Dear Apple: bring out a 3-u xserve with built in RAID cages and redundent memory banks! you cannot imagine how cool it is having a bank of memory on standby in the domain controller or NAS controller if one stick goes bad in the middle of peak production (which is the only time it happens of cource!)
Another interesting note about the Xeon Xserves is that it's about an inch deeper than the Xserve G5! I was looking at the ones we just got, and the black rails do seem an odd touch considering everything about the Xserve is silver. I am not too sure I like having to remove the Xserve to service it. I think it was easier adding memory the way the Xserve G5s were setup, but I configured my Xeon Xserves with the memory I wanted. I probably won't be adding memory for a year or so minimum, although 1 never knows.
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
Hypothetically, you could use it as a render node if you were into video editing or 3D animation work, but it really doesn't make sense to use it at home.
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
Yeah dude I'm feeling very inadequate at the moment hearing all these 1337 peoples prattle on about their server room stories
I last saw a server room almost 3 years ago.... *sniff* ....And never saw a bunch of xServes
Though in 2000-2001 there was a ton of PowerMac G4s in the server room at an SF Bay Area company I was working at ...Ah, memories. Frack me, two 1U racks of Xserve Xeons could have replaced like 10 of those PowerMac G4s in that server room.....
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
If you have like a library of 50 DVD movies you could use it as a dedicated machine to just do all the conversion to smaller, yet same great resolution/quality H.264 videos..... But you'd have to buy a server rack to fit it into. And put it in an air-con room in summer
Lots and lots of family photos, or video (I'm thinking ripped DVDs) which could then be available for watching to anyone on the home network. That's what I'd use it for anyhow.
Photos and videos aren't hard to store or serve. The initial re-encoding of video might take a lot of time, but it's a one-time job. For the same price as a base Xserve, with just one 80GB hard drive, you can buy a mini and nine 500MB mini Stack hard drives.
Another interesting note about the Xeon Xserves is that it's about an inch deeper than the Xserve G5! I was looking at the ones we just got, and the black rails do seem an odd touch considering everything about the Xserve is silver. I am not too sure I like having to remove the Xserve to service it. I think it was easier adding memory the way the Xserve G5s were setup, but I configured my Xeon Xserves with the memory I wanted. I probably won't be adding memory for a year or so minimum, although 1 never knows.
It is on rails and assuming you use proper cable management you should be able to slide it forward, pop the top and do your business...besides, the only time you should have to open it is to add ram or replace failed equipment...and for the most part, if your server isnt DOA, and stays up for the first few HRs with no hiccupos, you are in the clear on that... and if you spec the server correctly for its duty, you shouldnt need more ram...unless you do other upgrades like new software versions before the next hardware cycle.
Photos and videos aren't hard to store or serve. The initial re-encoding of video might take a lot of time, but it's a one-time job. For the same price as a base Xserve, with just one 80GB hard drive, you can buy a mini and nine 500MB mini Stack hard drives.
Or a super-powerfull dual core AMD-64 beige box ,load it with Linux, rip and encode your stuff, then serve up to all the Macs on the LAN via NFS for well under $1500
Who cares if the server has a slick UI, servers are a utilitarian thing, paying a premium for an Apple server for anything other than work group management/app deployment is insain.
....Or a super-powerfull dual core AMD-64 beige box....
Nah. Overclocked Core2Duo (Conroe) E6400 -- 2.+ ghz to 3ghz easy on stock cooling. Cheap and powerful for all one's ripping and encoding tasks.
By the way, I've hit the aesthetic gold mine - DVD-Rip using MacTheRipper, then XVID via FFMPEGX, 640x360 (for 16:9) Qmin3 Qmax3 --- let's just say 44 minutes is about 260mb. Set bitrate to 1500 - don't worry because the Qmin Qmax is constant, so the bitrate will be, whatever it is, even if you set it to 1500, it'll work out the appropriate bitrate on the fly. On average with TV shows, you get 16:9, 44 minutes weighing in at 260mb. SCORE. Be sure to adjust brightness to 5, contrast to 12 or something like that. Crop 4,4,4,4 to make sure you don't get any extraneous edges (sometimes with some DVDs, older ones usually)... Crop accordingly for 16:9 or 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 of course. XVID has even in single pass, an ability to make the "blockiness" almost "painterly" if the source is film-mastered-encoded-to-DVD-Mpeg2 (most of the recent TV shows and movies released on DVD) and shot with a short depth of field. I find adjusting the contrast upwards prevents XVID from artifacting most notably on shades of grey -- or darker shades of colours, it blocks up bad, though not majorly noticable unless you're an aesthete when it comes to encoding... But yeah bumping the contrast up makes the colour gradations more distinct and XVID handles that alright. Subtle dark shade gradations not so good.
You will notice that TV shows and movies -- sequences which are "effect" with a very high contrast, stark-looking images, particularly "a hot LA daylight flashback sequence" -- in XVID the imagery "pops" off the LCD screen real well.
Yeah, someday I wanna be a Director of Photography... \ Working with film stock and different lenses and all that stuff is way cool. Though digital is banging hard on the door. But dreams give hope, you don't have to fly every airline or the newest or oldest plane to be in the clouds.
I love a film magazine review of "Miami Vice" - to paraphrase - The picture is grainy and the dialog inaudible but at least the soundtrack is kinda cool, if you can handle a Moby sample over and over washing through the movie. Heh. That whole drugs- cops- and- robbers lingo was pretty much jibberish. Most of the time I had to look at Jamie Foxx's expressions to try and get what the hell they were actually doing/ planning/ not doing/ not planning.
Yeah, anyway... FFMPEGX... that's on the iBook G4 933mhz. With the right software on WinXPPro2 on a 3ghz Conroe with 2GB of RAM, just a 7200rpm SATA drive, or RAID[0+1] across say 4 200GB(or more...?) SATA drives, sweet.
Once the ripping and encoding is done though, then move it to the silent and cool Mac Mini (as suggested several posts up) + FW400 DriveStack that's RAID1'd (but how is data recovery on Mac OSX Raid 1????) as a movie server. [insert: .....iTV ..!!!!]
Max res though is 1440 x 1080 , with 1920 x 1080 planned. 90nm LSI (large-scale integrated circuit).
I know tons of people on Mac and Windows and Linux that would *KILL* for this to be smoothly integrated into a GPU chipset. Or just an add-on card, that's cool too. HELLO INTEL, NVIDIA, ATI, AMD, YA HEAR US???? HARDWARE H.264 encoding!!! Now!!! Wooooooooo
Above info thanks to hardmac.com who also recommends the x264 codec for H.264 encoding via quicktime, claims faster, better, more options, etc. Should be for OSX, Universal Binary, AFAIK. Link here: https://developer.berlios.de/projects/x264qtcodec/
Comments
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
Hypothetically, you could use it as a render node if you were into video editing or 3D animation work, but it really doesn't make sense to use it at home.
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
Yeah dude I'm feeling very inadequate at the moment hearing all these 1337 peoples prattle on about their server room stories
I last saw a server room almost 3 years ago.... *sniff* ....And never saw a bunch of xServes
Though in 2000-2001 there was a ton of PowerMac G4s in the server room at an SF Bay Area company I was working at
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
If you have like a library of 50 DVD movies you could use it as a dedicated machine to just do all the conversion to smaller, yet same great resolution/quality H.264 videos..... But you'd have to buy a server rack to fit it into. And put it in an air-con room in summer
I admit it looks very cool... now can anyone think how I can justify buying one for home? What the heck could I use it for...?
File server? Overkill, but damn cool overkill.
Lots and lots of family photos, or video (I'm thinking ripped DVDs) which could then be available for watching to anyone on the home network. That's what I'd use it for anyhow.
Photos and videos aren't hard to store or serve. The initial re-encoding of video might take a lot of time, but it's a one-time job. For the same price as a base Xserve, with just one 80GB hard drive, you can buy a mini and nine 500MB mini Stack hard drives.
Another interesting note about the Xeon Xserves is that it's about an inch deeper than the Xserve G5! I was looking at the ones we just got, and the black rails do seem an odd touch considering everything about the Xserve is silver. I am not too sure I like having to remove the Xserve to service it. I think it was easier adding memory the way the Xserve G5s were setup, but I configured my Xeon Xserves with the memory I wanted. I probably won't be adding memory for a year or so minimum, although 1 never knows.
It is on rails and assuming you use proper cable management you should be able to slide it forward, pop the top and do your business...besides, the only time you should have to open it is to add ram or replace failed equipment...and for the most part, if your server isnt DOA, and stays up for the first few HRs with no hiccupos, you are in the clear on that... and if you spec the server correctly for its duty, you shouldnt need more ram...unless you do other upgrades like new software versions before the next hardware cycle.
Photos and videos aren't hard to store or serve. The initial re-encoding of video might take a lot of time, but it's a one-time job. For the same price as a base Xserve, with just one 80GB hard drive, you can buy a mini and nine 500MB mini Stack hard drives.
Or a super-powerfull dual core AMD-64 beige box ,load it with Linux, rip and encode your stuff, then serve up to all the Macs on the LAN via NFS for well under $1500
Who cares if the server has a slick UI, servers are a utilitarian thing, paying a premium for an Apple server for anything other than work group management/app deployment is insain.
....Or a super-powerfull dual core AMD-64 beige box....
Nah. Overclocked Core2Duo (Conroe) E6400 -- 2.+ ghz to 3ghz easy on stock cooling. Cheap and powerful for all one's ripping and encoding tasks.
By the way, I've hit the aesthetic gold mine - DVD-Rip using MacTheRipper, then XVID via FFMPEGX, 640x360 (for 16:9) Qmin3 Qmax3 --- let's just say 44 minutes is about 260mb. Set bitrate to 1500 - don't worry because the Qmin Qmax is constant, so the bitrate will be, whatever it is, even if you set it to 1500, it'll work out the appropriate bitrate on the fly. On average with TV shows, you get 16:9, 44 minutes weighing in at 260mb. SCORE. Be sure to adjust brightness to 5, contrast to 12 or something like that. Crop 4,4,4,4 to make sure you don't get any extraneous edges (sometimes with some DVDs, older ones usually)... Crop accordingly for 16:9 or 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 of course. XVID has even in single pass, an ability to make the "blockiness" almost "painterly" if the source is film-mastered-encoded-to-DVD-Mpeg2 (most of the recent TV shows and movies released on DVD) and shot with a short depth of field. I find adjusting the contrast upwards prevents XVID from artifacting most notably on shades of grey -- or darker shades of colours, it blocks up bad, though not majorly noticable unless you're an aesthete when it comes to encoding... But yeah bumping the contrast up makes the colour gradations more distinct and XVID handles that alright. Subtle dark shade gradations not so good.
You will notice that TV shows and movies -- sequences which are "effect" with a very high contrast, stark-looking images, particularly "a hot LA daylight flashback sequence" -- in XVID the imagery "pops" off the LCD screen real well.
Yeah, someday I wanna be a Director of Photography...
I love a film magazine review of "Miami Vice" - to paraphrase - The picture is grainy and the dialog inaudible but at least the soundtrack is kinda cool, if you can handle a Moby sample over and over washing through the movie. Heh. That whole drugs- cops- and- robbers lingo was pretty much jibberish. Most of the time I had to look at Jamie Foxx's expressions to try and get what the hell they were actually doing/ planning/ not doing/ not planning.
Yeah, anyway... FFMPEGX... that's on the iBook G4 933mhz. With the right software on WinXPPro2 on a 3ghz Conroe with 2GB of RAM, just a 7200rpm SATA drive, or RAID[0+1] across say 4 200GB(or more...?) SATA drives, sweet.
Once the ripping and encoding is done though, then move it to the silent and cool Mac Mini (as suggested several posts up) + FW400 DriveStack that's RAID1'd (but how is data recovery on Mac OSX Raid 1????) as a movie server. [insert: .....iTV ..!!!!]
Heh.
First off the block: Fujitsu reveals realtime hardware-encoding of H.264. Woot.
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/news/p...061130-01.html
Max res though is 1440 x 1080 , with 1920 x 1080 planned. 90nm LSI (large-scale integrated circuit).
I know tons of people on Mac and Windows and Linux that would *KILL* for this to be smoothly integrated into a GPU chipset. Or just an add-on card, that's cool too. HELLO INTEL, NVIDIA, ATI, AMD, YA HEAR US???? HARDWARE H.264 encoding!!! Now!!! Wooooooooo