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Pick the Right Kodi Box (UPDATED FEB 2015)
(2015-02-25, 19:02)poofyhairguy Wrote: Yes, that way you can use Quicksync for some of the encoding.

Thanks.

Would you agree that you would need both Ubuntu and Openelec to run on the same box since Handbrake does not run under Openelec?

Thanks.
No you wouldn't need openelec on your server. Can't imagine why you think that. In this case the server would rip and encode your BluRays, and serve them over SMB or NFS to your openelec clients.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
(2015-02-25, 20:47)nickr Wrote: No you wouldn't need openelec on your server. Can't imagine why you think that. In this case the server would rip and encode your BluRays, and serve them over SMB or NFS to your openelec clients.

I am trying to figure out how this server is going to work.

Handbrake supports Windows, Mac & Ubuntu. The best platform to run Kodi I have been told is on the Chromebox with openelec.

Never having dealt with a server before I am not sure what is involved.

Thanks.
[quote='poofyhairguy' pid='724491' dateline='1297756702']


Never buy more than one of the same HD from a vendor at one time!!! If you do you might be buying part of the same batch and if its a faulty batch no RAID in the world can help you. Mix and match drives vendors when building an array to pull from many separate batches.


This comment is simply not true. Telling people they should around to different stores (vendors) and buy each new hard drive is like telling people who own a Dell M3220 or a EqualLogic SAN they should go to Dell to buy the first drive, then to HP for the second, and IBM for the 3rd. lol

All hard drives come with a warranty, it's best practice to buy one or two spare hard drives just in case your RAID fails this way you can do a hot swap and let the RAID rebuild itself. And if the data is so important to people they should be making backups of their data because drives to fail from time to time.

Sorry I work in IT, I work for an MSP and I can tell you from experience that people who think like you do when it comes to RAID setups have more problems and failure rates than everyone else who buys their drives in one batch plus an extra spare or two.

The BEST drives for RAID, well there isn't a best drive I can recommend if you don't want to spend the extra money and buy Enterprise SATA drives to look at the RAID specific drives from WD and Seagate as you will get a much lower failure rate and better performance on your NAS than if you were to use the stock desktop drive.

There many good NAS/SAN systems out there, Dlink makes a decent one, the DNS-345 which supports iSCSI, QNAP has a few good units too. Ideally though KODI should support iSCSI and not NAS systems as iSCSI is more reliable and faster than NAS systems. Smile

Thanks,
(2015-02-25, 21:13)mpmp Wrote:
(2015-02-25, 20:47)nickr Wrote: No you wouldn't need openelec on your server. Can't imagine why you think that. In this case the server would rip and encode your BluRays, and serve them over SMB or NFS to your openelec clients.

I am trying to figure out how this server is going to work.

Handbrake supports Windows, Mac & Ubuntu. The best platform to run Kodi I have been told is on the Chromebox with openelec.

Never having dealt with a server before I am not sure what is involved.

Thanks.
Don't be spooked by the term 'server'.

It is simply a computer with lots of hard drive space and connected to your network.

Serving (think 'sharing' if you like) files to other computers is something that computers do all the time. Your server simply uses a known network protocol to serve files to the kodi machines. The most popular network protocols for a home LAN are SMB and NFS. SMB is probably easiest to set up and is the same protocol windows has used for years. If you right click a folder in windows and choose 'share' you are sharing over SMB or it's successor CIFS (you really don't need to worry at this point about the difference between SMB and CIFS).
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
Welcome smoothrunnings, a lot of us on this site have been running multiterrabyte servers for a very long time and I can assure that this advice still holds true.

(And applies as much to simple home RAID servers as much as it does to ZFS, EMC and NatApp setups)
Hi Everyone. Just wondering if there's a product out there that can run: Kodi (local and web streaming to 1080p), LiveTV w/PVR, and Netflix?

I currently have a collection of OUYAs for my satellite TVs but OUYA can't run LiveTV. I also have a PC w/Windows as my main source for LiveTV capabilities. Been a while since I had my toe in the pond so I'd just thought I'd see what's out there now.
What is up for OUYA for live tv? Is it a deinterlace problem?

And when you say "LiveTV /PVR" are you wanting to run just the frontend, or the backend as well on this machine. (You only need one backend per household, people tend to put them on a server and run light clients with kodi as frontend).
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
(2015-02-25, 22:38)nickr Wrote: Don't be spooked by the term 'server'.

It is simply a computer with lots of hard drive space and connected to your network.

Exactly. Honestly I do all my encoding on my main desktop, but whatever is your mediaserver could do it too.

(2015-02-25, 21:32)smoothrunnings Wrote: This comment is simply not true.

It is VERY true. With hard drive manufacturing the the failure rate is pretty much luck of the draw- there are good batches and bad batches. There is no way to know what you got until it is in use, ESPECIALLY with consumer drives.That is a completely different situation than SANs, or anything enterprise.

Most media NAS systems have some level of parity protection- a disk or two. If you mix and match your drives and you hit a bad batch on one of them then the parity has you covered. If a few or all of your drives are from the same bad batch you VERY quickly get past your level of parity protection which means no RAID rebuilding. It means raid failure. The warranty on the drive doesn't cover lost data, that is a problem you have to then deal with.

Telling people the answer to that is to "make a backup" of their mediaserver is quite frankly ridiculous. The whole point of a mediaserver is a device that serves large files, that is why we lean towards RAID 5/6 or Unraid instead of RAID 1 or 10- space is a premium. The backup to a mediaserver is another mediaserver. I have two, but most people won't do that.

I am not discounting your knowledge or experience smoothrunnings, but this isn't your world. You are used to enterprise level hardware driving servers that need 99% uptime for an essential business purposes. That is not what we are doing. What we are doing is building HUGE servers, spacewise, that need "good enough" uptime on budgets that wouldn't even buy the cabling needed for an enterprise setup.

Basically you are used to the NASA way of doing it, and I am more looking at the Space X way of doing it. If I was running a business I would do it your way, to entertain the family my way is more economical.

I mean you are 100% correct that if you just buy enterprise drives, or SANs, or something else with a real pricetag as part of that hopefully you don't have to deal with a batch lottery. But if you want to throw together a shoe-string mediaserver with more space than most business servers have for a fraction of the cost then you must do EVERYTHING you can do avoid problems. Hence my advice of mixing batches, that I learned the hard way.

I mean my way works- I have over 50TB of space in my servers and they have run since 2010. People who think like I do are the main participants in this hobby.

(2015-02-25, 22:38)nickr Wrote: Don't be spooked by the term 'server'.

It is simply a computer with lots of hard drive space and connected to your network.

Serving (think 'sharing' if you like) files to other computers is something that computers do all the time. Your server simply uses a known network protocol to serve files to the kodi machines. The most popular network protocols for a home LAN are SMB and NFS. SMB is probably easiest to set up and is the same protocol windows has used for years. If you right click a folder in windows and choose 'share' you are sharing over SMB or it's successor CIFS (you really don't need to worry at this point about the difference between SMB and CIFS).

Thanks nickr. That does simplify the concept a little for me.

So the server would be a Windows PC and you would need to have downloaded the file 4K file in order to encode it via HandBrake software on the Windows Server? Or do you run Kodi on Windows and when it needs to encode or decode it calls HandBrake?

Thanks.
(2015-02-25, 23:16)poofyhairguy Wrote: Basically you are used to the NASA way of doing it, and I am more looking at the Space X way of doing it. If I was running a business I would do it your way, to entertain the family my way is more economical.

That's a pretty crap analogy. Both NASA and Space X have a contractual obligation to not kill the astronauts, regardless of how many dollars they can shave off the price of the high-explosives-in-a-tube.
(2015-02-26, 00:31)twelvebore Wrote: That's a pretty crap analogy. Both NASA and Space X have a contractual obligation to not kill the astronauts, regardless of how many dollars they can shave off the price of the high-explosives-in-a-tube.

And my wife holds me accountable for serving the media stricter than any client I have had in the professional world. I want 99% uptime just like anyone else. I am just not willing to pay extra for a part simply because its labeled "enterprise," while I might for a business because A: its not my money and B: buying the enterprise part gives me political cover if things go wrong.

Obviously all this stuff is trivial compared to human life or even the science of space exploration, but the fact is that the enterprise world is a completely different range of prices compared to the consumer stuff to do the same job (IE serve the file).

(2015-02-25, 21:32)smoothrunnings Wrote: Sorry I work in IT, I work for an MSP and I can tell you from experience that people who think like you do when it comes to RAID setups have more problems and failure rates than everyone else who buys their drives in one batch plus an extra spare or two.

I'll throw my hat in the ring on this one. Smile
Most folks don't wake up in the morning and say " I am going to build a storage system today that will handle all my media, so I can finally get all my DVD's and blurays disc's out of the house."
Instead it is rather a progressive journey. Starting with " I think I will get a hard drives to store my pictures and music on." This then leads to "Wow, I need a few more drives. I didn't think I had that much stuff I was saving." To finally saying "I will build a small Nas or buy one." At this point, the idea to start taking DVD/Bluray disc's and putting on hard drives take a foot hold. We now look at what we have first and use the drives that are available in our progressive journey. Or we buy maybe a few extra drives saying, "This will certainly be enough storage for me." Only finding out a year down the road that it was not enough storage and now will need to buy a few more drives.

For me, this journey started as a 6 extra drives in my computer, all added at different times as storage was needed and price of hard drive was on sale. The idea of a NAS was always in my plans but cost for what I thought would be my Nas to end all Nas solutions prevented me from that build. So it was usb external hard drives that got added, then a WD network drive, then I finally built a 6 drive bay Nas with all drives from my computer, ranging in size fro 320gb to 2TB. I was happy, but that was not the end goal, more like a band aid till I could build my dream machine. So with some time till my storage was full from new dvd/blurays or other stuff, I could now concentrate on my ultimate solution. I started buying 2TB drives..I bought in 2 drive increments, because that is what I could afford at the time. All the drives purchased were on sale at the same time. Once I had 12 drives on hand, the planning for building my ultimate Nas was in place.

This whole journey did not happen over night but over years to finally get to where I am now, which is listed in my signature. As I type this I am now looking at 4TB drives to start the process of replacing the 2TB drives. But I won't be buying 18 drives all at one time. It is just too costly for me, but a drive here and there is my plan. Will the new drives be enterprise? If the enterprise drive is the same price as a highly rated commercial home use drive, then maybe. But for me, I will be looking at the HGST Drives, which I feel has a great reviews and is in my price range.

The last thing I will add is that over the course of 6 years I have had only 1 drive fail. I might be the exception to the rule, but figure how I am buying drives is working for me, so why change.
Just buy as many drives as you need, from somewhere you trust. Its probably (statistically speaking) more important that the hdds be shipped properly these days than worrying about batches.

Also, hopefully we can all agree that you do NOT need to buy all your drives at once, or from the same vendor/etc to make most non enterprise type of raids/sans/nas work.

Besides, the RMA process will insure you get your drives from different batches in the long run /sarcasm

I'd NEVER push anyone who needs to buy 4 large hdds to go to 4 different stores and get 4 different brands/etc. If they want to do it, knock yourself out. But its not needed. Maybe I'd tell them that if they were about to purchase 10 or 16 hdds to mix them up a little because of the bad batch possibility, but still.

In the end, what you should worry about (much more than bad hdd batches/etc) is how to backup your HUGE media library, and how to recover from (an eventual, cause they WILL happen) hdd failure. Either have backups, or be willing to rerip/encode/download/etc all your media. HDDs are mechanical devices, and they WILL fail eventually.

Just also want to thank Poofy for this concise thread, and everyone else that goes out of their way to make things like Pis/chomeboxes/windows/OE/etc work as well as they do and give us SO many good options that we need a summary thread like this.
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