don’t know how to do that, then you need to spend some time on Google and come back :)

At the command prompt, you want to type in this:

c:\>netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

Be sure to reboot afterwards for it to take effect (I never saw mention that a reboot was required, but things did not get better or me until I did).

If you want to turn it back on, just redo the command but change the disabled to normal. There is also a restricted level that may work well without outright disabling it, but I wasn’t interested in that since this is a dedicated HTPC.

Hope this helps! Leave any comments or suggestions you may have.

OK, I’ve seen this on countless forums, blogs, and other home theater/network sites and I wanted to get this out to all of you who have not yet experienced the inconvenience of disabled null sessions on Windows 2003 Server when trying to connect to a share with your HTPC.

For those that don’t know what I mean by “null session”, I mean connecting to a share when your system has a blank password. 2003 Server does not like this and screams, “Halt! Who goes there?” You must then enter a username/password that it recognizes. By design, this is desirable. 2003 Server was not created to give the home theater crowd warm fuzzies. It was created with security in mind. So how do we connect to our shares with a blank password? I’m going to tell you.

The most common information available is to start hacking away at the Group Policy Management entries under Network Access, some things about SMB signing, selling your unborn son, and sacrificing a chicken at the next equinox. I don’t know what an equinox is and chickens scare me, so I decided to come up with an answer that works. Windows system administration is what I do, so you can risk taking my advice or not. Either way, I’m enjoying password-free file sharing on Win2K3 Server.

We are going to need to change a (yes, one) Group Policy setting, so go to Start -> Run -> and type gpedit.msc and hit Enter. Expand Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options -> Accounts:Limit local account use of blank passwords to console logon only. Set this from the default Enabled to Disabled. Exit and reboot the system. That’s really all there is to it. You do have to have an account created on the server for any users attempting to access shares, however. So, make sure you do that. Also, make sure your shares are set up correctly. If this does not work for you, then something else is wrong in your setup (whether it be a user account or share permission/security issue).

Hope this helps. Please leave any comments or suggestions you may have!

Last night I put on The Condemned as I had not seen it and was in the mood for some action. Once it started, I noticed that there was something odd about the way it was displayed on the screen. I knew it was a 16:9 movie and I have a 37″ Hannspree XV37 widescreen LCD in my bedroom, but it was displayed more like a 4:3 movie with no black bars. Something was wrong.

I have this movie in Blu-Ray, so I checked it out. Sure enough, it’s in 1.78:1 widescreen. I then used MediaInfo to check the details of the mp4 I had encoded. I reduce the resolution to an acceptable one for most all my HD movies. It saves on space and still provides an excellent picture. For this one, I used a resolution of 800×448. However, for some odd reason, it had a PAR (picture aspect ratio) of 1.5:1. Crap.

Well, I’m pretty picky about things like this and I refused to watch the movie. But I’m also too stubborn to submit myself to ripping and encoding this thing all over again. What ever will I do?

After some Internet scrounging, I found out that MP4Box can alter the PAR. I already had YAMB installed, so I just took the MP4Box executable out of there and dropped it in my C:\Windows directory. I coped The Condemned to a local directory from my server and renamed it to take out the space, then ended up using this command:

C:\>mp4box -par 1=1:1 x:\archange\condemned.mp4

After it completed the ISO writing, I opened it up in MediaInfo and voila! 800×448 (16/9) love! I renamed it, copied it back over to my server, and went back to bed to watch Band of Brothers instead.

So, if by mistake, you or your encoding software incorrectly sets your PAR to something other than the intended one for your mp4 files, this is a good way to change it. Keep in mind that it may not always be 1=1:1, however. I ended up having to change a couple of others using 1=8:9 (which is 4:3 fullscreen) and 1=32:27 (which is 16:9 widescreen). These were encoded in true DVD resolutions of 720×480, but were showing a 1:1, which made them display at 1.5:1. For fullscreen material, this looks very close. It’s not acceptable for widescreen, however.

I could get into PAR, SAR (sample aspect ratio), and/or DAR (display aspect ratio), but I’m afraid I’d just confuse my point here. I’d probably confuse myself as it can be harder to preach than practice.

Hope this helps someone out. Let me know what you think (comment/register). Happy encoding!