Sunday, May 9, 2010

XBMC and DD-WRT Wireless Client

The "Home Media Centre" concept can be summarized as turning your television set into an entertainment centre, i.e. migrating what you usually do on your computer to your TV; such as watching mpeg videos, photos, DVDs, YouTube, IPTV, internet radio and various other medias stored on a hard-drive or over the internet.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have managed to setup my own low-cost media center for around $130, with most of the cost going to a brand-new wireless router as you shall read.

A couple of months ago, I bought a pre-owned Microsoft XBox (the original one) for $50 and installed XBox Media Centre (XBMC http://xbmc.org/) onto it. I followed one of the softmod installation guides found on the internet, which was pretty straight-forward. I completed the whole process at home without needing to bring the console to a shop and modify its hardware. The installation process basically utilizes another desktop PC as a platform to load XBMC OS onto XBox's harddrive (through IDE cable) as though it were its own, and then it's done.

Then I connect the media centre to the internet. My ADSL modem is located quite far away from the television set. As I have previously setup wireless internet, I decided to install dd-wrt (v24-sp2) onto D-Link's DIR 600, set it to "repeater bridge" mode and connect to the xbox with Ethernet cable. As a side note, the wireless router cost me more than $70 but supports only 802.11g...

In terms of functionalities, the original Xbox has component cables (Yellow/Green/White) supporting SD (standard definition) video - good enough for watching DVDs.

The whole setup is now sitting in my living room. I use it mostly for listening to internet radio provided by my ISP and occasionally watching DVD. I have also downloaded a YouTube script so I can watch YouTube on TV... although the Xbox seems to struggle with High-Definition videos. Nonetheless, it is still good value for $50.

As a side note, I also purchased Xbox's DVD kit over Ebay, giving me a remote controller to this media centre. There are some photos of this setup in the "photo gallery"...

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Hard-Drive Short-Stroking

I read an article on Tom's Hardware page about short-stroking, and found it quite an interesting concept. The idea is to limit the "usage" of an hard-drive to its out-most rim. By under-utilizing the hard-drive, the mechanical movement of its arm is also reduced, hence increasing the r/w performance...


Giving credit to the original author, there are more information on  the following link:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html