Advice on media server setup

1. Doesn't matter.
2. Not necessarily, I serve the recorded files up and play them over the network.
3. Let WMS on the server do the recordings and WMC on the playback machine play them back.
4. Doesn't matter as long as you're down with the quirks of replacing MSVidCtl.dll etc.

I use a similar setup only the media server sleeps as well as the playback machine and I use WOL with mc-wol.exe to wake the server up when I want to play stuff otherwise I let WMC running on it wake it up to record stuff and it serves up the directory WMC records stuff in to the playback machine(s). I don't let Windows decide when to sleep, instead use batch files running Steve Gibson's Wizmo.exe sleep command to check if there are recordings going on or other processes I don't want disturbed or whether RDP is active (the idea being to RDP to the machine when playing stuff or setting new things up to be recorded so you can (a) put it back to sleep when you're done watching and (b) to block the scheduled tasks I run to put the machine to sleep after recordings every half hour or so, I don't playback stuff over RDP though, not enough network bandwidth). Windows never could make it's mind up about sleeping properly, just not within the paradigm to have a server sleeping I guess. You do have to be a little careful playing a recording on the playback machine with WMC that currently being recorded and WMC also gets it's knickers in a twist when you run WMC on the playback machine when the media server is recording, if WMC says the file is only 1 minute long you either need to copy it somewhere else or fire up WMC on the playback machine with the server sleeping and then wake the server up and let WMC see everything again. And you probably want those scheduled tasks to sleep the machine log their output because it can take a bit to get everything bedded down properly, but it is possible.

sleep batch file:

date /t
set prompt=$t $p$g

rem see if wmc is actually recording something
sc query ehsched | find "STOPPED" > nul
if errorlevel 1 exit

rem see if winamp is running
tasklist /fi "imagename eq winamp.exe" | find ":" > nul
if errorlevel 1 exit

rem wizmo.exe quiet standby! not sure the damit version (!) is safe
wizmo.exe quiet hibernate

 

And the nightly sleep batch file is something like this where it checks for RDP before calling the sleep batch in the previous post:

date /t
set prompt=$t $p$g

rem see if RDP sesssion active
query user | find "rdp-tcp" > nul
if errorlevel 1 goto good
exit
:good

rem taskscheduler seems to have an issue sleeping immediately after firing off a task so wait a bit...
timeout /t 66 >nul

sleep.bat

 

And I also like to put a bunch of pings after the MC-WOL command so you can tell when the server finally wakes up..

mc-wol.exe server's MAC
ping -n 100 server's IP