New Media Center Setup

So to try to overcome the stress on the media center I have been building dual proc media center with a raid 0 ~400 gig array to up the storage for all the TV we record. I am not sure if it is just me or the hardware I choose to use, but I cannot seem to get the media center OS to the array on a promise 133ut2 pci raid card. Apparently I cannot even configure the array the way that I have with previous promise pci raid cards. This seems unfortunate as I was hoping to configure 3 drives (2 200's and 1 160gig) into a big old array for OS and all the media that we have to put on it. So I am kind of back to the drawing board and looking through the scrap heap for another pci raid card. Very sad.

Kind of fun getting to show my little brother the process of building a computer the looking for parts and testing each component to ensure that failures are isolated and removed. I am kind of an electronics graveyard so somethings work, others or questionable.

Any how, I am diligently working to complete this "dry run" so we can put the TV tuner cards in and give this baby a spin. Works out great that the wife went to the Chestival (Some country music festival) at the Seahawks stadium and my brother was at a friends wedding all day. Even after a firmware upgrade the pci card didn't give me the option to configure the raid, so I am tediously reading the manual to see if it even supports what I am after.

Tags: Convictus Media Center DVR PC Building

Need something to do.

Moving on from the digital picture frame and looking for something new to tear apart and make my house a mess, I saw a post about a "Portable Media Center Extender" on hackaday. It immediately excited me as my house hold is becoming a bunch of media center whores and severly over burdening the el cheapo media center I put up. All in all the box has performed brilliantly and I am very happy with the set and forget nature of the beast. Unfortunately for us and our ever increasing number of religiously watched shows, the "season finally" season almost put the nails in the coffin of my media center and nearly got me killed.

I was a little disappointed to find it was a wireless extension of the XBMC. Undetered, I loved the idea and want to make a true wireless Xbox Media Center Extender.

A Few product idea for use:

Video Sender/Reciver
8" LCD TV
Maybe something Like this for a big battery

Tags: Convictus Media Center Portable wireless