My Technology Blog

I was listening to the CEO of Sony talking in Davos last week, and he seemed to indicate that Sony’s strategy to compete with the iPOD was focused on cell phones with Walkman functionality incorporated. It looks like Sony is counting on cells phones to eventually replace iPODs for music. Of course Apple seems to have already realized this, which might be the main reason why they are releasing the iPhone which is focused on the consumer segment of the cell phone market..

The iPhone is definitely a nice consumer product, but Apple has not been focused on penetrating the large corporate market with the iPhone. The corporate or enterprise market is of course the place where Research in Motion is very strong. There has been much written about various cell phone replacing RIM over the years, but they still have an extremely loyal following with business users.

It would be great if Apple and RIM merged together to focus on the cell phone market. Both companies seem to have great industrial design groups, and very loyal followings with their customers. Unlike Nokia, Motorola, or Sony, they do not have a very wide of cell phone products to cover all of the cell phone market. If they were to combine their strengths at this point in time, I am sure that they would be able to fend off their larger competitors and grow their market share in the cell phone market.

I doubt that a merger will ever happen, but if it did it would be interesting to see what products these two companies would come out with.

I have been looking for a good solution for a home media server for some time now, and I have just not been able to find it. The best solution that i could find was a MAC mini, with an external capture adapter like Hauppauge, but it just seemed to defeat the purpose since I would have all of this junk near the T.V. I also want a large amount of storage with RAID, which I also could not get easily with the MAC Mini today. I am not posting this to knock the mini, since it does seem to be one of the better solutions today, and all of the other off the shelf solutions are even more narrowly focused (and limited).

Instead of trying to work with all of the limitations of the existing “media server” solutions, I decided to go back to the drawing board and focus on what I needed first. I thought that by doing this, I could create a check list for everything that I needed, and make it easier to find what I really wanted. After going through this exercise, I came up with the following requirements (not in any particular order):

• Lots of storage for digital photos, music, and video.
• RAID5, since I will also use the storage to back up all of the other home computers.
• A direct connection to my home theater.
• 1G wired Ethernet connection.
• Lots of processing power.
• Lots of software included.
• Easy access to the server from any other computer on the network.
• Network security.
• Web based filing system to make it easy to amount a large amount of content.

After looking at the system from the top down, it quickly became apparent that any decent consumer solutions will be several generations away, and if any solutions does exist today, it would be very very expensive. Because of this, I decided to build a Linux based PC media center from scratch, with support for everything that I have listed above. The only problem, is that it is going to be very big and ugly, so I also decided to move the server into the basement below the Living room T.V. That way I could connect it up to the home theater system easily, but not see it, or hear it. Finally, I ran Ethernet cables in the basement to create a second gigabit home network, connected with a 1G Ethernet switch, just for devices connected to the media center.

Once I realized that I could work with a standard Linux system, all of the previous limitations of off the shelf systems were gone. I now have a fairly high end system, that has lots of processing power, storage and memory. I don’t need to worry about the form factor, and there are lots of adapters available for all of the media interfaces. I also have lots of free Linux software to choose from for networking, RAID, and capturing and displaying media.

Right now it is up and running, but still pretty basic. I do have the networking set up, and I can display and capture media on my T.V. using software like VLC, and Kino. I have copied all of my home videos, music, and photos over to the server, and display them on my T.V. which makes it easy to watch old home videos without dragging out the old camcorder and connecting it up. I can also easily access all of this digital information from a Windows laptop that I have, if I am not in the living room.

I will add more details and photos once I get time, and things are more integrated. There are still tons of things that I want to do, but it is just great having a large backup server in the house, and all of my digital content in one place.