February 2007 Archives

Last night, I logged onto my Netflix account to update some movie queues that I hadn't looked at for over a month. I have the habit of queuing up and watching over couple dozen movies at a time and then leave the last batch on my home office desk for weeks, if not months, before returning them. (The ridiculous part is that had I simply returned the already watched movies, my new batch would have been waiting for me and my latest movie watching mania.) Whadayaknow, but I found that Netflix's Watch Now feature had been added to my account! I was a bit excited because, unlike the other online, on-demand ventures, Netflix's interface has always been straight-forward and user friendly. I knew up front that Macs/OS X wouldn't be supported. Rather, I assumed it wouldn't be supported. Since I am forced to use Windows for a number of other programs that we use at work, I always have a machine handy (my Parallels Windows XP installation didn't work because I didn't have enough swap space available on the virtual hard drive - I'll be testing that today or tomorrow) and pulled out the UX/90, loaded Internet Explorer and logged into Netflix.

You are first greeted with a request to allow software to be installed on your machine and I clicked OK. As the film I selected was loading, the browser showed a cryptic error that I translated to mean there were issues with the Windows Media Player DRM plugin. (By the way, I love how Microsoft sells their DRM technology to the consumer by claiming it's for your protection. I know that this is partially due to the movie companies, but if software and hardware manufacturers would stand their grounds as the conduit to consumers and resist DRM implementation, life would be a lot easier for all of us.) So, I took the 30 minutes to run the latest Windows Update (this is the only part that really bothers me about the Netflix implementation - one that I realize they have little choice on, except that they could play a PR game and enlist the consumer to get the movie studios and DRM designers to relinquish control to the consumer - the DRM hooks required by the player are pervasive enough that it requires a system restart vis a vis a Windows Media Player update) and restarted.
The next time I went to pull up the movie, it started without any problems. I'm excited about two things: speed/time it takes to start and the quality of the video. (If you want to see how the player really acts, there are videos floating around the net showing functionality - search google.) I have a 3.5mbps/384kbps connection at the house and it took around 10 seconds for the movie to start. The navigation functionality is limited to a player slidebar, volume and a stop and start button. In full screen mode, the playback was flawless. After having dabbled and worked with the guts of transcoding codecs, whatever they are using to produce the image quality I saw is impressive. Either they are depending on raw processing power of a lot of machines to transcode the video or they have a technique that even those of us in the video distribution business (which I became part of last year) don't know about.
Notwithstanding the issue I have with it being a Windows only player, I highly recommend using the service to those who have the bandwidth and the machines on which to use it. My favorite part about it is that I didn't have to do anything extra with my current Netflix account to take advantage of the service - e.g. pay more. So, those of you with Netflix who don't yet have access to the service, hold on to your accounts if you're thinking of canceling or switching to Blockbuster's competing service. If Netflix is true to form, we'll see improvements to the service that will make it even better.

Technorati Tags: internet, netflix, video

When Apple introduced their new AirPort Extreme and I started digging around at the specs, I got quite excited: it could act as a mini file server. I was less excited about the speed specifications of the 802.11n draft because the fact is that it still doesn't come close to performing like gigabit ethernet, and because I'm usually pushing around video content in the gigabytes range, I rely on wires. (Plus, I know that reality never coincides with the test environments where wireless specifications are proven. And, I have so much wireless equipment littering the airwaves in my house that I expect diminished performance in whatever I have bought.)
But, as a mini file server vis a vis a USB Hard Drive, I thought, "wow, my prayers are answered. Apple usually does things the easy way and this has got to be one of those products."
I have seen a number of published reports from MacWorld, MacNN and a few other tech weblogs that have either dissected the device and/or tested primarily wireless performance. Wireless speeds are all across the board. MacWorld has a review that best explains why you will see better speeds using the 5GHz settings instead of 2.4GHz:

When a network was using 2.4GHz channels (or ranges of frequencies) shared by other nearby networks—as many as five networks showed up in testing on one channel—we still saw typical speeds of 50 Mbps. On unused channels, a rarity in cities, we saw rates of 70 to 80 Mbps. (via Macworld Review: AirPort Extreme Base Station)

The fact is that with all of the devices out there that can potentially interfere with products like the AEBS, people should be happy to see performance of half of what it is advertised to do - especially if they are not knowledgeable of what equipment may or may not interfere with the device.
My own opinion has very little to do with the wireless side of the equation (other than, I have my base station set at 802.11n 5GHz only - and it works great that way, except range is very limited in my house), I am more interested in performance as a file server. Simply put: it sucks. If you want to backup, store or share small files - or even tens of thousands of small files - the performance is certainly not that of a file server (or a bastardized Mac being used as a file server), but it is adequate. If you want to serve huge media files, forget it.
I should have known, though. My experience with using small, low power devices as file servers has been telling. An old P5 100MHz was one of the first machines I tried to use as a power file server. It was the first big tower computer I purchased with my own money when I went to college and had done its job for years, but about two years ago, after collecting dust for a year in our basement, I decided to throw OpenBSD on it and set it up as a file server. It performed, but not well. There simply wasn't enough horsepower from the processor or the motherboard to push a lot of large files (large being multi-gigabyte) through my home network. It sufficed for storage, but not a lot of reads and writes from multiple devices. My next attempt was to use a Soekris board an HD connector. Same exact problem: not enough horsepower. So, I ended up biting the bullet and taking a PowerMac G5 that sat idle most of the time and turned it into a file serving power house (to make up for going overboard on the processor of said file server, I used a lot of its idle time to transcode video). With that in place, I was able to transfer 10GB DV files and transcode to my heart's content.
What I had hoped for in the AEBS was something low power to simply copy content to and server content from. I realized that with a 10/100 ethernet connection that transfer speed expectations shouldn't be overly enthusiastic, but they should suffice.
Well, transfer speeds are sufficient. The problem is that the AEBS locks up all the time when transferring large files to and from the attached storage. To simplify my testing, I removed the three 500GB drives from the USB hub and attached one, 500GB LaCie USB drive. I decided that whatever content was to be moved to the drive ought to be moved to it from a wired device. On five different occasions - and the only five I tested with the single drive - the AEBS locked up and I had to unplug it to get it working again. I tested by sending 20GB of 1-2GB video files to the drive. I didn't ever get to the process of reading from the drive... Half of the time, the base station itself would still act as an access point, but clients could no longer access the shared drive.
Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it. I have some thoughts on why this is happening (i.e. memory buffers on the AEBS are filling up, etc.), but Apple should know better. They should know that because their market is somewhat driven by video and music content, they should expect people like me wanting to use the AEBS as a mini file server for said content. If I can't copy large files to it, how shall I ever read from it?
None of what I have written has been proven through scientific method and may be a result of a problem with my specific AEBS (which is why I ordered another one), but it is somewhat telling: don't expect much, if anything out of this file server's capabilities. Hopefully these are issues Apple will fix. This is yet another reason why I hate rev0 Apple products...

Technorati Tags: airport, apple, hardware, wireless