Back in 2007, I posted an article about must have tools for windows power users, and one of my favorite items on there was the Image Resizer powertoy. After I switched to Vista64 last year, I was very disappointed that the Image Resizer was not compatible with 64 bit versions of Vista, and now also with Windows 7. I had really been missing this tool, and apparently, so did other people.

A fella by the name of Brice Lambson took the time to create an exact clone of the tool for Vista64 and Windows7×64. Thanks to him, I now have the tool again and am happy as ever. Take a moment to go to his website and download the tool. Make sure you support his efforts by letting him know you enjoy it and use it..

One of the new features in Windows 7 is a nifty little bugger called Aero Snap. The intention of Aero Snap is to improve the management for open windows on the desktop. When a user drags a window to the top of the screen, Snap will maximize the window automatically (you can tell this is about to happen with a brief animation before you release the button). Also, when resizing a window left or right, the Aero Snap will resize the application to half the screen real estate, making it easy to setup windows side-by-side for comparison.

For a lot of users, this feature will be welcomed and hailed as the …Read On

Windows 7 RTM was released to the MSDN network on Thursday, August 6th 2009. Being the curious tester that I am, I downloaded it and had a go with it on Friday. So far, my initial thoughts are that it is a definite improvement over Vista 64, which I have been using for the past year or so.

My initial nightmare was backing up the crap that I wanted to carry over to the new installation, since I always opt to re-install rather than upgrade (ya know, to clean out the gremlins that crop up from when you forget to test new things in a VM). Using the Easy Migration wizard was quite painless, and got 99% of what I needed. They apparently have done a very good …Read On

Now, a lot of you may be curious why on earth I would write an article about the merits of anything containing the letters “AOL” in it. In my job, I write software primarly for use on a webserver running AOLServer 4.0x. I know this is already casting a large number of doubts in your mind, but let me finish.

AOLServer was not written by AOL, but is used by them (and I believe it was purchased by them way back when.) It has many pros and a few cons. I will try to discuss those, so that anyone in the market for an application server/web server can make an educated decision about it.

First off, most of these points were …Read On

Die in a fire. Seriously. I hate you with the burning passion of 1000 suns. I had to delete hundreds of fake users today. As such, registrations will now be greeted with a new captcha system. If this doesnt work, I will extend it to include trick questions which any human should be able to figure out.

<3 Jim

So back in November of 2007, I wrote a short blurb about jQuery where I thought it warranted a look. Well, I looked at it a little bit and quickly passed it off as a fad.

Fast forward to July 2009. I have now built several sites with jQuery, which gained a ton of momentum over the past couple years. It is now still as prominent (if not more) as it seemed back in Nov 2007, and I can only with that I had been using it all this time. I can truly say it is fabulous, and if you aren’t using it today, you should be. The learning curve for a javascripter is very easy, and once you figure out the syntactical differences (can we say ‘chaining is awesome’?) you will quickly realize it may truly be the product that will step in and make everything make sense.

So, I have been neglecting my blog for quite some time, and decided to give it a needed upgrade to the newest wordpress.. The next step is to start posting articles now and then.

In reading this article, I was reminded of things I have been talking about since the inception of DRM (Digital Rights Management). Here is my rant.

Several years ago, the music and movie industries created the bane of the consumers existence, DRM. DRM is a technology which became popular for licensing music and movies over the Internet. When you buy a song from iTunes, you don’t actually BUY the song, but you LICENSE the song for a finite period of time, as defined by the operating agreement of the vendor. In the past, when you bought a CD, you were purchasing a perpetual license for the lifespan of the media on which it was sold, and thanks to DMCA, even longer.

I have converted my music and collected music in MP3 format since its inception because it does not contain DRM. When all the DRM hoopla began, I tried to tell people that they should not eat the food that the music industry was trying to feed them. They had managed to convince the consumers that DRM was what the consumers wanted, but in reality, DRM was what the industry wanted. Consumers moved in droves to license over 5 billion songs from iTunes, Yahoo music, MSN Music, etc.
Now the current, MSN Music and Yahoo Music are no longer issuing licensing. Want to replace your computer and move your music? Sorry, can’t do it, licenses are unavailable. Want to burn a CD? sorry, can’t do it since you can’t contact the licensing server anymore. What will happen in the future when you have 4000 songs in iTunes, and they too stop issuing licenses. Do you think you will get a refund for each $0.99 song you licensed?

Now to the current new thing hitting the shelves.. Digital movie download boxes, such as Vudu, Apple TV, etc. If you are in the belief that this is the next big thing going to replace DVD and Blu-Ray, then the MPAA has already succeeded in brainwashing you into believing what you want just happens to be the same as what they want. To all the “consumer reviewers” out there spouting that this is the next big thing, STOP DOING THE MPAA’s MARKETING FOR THEM.

There is a reason that boxes like the Vudu are financially backed by major motion picture labels. This is what the INDUSTRY WANTS, and they are trying to brainwash you into wanting it too. This is the same issue with DRM. You will no longer buy a perpetual license for a DVD, you license the right to view a movie. Want to watch it at a friends? Too Bad. Want to copy it to a disc to back it up? Too bad.

For these reasons, DVD/Blu-Ray will be around until the next big physical media replaces them. They will not ever be replaced by DRM laden licensing. Sure, if you want a nifty piece of technology with some convenience, get a device like this, but don’t go spending thousands building a movie library unless you have some physical media free of DRM that you can fall back to when the industry decides its time to upsell you on a new piece of technology, and relegates your old movies to useless fodder.

Support your artists and studios, buy DVDs, Blu-Rays, CDs, and download music from places that have done away with DRM. Don’t steal music, support the great artists that have taken a chance and made their music available without copy protection.

So my wife was scouring the internet for another set of Acoustic Research Hi-Res speakers for fathers day, and found someone about 3hrs away selling a set in near-mint condition. These are fantastic speakers that unfortunately, are not available since Acoustic Research went out of business a couple years ago.

The price was good so we made the trek and picked them up. In the set was the following speakers:

• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR11 Mains
• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR17 Surrounds
• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR4C Center

These are a slight step down from the existing set we have, but we have been extremely happy with the speakers, and having all the same brand makes it easier to repair any pieces that need to be fixed, since all the components are the same or similar. The primary set that we have that is going into the HT is:

• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR1 Mains
• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR15 Mid Surrounds
• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR17 Rear Surrounds
• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR2C Center
• Acoustic Research Hi-Res AR17 Extras

I am still in the market for a good sub, and am holding out in hopes of finding someone selling an Acoustic Research Hi-Res ARS500 or ARS300.

As you may have figured by reading my blog or the forums, I have been aiming for a home theater network, in which I store all my content on my network, and playing it at one of several TVs throughout my house.

In this post, I am going to focus on my movie library. I will follow-up later with a series of posts on how to handle music, photos, and recorded content.

I have a very large DVD library. I love movies. I don’t love opening one of many binders full of plastic discs, searching through them, finding the one I want, walking to the DVD player, putting it in, going back to the couch, then have to get up to clean off the fingerprints my kids got on the disc. In one of my previous posts, I discussed creating a very large storage system that will be shared across my home network. For the past several months, I have been ripping my DVDs, then encoding them into xVid h.264, which does 2 things. First, it makes them into a single file. This is more convenient for organization reasons then having thousands of folders full of more folders, each containing several IFO and VOB files. Secondly, h.264 at 720p reduces the size of the files from around 4.5GB to about 1.75GB per movie, with no noticeable loss of quality (and retaining all the original english audio streams, IE, DTS, 3/2, etc.)

I have setup and played with just about every media playback system known to man, and while MythTV has some really neat features, its more of a geek distraction then something that my wife and kids are comfortable with. For this reason, I choose to use Windows Media Center, as it is very stable, and very easy for the family to use (and I like it because its pretty). The problem is, it has no native support for handling my digital movie library using convenient cover art, searchable titles and artists, etc. Sure, I could use a explorer-esque view of folders, but then it loses most of that FAF (family acceptance factor).

In comes my favorite database management program for managing my library. Movie Collector from Collectorz.com is absolutely amazing. You take a DVD, scan the barcode using a barcode scanner (or type it in… If you have a large collection, the 40 bucks for a USB barcode scanner off eBay is a lifesaver), and it catalogs it and downloads the cover art, artists, genre, synopsis, ratings, and such. There is a field when adding the DVDs to enter a path and filename to the movie, to support ripped versions. The newest version contains the part that makes this whole project come together, the MCE Viewer (written and maintained by Brian Baskerville of mcezone.com). This application installs on your Vista MCE (it’s rumored to work on 2k5, but slow because it doesnt use the lite XML format), and reads the data from the database, which in this case, is located on an iSCSI drive shared across the network. What this app does is integrate into MCE and allow my to search my database by title, artist, coverart, etc. and play the network stored media. If there is a link to the network media in the database, there will be a “Play Movie” button on the synopsis page, otherwise it is considered offline media and there just to know that you have it in the database.

That’s it! A great DVD Library, easy to maintain, easy to store, and no more scratched DVDs. Please feel free to comment or start a forums thread if you want to discuss this in more detail.

In my previous post, I discussed a storage system for my home theater network that would store all my digital video and music content. While it would be certainly reasonable to map shares from every computer and DVR to the server, we can get a bit of an added performance boost by attaching to it via iSCSI. In some setups, in may be necessary to map UNC shares, for instance, if you cannot or do not want to run additional cabling for your dedicated iSCSI network.

In my scenario, I plan on installing a dedicated set of ethernet cabling for the purpose of iSCSI, seperate from the data network used for general internet access or streaming content. As you may be asking yourself already, “Jim, wouldn’t this require TWO gigabit ethernet switches so that the traffic is partitioned and not stepping on each other?” You are correct. Gigabit switches are getting cheap these days. I could optionally use 2 low end gigabit switches, such as the D-Link DES-1026G, or the Linksys SRW2048. I have not entire decided on exactly what switche(s) I will use for my network yet, but chances are likely I will use my industry connections and end up with a Cisco Catalyst gigabit switch. This is my preference, since I can partition a catalyst and get by with 1 switch instead of 2, plus create any VLAN and custom configuration I see fit for the ports.

Regardless of which route I choose, I will end up with a gigabit network for the iSCSI, and a minimum 100Mb network for the data/internet/etc. I will certainly update this post when I have narrowed this decision a little more.

One Bad Pixel is happy to announce that Forums have been added to facilitate discussions among readers. These are available and can be used with the same username and password as this blog (in fact, your saved logins will be remembered between them even). Please feel free to use them and make sure to request new subjects if you don’t see one that fits your topics.

In a previous post, I discussed building a very large storage array for under $5000. Since the time I have written the original article, prices have continued to come down, drive capacities went up, iSCSI target software became more stable, and many other things that make this even more attractive than ever. My plans are mostly unchanged from the previous post, but I thought it would be relevent to summarize them here so you don’t have to read that whole post.

I think it is noteworthy to say that there are other drives out there, some cheaper and some larger. I wanted to go with the ES.2 (or WD RE) as they are designed more for 24×7 operation and this type of application. Using consumer level drives for a setup like this is generally a bad idea. It should also be noted, that if you use Western Digital drives, you should use the RE version as opposed to the SE version. Trust me on this. The RE version is RAID enhanced, which has several differences between the SE, but the most important being that the RE is firmware encoded to be the given size. An SE 500GB drive may be 499.7, 501.2, etc. The RE 500GB drive will always be 500GB. This is very important in a RAID setup, where replacing a faulty 501.1GB drive with a 499.9GB drive will NOT work, be very frustrating, and probably make you want to hang yourself.

Additionally, there is other, more chocolaty controller cards. If you have something against 3Ware, I recommend looking at the Areca cards (they even have a nifty LCD panel to show the health of the array, perform rebuilds, etc.) I chose the 3Ware from personal preference. I have used hundreds of their cards and never had problems. Why fix what isn’t broke.

This setup, based on which RAID setup I choose, will yield the following storage space:

The technical nitty-gritty is beyond the scope of this post, but here is a summary of why I chose RAID50.
Because the majority of my IO operations to the array are read operations, I wanted something that had a bit higher performance on the read operation, which I was willing to sacrifice a bit on the write operations. RAID 0 provides the most read operation performance boost, however it entirely lacks any fault tolerance. As you increase the number of drives in your array, the chances of a single drive failure increase. In a RAID0 setup, any 1 drive would destroy the entire array.
So… Because Fault Tolerance is a requirement (I’m not going to re-encode 5TB of video unless I have a catastrophic fire and cant grab the array in time.), that rules out RAID0. RAID 10 is 2 mirrored RAID0 stripes. This is a rediculous waste of storage capacity without any major benefits, other than you get the performance of RAID0 and the Fault Tolerance of RAID1. Scratch RAID10.
RAID 6 implementations are rare and not well documented, but it is basically RAID5 with dual parity. I scratched this because its confusing and offers no major advantage over RAID50.
RAID 5 offers enough fault tolerance for my needs, with a slight performance it.
RAID50 offers the same great redundancy as RAID5, with a read performance boost like RAID0. It takes a slight penalty on the write operations because it must write parity information more than once. Most of my ops are read, so this one is FTW.

In regards to my server… Yes, I know this is cheap. No, I cant replicate this price exactly and consistently, but eBay has a lot of bargain barrel servers for the cheap. It needs to serve one purpose only, and that is to hold the 16xPCIe RAID controller card and serve as an iSCSI target. Nothing more. I intend to use Windows Server 2008 or Linux using IET. This iSCSI target will connect to multiple other computers and PVR systems with iSCSI initiators via dedicated Gigabit network (more on this later).

When planning my home theater, one of the single largest costs involved will be the selection of speakers. In my specific theater, I have chosen to re-use speakers I already own. In 2003, I purchased a set of Acoustic Research AR1 Hi-Res series main speakers. I had done a large amount of research into the company, and after comparing a large number of speakers, the AR1 sounded the best to me. AR had a long reputation of building some of the best speakers available, and despite their rocky financials, I made the decision anyways. Towards the end of 2004, Acoustic Research went bankrupt and ended up selling their speaker division to Jensen. This certainly would have tarnished the reputation of the solid Hi-Res series speakers, however the product line was discontinued and not picked up by Jensen.

I continue to stand by my choice, as these speakers have looked and sounded absolutely fabulous for the years I have owned them. I feel proud to be one of the few select owners of the AR Hi-Res series, their flagship product just before their demise.

Over the past few years, I have managed to acquire many other AR speakers in the Hi-Res series to complete my setup. In 2005 I acquired an AR2c center channel new in the box from a retailer that happened to have 1 left sitting on a shelf after the bankruptcy. I acquired it at a significant discount, knowing that the manufacturer was no longer in business.

In 2006, I was able to locate another retailer that had a new set of AR17 surrounds from the Acoustic Research Hi-Res series, however what I really wanted was their bigger brother, the AR15. I decided at the time to buy the AR17s and continue searching for AR15s.

This month, May 2008, my 4-leaf clover apparently worked, as I was able to locate a set of nearly perfect used AR15 surround speakers. The cost was good, and the speakers are in excellent condition, so I now have a complete set, aside from the Sub.

Since I have kids, one of the things that worries me always is damage to the speakers. How could I repair them if they become damaged? Well, my daughter tested this theory by pushing in one of my tweeters on the AR1 mains. I was slightly dissappointed. After some searching, I found a vendor ABTech Systems that sells replacement speakers to repair the Acoustic Research speakers, from the original manufacturer. (Acoustic Research assembled the speaker units from speakers mfg by other manufacturers). A special thanks to ABTech Systems for their commitment to the Acoustic Research owners of the world.

So, after several years of searching and waiting, I finally have the speakers that will serve as the primary system for my home theater, which will be a 7.1 Surround system. The setup is as follows:

• Acoustic Research AR1 Mains, with 15″ Side-firing woofer powered by 500W Carver Sunfire amp
• Acoustic Research AR2C Center channel
• Acoustic Research AR17 Mid-Surrounds
• Acoustic Research AR15 Rear-Surrounds

While I still haven’t entirely decided whether the better AR15 surrounds should go in the middle or the rear, I’m sure a little trial and error will help present the answer to this.
Also, you will notice that I do not have a dedicated subwoofer for the system, but am utilizing the 15″ side-firing woofers on the AR1 mains as my LFE. These sound great, however I do intend to eventually add a dedicated sub to go in the rear of the theater. I am currently actively seeking an Acoustic Research ARS500 (or ARS300) subwoofer in Black Ash. If you have or no someone that has one of these, please let me know. I may opt to use an alternate dedicated sub until I can find an ARS500 someday.

I wanted to share a link to an excellent discussion and tutorial on 1080p, what it means, why you should care, and how to understand the nitty-gritty about it. Without further ado, here is the article.