sector 42

(This was intended to be a follow up to Network Attached Storage for the Home)

After doing a fair amount of researching it seems that I was a bit optimistic to expect a relatively simple procedure.

Microsoft’s strategy looks to be that despite having a 360, a PC is still the digital hub of the home, since the 360 uses the WMC protocol (yawn) to talk to a Windows PC with the necessary stub software installed, this PC containing all the content. One would think that the 360 would be able to connect to the NAS directly, using SMB, but that is not an option unfortunately. And even if it was, the 360 supports very little in the way of codecs out of the box, necessitating some kind of transcoding proxy sitting between it and any Xvid encoded content.

There is an application called Connect 360 which lets you do some measure of sharing to the XBox, but its fatal flaw is that it requires an OSX system to run, and assumes all your media is in iPhoto/iTunes.

The whole point of my buying a NAS was so that I wouldn’t have to have a PC running to access my content in the first place, and could just stream my media to the XBox directly off it.

A German company called TwonkyVision has implemented a product with the same name, which sounds like it would do the necessary work. At first glance, it looked like the ideal solution, since they created a version that could be installed directly on my NAS. After installing it, I had some reason to hope, because the 360 was able to detect it, and I was also able to browse the directory structure on the NAS from the 360.

However, I ran into some issues:

• Only pictures and audio actually showed up as content on the 360, none of my Xvid encoded movies did (some MP4 content did, but unplayable, see below).
• I am not sure that transcoding actually works in TwonkyVision – I tried to play the MP4 video content that showed up, and I either got a strange codec-like error message, or I nothing happened when I pressed play.

Not very promising – I was hoping the 360 would be a nice option for playing some HD content, but it looks like I am stuck with the XBox first generation and XBMC for my home content needs, though the hardware is starting to feel a bit long in the tooth. If XBMC could run on the 360, and run well (without breaking Xbox Live), I wouldn’t even be posting this, XBMC‘s media navigation and metadata features blow the 360 out of the water, you simply can’t beat community for adding features people actually want, it seems.

I have a relatively large collection of ripped DVDs at home, in XviD format, which I play back using the excellent Xbox Media Center.

I used to have this stored on the Xbox hard drive itself (which I had upgraded to 200GB). However, it was a royal pain to get media onto the Xbox, since it wasn’t connected to my home network at the time, and I wanted to consolidate the location that my media was stored (having recently purchased an Xbox 360, which also has some streaming capabilities).

Having had enough of preparing the files on my desktop, copying them to my laptop, and then FTP‘ing them onto the Xbox using FTP and a cross-over cable, I decided to take some action.

I bought a 10m ethernet cable to hook the Xbox into the switch, then I settled on the Synology DS101j as the storage unit, as it met my criteria:

• Affordable
• Supports both internal IDE disks and USB attached disks
• No drive size limitation

After purchasing the DS101j, I was quite pleased to discover that it is running some form of Debian Linux on an Intel XScale processor, should I ever wish to extend its capabilities in the future, its nice to know that possibility is open to me.

The hard drive I put inside is a Seagate 500GB 7200RPM unit, I don’t need it to be particularly fast, just fast enough for streaming at ~3000 kbits/sec, which this is obviously more than capable of doing. At the time of purchase 500GB was at around the $/GB sweet spot.
The only slightly annoying part of the whole setup experience was that it required Windows to do the initialization of the disk, but once initialized, it doesn’t need Windows any more. This was no problem, since I have Windows Vista & XP both available, just something to note for people who run purely Linux or some other free operating system. Presumably you could initialize it yourself, if you knew what it expected on-disk.

Once setup, it works pretty much as you’d expect – Acquires IP via DHCP (or static, your choice), and shares files via SMB. The default access rights are that everyone can write to the device, which is fine for me, since its on my home network. There is the capability to restrict writing to particular users though. Since XBMC supports SMB out of the box, it is trivial to add a new media source that refers to the DS101j instead of local disk, and there you have it, seamless playback from centralized location.

In the next installment, I’ll investigate what the streaming options are when using an Xbox 360 instead of the first generation Xbox.

Since the DS101j supports uPNP, I’m hoping this means the integration with Xbox 360 will be painless. However, I suspect some form of transcoding may be required, as the information I’ve been able to gather up till now points at the Xbox 360 only supporting WMA/WMV.