The intent of this article is to provide an approach to setting up a network media player and specifically, how to setup a Helios X5000 Network Media Player. This article is about two-years late in coming, since the firm that manufactured Helios X5000 shutdown its operations in 2008.
As I have mentioned in my other blogs. Helios X5000 was an innovative product and ahead of its times. The firm that manufactured X5000 and few other products ran into multiple issues related to customer support of a complicated technology product, highly competitive dynamics of consumer electronic business, threats due to branding conflicts, multiple threats of lawsuits and finally ran out of capital.
I noticed a couple of product issues, which could have been fixed, if the firm were able to survive. These product issues related to online access of multimedia content from Internet, firmware updates to take care of relatively infrequent issues related to audio synchronization, freezing up of the firmware after watching a long movie--an issue that currently requires a hard reboot of X5000. However, there was nothing that couldn't have been fixed with a few enhancements of the firmware and NeoLink media server software.
Helios X5000 has a network interface that allows it to communicate with a Media Server running FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) protocol to play the content on your music system and TV. Most of the network media players support FLAC protocol. You can find more about FLAC here on Wikipedia. You don't have to be running NeoLink Media Server for Helios X5000. Based on theory, I believe that Microsoft Media Center should work with Helios X5000 too but someone will have to test it out. Similarly, I hypothesize that NeoLink Media Server will work with Netgear or D-Link network media players too. Though, you will have no reason to use NeoLink media server with Netgear digital media receivers, such as, EVA8000 or EVA9150, due to product issues that I have mentioned in my previous paragraph.
Setup of multimedia server is critical to (a) making your content safe from data corruption or disk damage, (b) easily accessible from the digital media player and (c) scalable to include unlimited new content, viz., movies, music and family pictures without disrupting the previous content.
If you have bought a DVD or music CD, then under the fair use protection of copyright laws, you as a consumer are allowed to make a legal backup copy of the DVD or CD. However, this provision does come into conflict with the prohibition on circumvention of copy protections and encryption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Therefore, ripping DVDs, even the ones you have bought, to play them through digital media servers in the privacy of your home may be in the gray zone of legal issues surrounding protection of intellectual property rights. No such issues exist with DVDs or CDs that are not encrypted and, of course, your family videos and pictures. Similarly, there are no such issues around the paid music and video content that you may have downloaded from Apple iTunes, Amazon.com or other similar legal websites.
If you are going to use a dedicated PC as your multimedia content server in your home, it is best to install a minimal Windows operating system on the machine and "disable" all the non-essential services. This will improve performance, capacity and security of your PC, which you will be using as the media server. If you are going to keep your multimedia server in a hidden corner, you may want to turn-on the terminal server on that machine, so that you can use a remote desktop connection (RDC) to manage the your hidden PC. It is best to use a wired gigabit connection, since the size of video files can often exceed four gigabytes. Wi-Fi will be fine but woefully slow. Please note that the Helios X5000 hardware has a 100baseT network interface. Therefore, it can't operate above the speed allowed by Fast Ethernet protocol, which is 100 megabit/second. However, you would certainly like to achieve higher speeds of file transfer, if you are setting up your media server PC in a hidden location and if you want to quickly transfer movie files from your laptop to your media server PC. For those who want to get into higher end networking, I would recommend creation of a sub-network exclusively for multimedia networking. This way you will ensure that nothing gets in the way of you and your multimedia experience. Sub-networking is complex, therefore, unless you know exactly how to setup and manage it, you may want to avoid it initially.
Your media server PC will need tons of storage space. A low-cost approach is to install an internal PCI or PCI-Express USB card with multiple USB ports in the PC and keep on adding external USB hard drives as you run out of space. Alternately, you can use a USB hub connected to your PC with multiple external hard drives attached to the USB hub. If none of these options match your needs, you can buy a high-end network storage device such as Netgear ReadyNAS NV. If you are looking into using something similar to ReadyNAS, you may want to review my blog on how to enhance such devices here. Interestingly, if you are planning to use ReadyNAS type of devices, you would be pleased to know that many such devices already come with a network media server built into the firmware, thus obviating the need for setting up a separate PC as a media server. All you have to do is to connect to the storage device using a browser, setup the media server and load multimedia content.
If you are going to be setting up a dedicated PC as a media server, my recommendation is to use Windows XP as the operating system for the multimedia server, since NeoLink running on Windows XP integrates effectively with Helios X5000 hardware and remote control. Though, I have not yet tested, I believe Windows Media Center on Windows 7 should work equally effectively. By the way, I did try TwonkyVision media server software about two years back but did not like the graphical interface. If you are willing to experiment, you can test out TwonkyVision (http://www.twonkyvision.com) and Tversity (http://tversity.com) media servers. I hope they have improved since I tested them. There are media servers available for Linux OS too. Some day, I might review them in my copious free time (lol).
After installing NeoLink Server, you may want to move a shortcut to NeoLink server in the "Startup" folder, so that NeoLink Server is automatically kick-started, whenever PC is turned on. NeoLink server creates three folders for storing video, audio and digital still picture content. NeoLink server can read MP3 tag information about artist, genre, album, label and display it on the TV to facilitate search and selection of music content.
Multimedia servers play streaming video and audio. Therefore, DVD menus are not compatible with multimedia servers. If you are making a copy of a DVD to play it through the digital media player, then I'd recommend removing DVD-menus and keeping the main movie only. DVDFab software available at http://www.dvdfab.com allows removal of DVD-menus. AOA DVD Copy is another similar software. Both these software generate unencrypted .VOB files of the DVD movie. If you don't want to reduce the resolution of DVD picture, then extract DVD9 as DVD9 without reducing its size. A DVD9 has up to 7.95 gigabytes of data. After running DVD extract, each .VOB video file except the last one will be one gigabyte in size. Therefore, after extracting the "main movie" .VOB files from the DVD using DVDFab or AOA DVD Copy, you will find that generally a 90 minute movie will have three four-gigabyte files and one smaller file, which will be the last one in VIDEO_TS folder. AUDIO_TS folder will be blank. The .VOB files in VIDEO_TS folder will follow the naming scheme VTS_nn_n.VOB. Both these software will allow you to select one of the options among AC3 5.1 or DTS sound, if available. In addition, if DVD has multiple subscripts or captions available, you will be able to choose the captions. In order not to confuse the Helios X5000 player, it is preferable to select one sound option and one subscript option. Though, you can select multiple subscript options and test for yourself. It will work. The video extract directory will contain several other files, such as, .IFO, .VOBs that contain blank spacers or menus, for instance, VIDEO_TS.VOB and .BUP that are backups, etc. These are now no use for your streaming media player. You can happily delete them.
Now you have multiple .VOB video files. These .VOB files are ready to be put in the video folder of the multimedia server (your PC running NeoLink software) and played one by one in the right order. But it is kind of clumsy and annoying to play these files one by one. Therefore, the right approach is to concatenate these .VOB files into a single valid subject unit, for instance, a movie, a show or a family event. If you want to check and confirm, which one is which, then VLC Media Player available for free from http://www.videolan.org is one of the best software for playing/streaming .VOB files. You may want to note that a .VOB file is a container for a MPEG2 file. Therefore, if you rename .VOB file as .MPG file, it will play in Windows Media Player. But without going into the gory details of the differences between .VOB and .MPG files, I'd recommend not renaming .VOB files as .MPG files.
Let's get back to the topic of concatenation or joining of .VOB files. The right approach is to concatenate or join these files without re-encoding. Re-encoding is messy, time-consuming and may result in loss of quality. Here is the best approach to joining .VOB files: Use simple and easy Windows DOS command, which continues to be available even in Windows 7. The format of this concatenation command is as follows:
copy VTS_02_0.VOB /B + VTS_02_1.VOB /B + VTS_02_2.VOB /B "My New Movie (R).VOB" /B
This command will concatenate all these .VOB video files into a new "My New Movie (R).VOB" file. We are using /B switches to indicate that the input and output files are binary files. You noticed that I added an (R) in the file name to indicate the movie rating. This is a good way of concatenation of video files without re-encoding and you can test the output file using VLC Media Player.
Interestingly, someone has written a utility called VOBMerge that performs the same steps that are listed above in a much better way using a point-and-click graphical interface. You can download the latest version of this utility from http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VOBMerge or an older version from here. I've not tested the latest release but the old version has been working quite effectively for me.
Now let's quickly recap the steps that we have performed. You have a home network. We setup a PC with minimal Windows XP OS. We turned on the terminal server to control the PC placed in a hidden location from our laptop, even though this step was not essential. Then we installed Helios NeoLink Server and added it to "Startup" folder for automatic start-up. Our next step was to extract .VOB files from a DVD using DVDFab/AOA DVD Copy or other similar software. Then we concatenated those video files into a single .VOB file with a meaningful name and rating. Now we are ready to put this file in the video folder of the NeoLink media server. At this point of time you may want to decide on a movie classification scheme, such as, classification by genre, director or artist and create suitable folders under the video folder. If you think creatively, you can use multiple classification schemes. The best way to do it is to place the movie on a separate disk and copy a softlink (called shortcut on Windows) under the suitable video folder watched by NeoLink media server. Use of these shortcuts will allow you to create multiple links/shortcuts to the same file from different folders. Which means that now you can classify files under multiple genre as well as use multiple classification schemes without having to duplicate the file. Finally, I strongly recommend making all your video files, music files, photos, shortcuts and relevant folders watched by the media server on your PC "read-only". This reduces the chances of accidental corruption of files and hard drive. Under Windows you can easily do it by left-clicking on file properties and checking "read only" option under the general properties tab.
MP3 files are placed under an audio/music folder watched by NeoLink media server. NeoLink media server can read MP3 tags and classify files by album, genre, artist, etc. You can use a good MP3 tag editor to edit MP3 tags of music files for a suitable classification scheme. Roxio Creator 2010 is a good software for extracting MP3 files, since it checks an Internet database to setup correct MP3 tags.
Similarly, jpeg picture files can be put under the photo folder watched by NeoLink media server. These will appear under Photos on Helios X5000. You can create multiple folders under Photos. Each one will appear as an album.
Here is a picture of the setup of a multimedia server. This is a standard setup that can be used for any media server. Basically, all the multimedia content is stored and served from a PC running a media server software over a network.
The digital network media player hardware (for instance, Helios X5000) allows remote control operations, integrates music system, TV with the computer and allows you to access online media content over the Internet. Online media content access on Helios X5000 is pretty poor.The picture below shows the first screen of Helios X5000 media player. By the way, you can setup multiple media servers and all of media servers that are accessible over the network will show on this screen. You can select the media server that you want to access on this screen.
For instance, if you are running a Windows 7 machine on the same network with Windows Media Center, it will show up on this screen with a Windows icon and name of the computer.
Here is a picture of Helios X5000 home screen as it appears on a flat screen digital TV. All videos watched by NeoLink media server on the PC will show up under Videos, music files will show up under Music and still pictures under Photos.The following pictures show how other screens are displayed on the TV screen by Helios X5000 network media player. The last picture at the bottom, which is a stock picture from Helios website, shows a detailed configuration of Helios X5000.
