Most important component for streaming HD content

Furton · 26 Jan 2008 at 14:56

I'm in the process of speccing myself a home server to stream content to all machines in the house and the HTPC. From experience I know that streaming SD content is fine over pretty much any spec server, however is there anything you need to be careful about when streaming HD content?

Does the CPU speed, or amount of RAM have an effect on streaming HD? It will be on a 100Mpbs network.

Furton · 26 Jan 2008 at 15:59

An upgrade to Gigabit network won't be too hard, how much ram are we talking though? 2GB on a WHS box or 4GB?

Furton · 26 Jan 2008 at 21:11

I think I'll probably go with just 2GB to start with, will probably only be streaming 1 piece of HD content at a time.

Would a RAID 5 setup have any effect on the streaming of HD? (i.e. slow it down)

Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 14:15

Any suggestions on this spec then?

I'm going with a 80GB HD just for the WHS OS install, then 5*500GB HD's in RAID5 for storage, I'm going for RAID 5 as there's some sort of redudancy in there, i.e. one drive fails and it's possible to re-build the array again. There won't be any vital data there, just ripped DVD's e.t.c

Can't decide on a case though?

Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 15:32

Just went for the SLi board as it's the only AMD one I can find with 6 SATA connectors on it and it's rather cheap.

Will download the manual for the board and check on the 4 or 5 drives thing.

Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 17:46

decto said:
The raid features on that board look pretty good.

I'd go for 2GB of the OCZ 6400 DRR which is a stunning ~£25 this week and for the CPU I'd go up a notch to the 4200 which runs a little faster and comes with an AMD approved heatsink and fan for £43. The 256KB of cache is cutting it a little thin on the cheapest core.

Will you be using the 2400 for HD output? otherwise you could go for a MATX board with 4 x 750 GB drives and onboard VGA / DVI / HD etc.

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I won't be buying it for a few weeks so just went for the cheapest RAM assuming it would be the same price that time. Will the CPU be that much of an issue? Wouldn't have thought CPU usage would be high for just streaming HD content, decoding will be done on the HTPC and client PC's.

The server will eventually be headless, might just stick it in the attic after setting it up, just went for the cheapest GFX card available in case I needed to hook it up again.

Furton · 27 Jan 2008 at 21:54

megakid said:
Maybe I am missing something but it depends on how you're going to be streaming this content doesn't it?
If you're watching HD allowing the clients to decode the stream then you should get away with a not-so-special server.
If, however, you're using MythTV or something on the server using "Extender"-style clients then won't your server will be doing the decoding and need to be beefier?

My plan is to let the HTPC and client PC's do the decoding as they are beefy enough as it is. However, what is MythTV?