DXVA

At this stage I'm pretty much going to equate convenience with waiting time. Barring some unforeseen herculean effort of strength or agility, any movie-watching process you go through takes about the same amount of hassle so I'm firstly going to measure the time-to-screen of each process and the physical storage capacity required for a selection of movies.

I've got a bar to raise but its not set very high. With Broadcast TV you have to wait minutes, hours, or days to watch the program you want. Loading Film into a projector takes a lot of effort although less time than waiting for a scheduled TV broadcast. VHS is better, but having to rewind after (or before) watching takes time.

The digital world of DVDs and BluRay has just about taken the hassle out of media. You can pick a title and put it on within a minute. This is the ball park I want to be playing in.

For me, the process has been kick started by a colleague emigrating to Canada, and providing me with an excellent opportunity to buy a very cheap 36" TV which I am using as a starting point for my configuration. (Thanks Geoff!) This informs a number of other decisions - the immediate availability of a HD-TV promotes HD content over Film or VHS formats, for example. Given most of my content is SD, coming from Cable TV and DVDs, I would say I own exactly one HD-TV but am using between zero-and-one.

Since this is a HTPC blog, i'm going to ignore the option of a standalone BluRay player or PlayStation-3 console for now and defer that debate to another day.
For convenience, a Movies JukeBox is worth considering. You get a small(ish) unit and you can dial up a movie, on demand, from an updateable selection of titles. Second to this, the amount of physical storage space isn't a limitation on the amount of content. This is what I'm trying to achieve with a HTPC. I don't need to stream broadcast TV or record incoming signals, this is a playback device for HD Content.

Just looking at the mathematics, a 720x576 progressive frame image is 414720 pixels, but really half that because of interlacing. However a 1080p frame is a massive 2073600 pixels - ten times the bandwidth of the old Standard Def image. This gives us an impression that a lot more CPU time is going to be needed to decode that image and get it on-screen that was for a simple DVD.

Thankfully, Media Player Classic Home Cinema supports DXVA, pushing a lot of that needed number crunching onto the video card and allowing the use of shaders for post-processing as a free by-product.

There are reports online of a Core2Duo E5200 being enough to play HD content using DXVA, so my E6600 should manage as long as its video card does the hard work. The two video cards I've tried are an old 7800GT and a fanless GeForce-9400. The first test is the 7800 in the Duo, because its already in and ready to go, but it just wasn't enough for 1080p.

In fact, the 7800GT just isn't man enough for DXVA support, and even in the quad I don't get perfect playback through just the CPU. Testing the 9400 in my quad-core playback is good, 1280x1024 test footage was fine and even 1080p plays back with CPU usage barely ticking up to 2%. Since I'd rather use the Duo as a media centre all I've got to do is get the 9400 in the E6600.

The first test has failed - after some playing about it does report DXVA playback although CPU Usage reaches 45% and playback stutters, and that is a problem to be solved another day.

In Convenience

I have tried, and today failed, to enjoy a coffee shop coffee. I'm sure we've all got a reasonably low expectation of the modern coffee shop by now - and as far as I can tell thats how they stay in business. Commercial coffee is a metagame between the customers low standards and the vendors willingness to meet them.

High street coffee is, on average... well average, and nobody seems to mind. Conceptually and historically the cafe, the plaza or agora are meeting places so the quality and quantity of the consumption on and around them is all but irrelevant. The 20th Century High street cafe is only the modern incarnation of a long tradition and the 21st Century Coffee Shop its newly commercialised cousin.

I wouldn't like to suggest that such an establishment isn't fit for purpose, or that it doesn't have its place. The could be some speculation that its lost it's purpose and is now out of place. Sitting in a plastique chair you can watch production line drinks prepared identically and so quickly you'd think a business model depended on it, quite the opposite from staying to talk, think and relax in a public meeting place. The purpose if this venture is to serve people quickly and the custom to sever then from their money in exchange for 200mg of caffeine diluted with hot water and steamed milk.

If a product it must be, then coffee preparation is readily autonomic - the end product is a matter of a causal relationship between a small number of easily controllable variables - water temperature and pressure, mass and consistency of grind and so on. It therefore follows that the commercialisation of this process, once automated, becomes a matter of finding a machine operator who is easy on the eye and willing to be occupied doing so.

The process of automation should not in its nature have to devalue the product and certainly shouldn't impact the experience at hand - the leisurely pursuit of relaxation, communication consumption, flirtation or whatever one so chooses. The common factor being the individual has the time to sit and make such a decision, and its the loss of this factor - time, that shows where the purpose of the monetised coffee shop is maligned with the purpose of the customer. One by its nature wanting to accelerate the process and the other to slow it down.

And so at this point on our journey we have taken the humble cup of coffee at a bistro table and replaced it with a whistle stop at a coffee shop. The fare of this journey has been the quality of the product while the benefit is a convenience that undermines the purpose by stealing the time from a time out. Both the free time and the drink used to fill it have not just been taken from us but willingly surrendered.

What is the world coming to when you can't get a good cuppa ?

The fall of TV

So since moving house I've been in the do-it-once and do-it-right mindset, driven by simple rules. For me, I just want the balance between the minimum amount of "stuff" and the maximum amount of "experience". Without diverging into the philosophy of how we quantify stuff or what constitutes experience, stuff in this context refers to some technological marvel that produces the experience of me watching a movie.

In general terms, the reduction of stuff is an important goal and one far to broad for me to go in to now and likewise the increase in experience is an admiral pursuit else we would happily live in a cave. The do-it-right and do-it-once mindset manifests itself in many forms but in this instance boils down to doing what an expert says weather that be seeking and following advice or by becoming an expert through education. These are also ideas that I suspect will become more relevant at a later date so I will start by reasoning on the problem domain.

"I've pretty much given up on TV."

By this I mean I'm largely dismissing broadcast television on the grounds that if it is to be cast broadly then it cannot be to everyone's taste. Through empirical means I deduce that the majority of broadcast television is not going to suit me because either the scheduling or the content is not going to match up. Everybody is entitled to set their own standards on what media content must match up to and I'm not going to go to the trouble of defining mine now, needless to say it must present some entertainment, education, or otherwise trivial distrationary value.

From a requirements gathering perspectinve, experience of watching TV and being at the mercy of a TV-Guide gives me the requirement that I must be able to schedule my own viewing. To be concise, if I am building a media centre it must be an "On Demand" service.

Film resolves this, and by setting up a projector and silver screen you can watch content on Demand. Film however is far from convinient, so from film we earn the requirement of convenience. Its an abstract qualitative measurement, and falls outside the basic Getting Things Done principle of first deciding what Done looks like but I think I can safely remain consistent on if a thing or activity if convenient or not so will stay with the term convenient until another presents itself.

VHS is a MUCH MORE convenient medium than film due to its light weight form factor and small player hardware. VHS achieves this through a reduction in quality compared to film, so now we have a quality datum and can construct a scale. I want quality to be better than VHS and accept that since the original recording is probably on film, My quality scale is measured as a continuum with VHS at one and and Film at the other.

Digital SD content was "sold as" higher quality than analogue VHS, but a simple examination of the artifacts on DVD media shows colourspace and quantisation effects that are enough to all but discount SD, placing it very close to the VHS end of our continuum of quality. While it may be erronous to associate all SD digital media with DVD, its widespread consumer acceptance stands for itself and provides a range of bitrates at which typically Full SD Frame 50/60Hz Interlaced 4:2:0 or 4:2:2 format streams are displayed.

Current On-Demand TV services fall into this category. Due to limitations of bandwidth, assuming storage is so vast as to be considered free-and-infinite, such services offer SD video content on a sub 2mbps MPEG-2 equivalent level where scene changes and fast moving objects such as fire or water break into objectionable digital compression artefacts.

A pioneer in its own right, DVD has accustomed the viewer such that digital compression artefacts are now considered both normal and accepted. It has also provided a new standard of packaging, in its robust disc form factor, that far outlives the slow degradation and stretching of VHS tapes. All of these factors have earmarked DVD as a trailblazer, and following that trail are a number of new technologies characterised as HD content.

While an observer might have an arguement against usage of the acronym "SD" to mean Standard Definition, Its incorporation into a number of standards at least make the claim credible. The Perpetual Modern Perspective throws an even greater objection at the acronym "HD" to mean High Definition, as its a much more relative term and one screen or media file is only High in Definition when compared to the previous generations Standard of Definition. Nonetheless, I will refer to 1080p content as HD for the purpose of this article.

HD, in its contemprary BluRay packaging provides the same convenience of scheduling and form factor as DVD but at a more respectable resolution and bitrate such that HD content does look better than DVD. Fine details such as facial features that were approximate blurs on DVD are now visible in HD. In general terms, HD content on BluRay still displays digital compression artifacts that are more noticable and more objectionable than the analogue artifacts present on film so from this we conclude that HD/BluRay lies somewhere between DVD and Film rather then surpassing Film on the Continuum of Quality.

And I think that is enough of a conclusion for me, I've drawn a continuum of quality with Analogue TV and VHS at the bottom end of the scale, followed by SD(DVD) and HD(BluRay) before Film at the top. I also know that if I witness a digital medium where visible analogue film artifacts are more objectionable than digital ones, I can place it above film on that scale.

First Past the Post

Well, I'd expected my first post to talk about HTPC, and had thought I had to mention something about the advantages/history of different formats and why a HTPC is actually a pretty good compromise.

I also expected to post after successfully watching some HD content.

So instead my first post is going to be brief, and talk about my file server falling over, rendering me incapable of getting my HD content to a PC capable of putting it on the screen.

When faced with building a file server for domestic use, I did a little bit of decision making.

Firstly, its for domestic use so wants to be cheap.

Its for up to a few users at once so doesn't need to be fast.

It needs enough capacity and reliability so that I can forget about it for a year or two.

This led me to a ZFS / RaidZ solution, and from there to FreeBSD in the form of FreeNAS, and from there to four 1.5TB Green/environmental/low power drives. After configuration, that comes out as a single 4.00TB pool with one drive for redundancy. The logic is pretty simple, so I won't go into the details here.

Its pretty cheap, with capacity over speed, and FreeNAS/ZFS is expected to be stable.

However, I can't reliably copy (large) files off. They copied on OK, but every time I try to copy a file - using SMB to a Windows PC - FreeNAS beeps and reboots. This makes me sad. I've managed to copy a DVD image, but nothing larger that 4.5GB.

In all other ways, I've been happy. I've had a (working) FreeNAS box for a few years, and ZFS seemed like the right option. The file server is an Intel P4 with 4GB Memory, a 60?GB Boot drive and four data drives. The network is a Netgear gigabit switch, and in real world terms I get about 300mbps copying from machine to machine.

My previous FreeNAS machine (still operational) is based on BSD 6 with a 500GB Mirror on a 1.xGhz Athlon. The long-standing success of that had given me confidence in FreeNAS and BSD in general.

Anyway, that's the sitch - I'm off to try FTP etc... to connect and see if I can copy some files.