Today I played with vails ability to stream media from my EX470. The music and pictures appeared fine but the movies has me somewhat confused. For testing movies I placed WMV, AVI, MP4, and MKV files on it. None of those files actually show up as available for remote access streaming I knew the MKV's would not show up but I did expect to see atleast one of the fomats appear. Instead I got a bunch of camera movie files my daughter had burried within her pictures of my grandchildren which was cool because they played and some pod cast files played but I have no clue where they came from.

The day prior Vail reported I had 2 videos available to for streaming but would not display them until today. Could be something with the EX470 slowing the process down. I may build a test machine just to see if some of the slowness is Vail or the EX470 but for now I just blame the EX470 but I do have to rule out Vail as well.

Anyway I finally got around to turning on my WD TV Live and was able to stream perfectly a Blu-Ray MKV rip of 2012 I dumped onto vail to see how it would handle larger files but I was impressed that this movie streamed so well I actually watched it in its entirety. Funny thing about this is that on my other HP EX470 with a BE2300, 2 GB RAM and HP3.0 software installed this particular movie does stream but not as well but then again that server is more active with things then the Vail Server is.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

I tried streaming GI Joe blu-ray which is a very high bitrate movie from the MSS Vail server via http which was working fine until I added the task of copying another blu-ray movie from Andromeda to the MSS Vail server while the movie was playing. The movie froze and wouldn't play at all (video or audio). Also the file copy didn't complete, (although I don't think that was problem with the Vail server). The file copy stopped about 3/4 way through, the progress bar turned red and the disk in Andromeda the movie was copying from dropped out of the storage pool. That same drive in Andromeda has done that before, so I think that drive is headed for a warranty replacement.

I have not tried to do multiple things with Vail on the EX470 just yet. I tried a few things just to see how it handled thing. Soon I will throw multiple tasks at it to see how it does. While everything appears to be fine with the EX470 I do believe that its somewhat slow when I log on to Vail both Remote and Local. I am thinking I should build another test unit for testing Vail out so I can get a true measure of its performance then I can simply convert the test unit into an HTPC but I have some thinking about doing that right now but I know I want to.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Logging into the Dashboard from my laptop is very slow. RDP from my PC is pretty fast, but the Dashboard loads up pretty slow.

The slowness of the load has me concerned. You know I antisipate my test with an EX470 with the stock processor to be a contributer of the slowness but yours has a 3800+ so I would not imagine it to be slow loading the Dashboard. Thing is that once your on the Dashboard its not so bad but I do see that in my case the responsiveness is not where it should be giving me the impression that a more powerful server is needed then just a stock EX470 with a RAM upgrade of 2 GB.

I do like the Launchpad though as it will make it much easier for new people to be able to Remote Access their servers and it looks as if they got the idea from HP and took it a step further. I do have mixed feelings on how one first connects to vail when their computer boots up. On one hand I see Microsoft has elliminated the User Name and Password issues that plagued the lower end Windows versions on the other hand I liked it very much when WHS used my logon credentials from my client to log me on the the server as in WHS-1. I think this would be better if the user could chose how they wanted to actually have their client logon to their server but I do see some value in it for beginners but its just another thing to logon to from the client end that I am not sure I like personally but I could be looking at this wrong or maybe I am just getting lazy in my old age. Just sometimes Less is More.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8