Serviio

My Media Center (or 'Cooking With Computers!')

Over the years that I have been in Thailand I've been downloading and collecting videos.

I've got lots of them... about TEN TERABYTES to be in-exact!
That means I have about 1,500 movies and every (half decent) TV program from The Avengers to Z Cars!

If you want to see Lenny Henry and Chris Tarrant in TISWAS, I've got it. If you feel the need for an episode of The Fugitive, then I'm your man. I've even got vintage episodes of Nationwide with Michael Barratt and all episodes of The Banana Splits Show! Lovejoy, Ellery Queen, Alias Smith and Jones... I've rounded up all my old favorites, not to mention all the new stuff from the video world such as Dexter, Banshee and Justified, etc.

They're all stored on various hard drives and I have back ups of all the stuff that I'm scared to death of losing!

Until recently, if I wanted to watch a program, I'd have to plug a hard drive into my WDTV LIVE media player, wait for the player to read all the titles and then watch them on my nice big telly.

The problem with this arrangement is that if I want to switch programs I'd probably have to switch hard drives.
(The media player only has two USB ports and I have loads of hard drives.)
I could get a massive hard drive (and I have tried this in the past) but the WDTV player refuses to acknowledge anything bigger than two terabytes. Grrr!

So... how do I get to watch any program in my collection without trudging in and out of my office at home and the bedroom, laden with hard drives?
Yup, you've guessed it... I need a 'desktop media center' where I can plug all the drives into one unit.

Well, over the last few days, the beings above the clouds have smiled on me and I did just that, and here's how...

My first bit of luck came when my colleague was upgrading his ancient laptop after he finally realized that his old one was a lost cause. For a start his laptop didn't have a screen that worked and he had to plug it into an external one. But the laptop would only recognize CRT monitors, not flat screen digital types. And of course his laptop was stuck to his desk at work as he couldn't use it elsewhere without lugging around a massive 17" CRT telly with it!

He bought it in 2007 and the SiS chipset had never been upgraded. It had one gig of ram, a 160 GB hard drive and just 128 megs of on board video memory. Also, it was filthy inside and out. So after he bought his new one, he happily gave it to me and assumed that I'd chuck it out after harvesting the hard drive...

My next bit of luck in the hardware department came from a client in Bangkok. The office manager had upgraded all the monitors to massive swanky touch screens. I asked him if I could 'borrow' one of the outgoing screens and he said "I can do better than that. You can have this one..." and handed me an almost new BENQ 20 inch screen!

Back at home I tore the crippled laptop apart. It was so caked with dust and fluff inside that I had to take it outside to clean it. I'm amazed that the fan went round at all! Anyway, Q tips and an old toothbrush did the job and it was at least clean on the inside.

Next, I doubled the ram to two gigs with an old DDR2 card I had in my 'nerd's collection of shit that I SHOULD throw away, but just can't quite bring myself to!' spare parts box.

Then I completely removed the laptop screen, got a rag and window cleaner on the rest of it and proceeded to plug it into a monitor to get online and see what I could do to make it work better.

First, I downloaded a copy of Windows 7 and replaced the Windows XP operating system with something that actually works! Next, I had to upgrade the chipset. No problem. SiS have a good website and I downloaded the latest version and now I was able to use my new flat screen monitor with the screen-less laptop! The next job was to plug in all my hard drives, assign them 'sticky' drive letters and make sure they all worked OK. They did.

Great so far... but to create my dream media center, I had to have a good DLNA program (Digital Living Network Alliance.) that would read all my videos and connect wirelessly to my WDTV Live media player AND my Galaxy Tab.

I went on line and did my homework and found out that the best (free) desktop media players were XBMC and PLEX.

First, I downloaded XBMC... The installation went by without a hitch but the program wouldn't start.
The warning window said something like "UNABLE TO CREATE GUI"
Bugger. I'd come so far and the measly amount of video memory (128 megabytes!) on this old laptop was the stumbling block.

(On a laptop. the graphics memory that it comes with, is all it will ever have. This wasn't something I could simply 'upgrade.')

I was pretty sure that the beautiful and swanky displays of PLEX (and all other similar programs) would be the same so I went back online to search for something a little less demanding of my meager video memory resources...

Introducing SERVIOO!

SERVIOO runs on Java.
(Java is a cross-platform operating system that runs over the top of other operating systems!)

The download was small and the reviews were positive so I downloaded and installed it... EUREKA!

SERVIOO has a 'tabbed' interface and looks rather old school. It's also more complicated to configure than the user-friendly alternatives. BUT it doesn't use up a shit load of video memory and it doesn't act as a media player that hi-jacks your computer's entire screen.

I'll skip the boring bits about configuration but I will answer any questions if I can, on this thread.

Anyway, after tinkering about, I now have my entire video collection broadcasting all over my wireless network at home.
For my TV I use the previously mentioned WD TV Live device. It's still the best out there in terms of features, options and display, but even the larger supermarkets do stock similar items for less than 2,000 baht. Like the WD TV LIVE you can also access YouTube and other online services as well as plugging in your own memory sticks and hard drives.

For my Android devices I tried several combinations of DLNA applications and media player applications. I finally settled on VLC as the media player and DK PLAYER as the DLNA reciever. They work very well together and the video flows seamlessly from my office to the patio outside!

A few notes...

Here's a link to some good screenshots of the program...

http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/Serviio-Screenshot-161778.html

The drives all need to be configured to allow sharing and sharing has to be turned on and 'allowed' in the Windows control panel.

When the SERVIOO software is reading your video catalog it will take a long time (hours) for them to be read, digested and filed... especially if you (like me) have a lot of files. It's worth figuring out how to stop the library scan being slowed to a crawl by disabling some of the interesting, but unnecessary features of SERVIOO.

To do this, when adding a path to your video folder under the 'Library' tab, un-check every option except the one on the left!

On one occasion I added a hard drive to SERVIOO and waited for the files to appear... and I kept waiting...
I couldn't figure out the problem so I simply deleted that path and added the exact same path again and the hard drive sprang into life and it worked fine!
(I'm guessing that the first time I tried, the hard disc drive took too long to 'spin up' and SERVIOO got bored waiting!)

A good feature of SERVIOO is the ability to easily turn off all the useless folder types such as 'Recently Watched' or 'Genres.' Just click on the 'Presentation' tab and un-check all the shite that you do NOT want appearing on your remote device.

Under the 'Metadata' tab, I unchecked everything. I don't need the DVD covers downloaded from the internet, or thumbnails of the files created, when I already have an idea of what I'm going to watch.

So with a bit of luck, knowledge and patience, you too can have ten TERABYTES of video available on demand in your house for almost nothing!

Right, I'm off to watch TV. There's an old episode of The Rockford Files I want to watch... and after that I think I'll treat myself to an episode of Barney Miller.

Goodnight!

There, fixed it for you...