Building a Vortexbox media appliance

The specs of my test mule, for posterity sake, are as follows:

Compaq Presario S4110CL - 2002 manufacture date

• Asus A7N8X-LA motherboard, proprietary for Compaq
• AMD Athlon 2600+ 2.08 GHz Socket A processor
• Nvidia nForce2 chipset
• Nvidiea nForce2 10/100 ethernet
• 1gb DDR memory

Since I'm not a total glutten for punishment, I did add these items:

• Rosewill RC-215 VIA PCI SATA Controller Card - $19 at the time, $11 now
• Hitachi Deskstar HDS5C3020ALA632 2TB drive ($79 when I bought it, now $229, yikes!)
• Intel 82541PI Gigabit Ethernet Controller - from my parts drawer, but <$30 for gigabit

Fired up the install CD and in less than 15 minutes the new Vortexbox was installed. From here you can simply disconnect the monitor and set it somewhere out of the way. All management from this point will be done via the web console and, in extreme cases, SSH. The Vortexbox simply names itself, Vortexbox, and can be accessed by going to http://vortexbox in your browser. Simple enough.

In the web console you'll want to do some small set up tasks, such as deciding if you want your music mirrored to MP3 and ALAC or if you just want it in FLAC format. Consequently for DVDs you'll need to decide if you want them in just MKV or also MP4 and M2TS. By the way, that DVD rip, on a non-HD DVD it takes about 11-16 minutes and does a bit-by-bit copy of the movie, even preserving the 7 channel audio.

The Vortexbox does a good job of finding the CD and DVD titles, and does a good job of finding CD art. It, however, does not find DVD metadata. For this you'll want a 3rd party program such as YAMMM (Yet Another Media Meta Manager). Be sure to set your cover art settings to the correct pixel size on the DLNA page of the Vortexbox web console or some DLNA appliances, such as our Samsung TV, will have trouble presenting the cover art.

So how does it work? Flawlessly, absolutely flawlessly... DLNA broadcast to our Samsung TV works beautifully without a single pause or buffer and our stereo receiver picks up the 7 channel audio and automatically switches to Dolby mode. The iTunes server and Squeezeserver functions also work great. Using the not-so accurate-for-absolute-fastest-speed-numbers LAN Speed Test application, I was able to write at 371Mbps to the Vortexbox samba share, and read at 655Mbps for a 100mb file. A gigabit file came in slightly slower, way more than enough for even the biggest streaming, especially since our Samsung TV only has a 100Mbps connection anyway. This old box idles at a respectable 50w as told by the Kill-a-Watt, and doesn't change when serving a movie. It does jump up to about 70w when ripping a movie, but that only takes <15min each.

Do I have any cons for the Vortexbox? It's free and it's awesome, that should be enough to give it a try yourself, there are some small things though. The FAQs on the site have great "modification" articles, but any upgrade seems to wipe out most of your modifications. The developer(s) are very active on the Vortexbox forums and responsive to issues, but when running something like this it sure doesn't hurt to be able to do a little digging and figure some things out on your own, sometimes even going to the code level and giving a little back. Some third party tools, such as MakeMKV, are eval versions and you need to upgrade the Vortexbox periodically to update MakeMKV and keep DVDs ripping. But overall those are small potatoes with all the great things the Vortexbox can do for you. My wife has been ripping our entire DVD collection on the premise of simply getting rid of them and cleaning up the clutter. Movie nights now simply consist of powering on the TV, scrolling through our list of movie titles by DLNA, and then watching whatever we choose.

The Vortexbox is easily something that could cost hundreds of dollars that you only see during the Parade of Homes, but due to the generousity of the developers, it's free to you for only the cost of an old PC and a few minutes of your time. Of course, for those without an old PC to use or lacking the time and/or inclination to make one on your own, you can always buy a pre-built appliance at the Vortexbox store.