DMA2200 on the way... Time to prepare

[philzgr8]

OK so I couldn't wait and I ordered my DMA2200 today. It should arrive by tomorrow or Wednesday (from DigitalYes who say they have plenty in stock). So the issues I have to deal with are as follows:

1. Network Cabling
Currently my MCE is cabled to a gigabit switch all of whose ports are in use (1 x Modem/Router, 1 x MCE, 1 x NAS and 2 x PC's.). One of the PC's is upstairs and is used by my kids when they visit just for MSN etc. I was planning to put an existing 10/100 switch between the gigabit switch and the upstairs PC and then run a new cable to the DMA2200 in my bedroom from there. If I've got it right it should work but of course the upsstairs machines will not have access to gigabit speeds. I don't see that as a problem but I'm wondering if anyone can see something in this config that might jump up and bite me. Note that the DMA2200 does not support gigabit lan speeds anyway.

Update: Last night I ran a new cable upstairs from the modem router using its built in switch instead of adding another switch upstairs. I decided that I didn't really want to introduce another switch into the network unless it was absolutely necessary. I do get tired of all those little plug-pack power supplies all over the place.

Post Install Update: Running the extra cable worked perfectly and all content streamed without any glitches so very happy with this.

2. Power Management
Presently my MCE is set to use S3 suspend and it seems to work pretty well. I believe it supports Wake-On-Lan but currently it is disabled. The issue now is whether to set it to allow Away mode instead or simply enable Wake-On-Lan. I would prefer to simply enable WOL if it works but I'm wondering if anyone else has tried it or has any thoughts on whether it will work.

Update: I found this post over at TGB which seems to indicate that wake on ping will work provided it is configured on the NIC device of the MCE machine. I will give this a try and post results back here. In the meanwhile if anyone wants to give it a try and let me know I'd be grateful.

Further Update: According to what I have read over at the Linksys forums it seems that the DMA2200 simply does not support magic packet and many NICs do not support wake on arp/ping. I'm starting to suspect I'm going to have to develop a nasty workaround or leave the MCE box on full time.

Post Install Update:
At this stage I have not spent any time on this but expect to revisit it once everything settles down. For now I have simply disabled any power management.

3. My Movies
See here for full details

4. Video Collection.
I have a fairly large collection of videos including mpegs, WMV's and AVI's. As I read it, it seems that there is an issue with all DivX files and with any DivX or Xvid having AC3 audio. From what I read the DivX files (without AC3 audio) can be made playable by changing the FourCC code and I have managed to download a tool that will do this in batch mode. Where I have a problem is in how to quickly separate all of my DivX files from all of the other AVI files. Is anyone aware of a tool or simple method of doing that?

Post Install Update: As expected DivX files are not supported and I have still to find the best solution for segregating these ready for modifying their FourCC codes.

5. Harmony Remote (Updated Post Install)
Setting up the Harmony 1000i was fairly straightforward. (I'm not a fan of the 1000i but it has been gathering dust in a corner so I thought I should put it to work.) I did however have to train a few commands to give it a full set and there is still some tweaking to do to get the best ergonomic button arrangement but that can be done over time.

6. Network shares. (Updated Post Install)
Despite my original concerns I had no problem at all seeing folders shared on my NAS device but they had to be manually added from the DMA2200. Once added they worked perfectly. Windows shares required a significant amount more work.

See here for full details of the fix

[shoreline]

To expand on the network shares:

1- Set up a user on the media storage server e.g xbox360 and assign a password e.g babbage, assign this user access to the shares that hold your media files.

2 - Then on the HTPC that you have attached the extender right click My Computer and choose Manage -> Local Users and Groups -> Users, under here you will see several accounts for the extenders, right click the account and choose properties, goto Profile and type in mcx1.bat under Logon script.

3 - On the HTPC, create a new folder under C: Drive named netlogon, right click this and choose sharing, share the folder as netlogon and assign everyone full access.

4 - Open Notepad and create a file that uses the unc paths to create a net use statement to share the folders on your NAS with the username and password that has access to them from step 1. You will have to choose all files from the save as box so windows does not append the .txt to your file, save it as mcx1.bat.

5 - Restart the HTPC and then the Extender and it should have access to your media files on the NAS

The "net use m: /delete /yes" portion just makes sure that no other drive maps are directed to that drive letter, just in case.

As long as you use the same .bat file for all your extenders and HTPC, then all the drive letters will point to the same shares.

[merovingian]

Regarding the power management, I use WoL (well, magic packet), with my Xbox 360 extender. It works, but there are two issues:

1) If the HTPC is asleep when I turn the Xbox 360 on, the first attempt at connection often fails. This is an acknowledged Vista bug, so I presume you will see it with the DMA 2100. Second connection attempt always works, however manual intervention is required (on the Xbox 360 at least) to trigger the second connection attempt.

2) AFAIK, you are at the mercy of the idle timer to turn the HTPC off again after you've turned your extender off. In my experience, pain and misery is to be had in Vista for any use of the idle timer. ie. HTPC frequently goes to sleep at the end of watching a show etc. I have mine set to 60 minutes so I don't normally get an issue watching a 45-minute show, but this of course means it takes an hour for the HTPC to turn off after the extender has turned off.

So it works, but it's not exactly sublime.

Personally I wouldn't bother with Away mode, as the power savings are minimal-to-nil. You either go WoL, warts and all, or run the MCE 24/7.

[atheo]

Hey,

Quick note....the network shares netlogon script worked a treat. No problems at all.

Thanks heaps.

Now to get it working with divx ;>)

Thanks

Adam

[philzgr8]

Originally Posted by merovingian

Regarding the power management, I use WoL (well, magic packet), with my Xbox 360 extender. It works, but there are two issues:

1) If the HTPC is asleep when I turn the Xbox 360 on, the first attempt at connection often fails. This is an acknowledged Vista bug, so I presume you will see it with the DMA 2100. Second connection attempt always works, however manual intervention is required (on the Xbox 360 at least) to trigger the second connection attempt.

2) AFAIK, you are at the mercy of the idle timer to turn the HTPC off again after you've turned your extender off. In my experience, pain and misery is to be had in Vista for any use of the idle timer. ie. HTPC frequently goes to sleep at the end of watching a show etc. I have mine set to 60 minutes so I don't normally get an issue watching a 45-minute show, but this of course means it takes an hour for the HTPC to turn off after the extender has turned off.

So it works, but it's not exactly sublime.

Personally I wouldn't bother with Away mode, as the power savings are minimal-to-nil. You either go WoL, warts and all, or run the MCE 24/7.

Thanks for that. Isn't "magic packet" the same thing as WOL?
By the way, have you tried using MST?

[philzgr8]

I've done a bit of research on the DivX issue and what tools I need but I haven't really come up with any good solution yet. What I have got is a batch tool called FourCCChanger which will allow me to drag and drop DivX files onto it and have the tool change all of the FourCC codes to Xvid but the problem is still about how to efficiently identify all of the files which need changing. I'm not concerned so much about overwriting Xvid with Xvid but I'm sure there are files encoded with other codecs amongst them and I'm not sure that changing the FourCC codes on those files won't render them useless. I will keep searching but any help would be appreciated.

Thanks to merovingian for the info about Power Management. Unfortunately WOL sounds way less than wonderful and I can only hope that SP1 has alleviated some of the problem. What concerns me though is that I know that Microsoft's preferred solution for extenders is away mode but I really am not wanting to have my MCE box running 24/7 as according to Microsoft there are virtually no power savings with away mode.

I will keep updating the info in my first post as I come up with my final solutions. With any luck I'll have the unit later today so I hope to start setting up late this evening.

[philzgr8]

OK, Here's another little issue to consider. Reports over at TGB suggest that SP1 breaks extender support in Vista. So far these reports only relate to Xbox but I'm wondering if anyone has a Linksys extender running with SP1 RTM. Any experience would be helpful.

[dgaust]

I posted that over here a couple of days ago, and they're been a few reports back saying that their extender works with SP1 RTM.

This is my post, on of the responses is directly below.

[philzgr8]

Originally Posted by dgaust

I posted that over here a couple of days ago, and they're been a few reports back saying that their extender works with SP1 RTM.

This is my post, on of the responses is directly below.

Thanks. It does sound like it's an Xbox only issue so I've got my fingers crossed. In any case I guess I'll know tonight as my DMA2200 has arrived.

[philzgr8]

OK so my DMA2200 saw service for the first time last night and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The setup went without a hitch and findings are as below:

Setup:
This was very straightforward although it didn't go exactly as the manual suggested which was a little disconcerting. Perhaps it was because I had the MCE interface running on my MCE box when I ran setup on the DMA2200 but (not being a great one for reading instructions) I wasn't aware that I needed to shut it down. In any case it immediately prompted me to set up the extender when I was expecting to have to run the install disk first. Anyway it set itself up and appeared to be fine but I decided to run the install disk anyway to be sure to be sure. I was also expecting to have to download some updates from WindowsUpdate but when I ran it there were no updates to install. (Note: It's possible that the fact I have SP1 RTM installed may account for this behaviour.)

The extender's setup menu was very straightforward and there was nothing in there of concern.

Appearance/Interface.
I must say I was quite surprised by the shape of this unit. Most similar devices I would expect to be wide and shallow but the DMA2200 is the opposite. It is quite narrow and surprisingly deep so that the front panel is very compact. Of course this could present something of an issue if you had a very shallow cabinet to put it in but I'd be surprised if anyone had an issue with it. Height wise it is comparable to your average stand alone DVD player.

From everything I saw the interface is virtually identical to MCE and most things just worked although it does have an annoying habit of scanning media folders each time I go to My Videos etc and prompting me to continue. I'm hoping that this annoyance goes away as on occasions I found that clicking OK would not dismiss the prompt for a couple of minutes. Interestingly, despite having been prompted to have access to watched folders from my MCE machine I still had to add them manually. Once added they worked as expected. Note that I have not resolved how to access shares on a windows machine but NAS shares (WD MyBook World - Linux) just worked.

Menu animations seem a touch jerky (a bit like micro stutter) but all in all they are fairly easy on the eye. Interestingly, without the ability to set any scan options on my 26" Samsung, I did find that with video files at least (and probably everywhere else too) there is definitely overscan and nowhere to make any compensation. I suspect that a panel with 1:1 pixel mapping would quickly resolve this issue but it's no big deal for a bedroom TV.

With the exception of the DivX incompatibility the streaming of media was absolutely fine. There was no evidence of any network issues and the units own netwok test indicated that I had 100% of the required bandwidth for streaming HD content.

The DVD interface, while somewhat annoyingly not intigrated with the MCE interface works pretty much the same as any DVD player and it will be handy for watching the occasional movie which isn't ripped to the NAS.

I have yet to tackle MyMovies and I must admit I'm not filled with confidence. The truth is I suspect MyMovies uses drive mappings for locating its content and it seems the DMA2200 only sees UNC's. Even if I do manage to resolve that little glitch, I may have to change the format of ripped DVD folders to a supported video format such as Xvid, MPEG or WMV as I think I read that these units won't stream DVD folder content. Time will tell.

I have still to check which plug-ins will work with the extender but I don't generally use them so there's no big hurry for me. I will report back once I've had time to do some testing. I guess I'll have to download a few to see what they're like.

Overall
Well with the benefit of only a short while playing with it last night I'd have to say it's well worth the $330 I paid for it and it is very quiet. This was a must for the bedroom. As far as I'm concerned I'd happily recommend it to anyone who has been holding off but to be fair, I guess I'd be a bit concerned if all of my media was stored somewhere on a 3rd party windows machine as I have not yet found a way to access windows shares.