Flash, Chrome & an Atom CPU all walk into a pub

Tried to watch something on 4OD catchup via my HTPC (Zotac ION ATOM 1.6) last week.  Dreadful., choppy and stuttering, in the end I gave up.

Today I decided to debug and see if I could fix it.

Firstly browsing in general also seemed slow.  Hit a well known bandwidth testing site and it was reporting 70-80ms latency.  Odd as no other device in the house showed the same problem, all in the 27-35ms range.

Spent a ton of time looking into this starting with networking\drivers being the source of the problem as it, even started packet tracing!   CLI pings all seemed fine, file download comparisons, all fine.  Finally, and I mean after a day of screwing around and almost a total rebuild, I cleared the cache on Chrome.  Bingo, latency fixed.  WTF! ..

Chrome and pepperflash were throwing the bandwidth test out, and guess what 4OD, flash site .. I think I have found the issue.

Seems like any flash site on Chrome pushes the CPU, on the ATOM its just too much, 90-100% .. Same on my desktop but its a way faster CPU so copes.  Never really appreciated what a great job flashblock does for me.

Switched to Firefox & Adobe Flash and all is well again .. for now

Homeplugs are dead, long live .... well, copper wires.

I've finally given up with my Homeplugs, Netgear HD model.  The throughput was never great but it worked for 'most' things.  But since installing the HTPC I really wanted to stream full 1080p which the HP had no chance, in fact when I started to test bandwidth with iPerf I was truly shocked at how bad they were.


Spent some time looking at new 500Mb plugs but the reality was even with the entire house turned off, I mean everything turned off, fridges, chargers, everything.  Even then the homeplugs connected to a simple four block next to the hub and the t/put was still crap.


So the run STP CAT6 plan kicked in.  


Step one purchase Snake Scope !


Just an excuse really, but actually turned out to be pretty useful.  At least in the early stages it meant I could just drill a small(ish) hole and poke around in the ceiling.  Gave me an idea of what I was up against and proved useful working around beams and stuff.


The chosen wall in the front room, in theory dropped down right above the cloak room toilet on the ground floor.  Six holes later I realised I was looking in the wrong place.  Measure twice cut once as my Dad used to say.


Eventually finding the drop from the front room turned out to be pretty easy. Then it was a case of cutting 'working' holes in the ceiling and making my way through beams - using existing cable holes and towards the study.


Where I came across the problem of getting through the metal supports they'd used to build the gypsum walls.  That proved to be a task easy resolved with another purchase.  This time a flexible drill shaft and a step 4-22mm step drill bit.  Took some time, some swearing and some dangerous balancing on a chair, which in turn balanced an old tower PC.  A H&S person would have imploded on the spot.


I bought some faceplates etc to give a nice finish and then patching up required dustless sanding.  googling how I stumbled across a youtube link showing how to smooth the filler with just a rough sponge and warm water, which I tried and worked OK.

Building a Home Theatre PC (HTPC)

Whilst the PS3 has done a sterling job of being a front room media centre its not perfect and I'd debated building a true HTPC for while.


A certain error whilst watching something on the PS3 kicked started me into investigating alternative options.


Normal requirements. HDMI, decent sound and enough power to run a full 1080p on my TV. I'd had decent success with ITX in the past so quite fancied that route.


After a day of reading I settled on the Zotac ION ATOM N330 Dual Core D-E with 4GB (overkill) of RAM and a Morex Cubid 3688 Silver case.  Ordered and delivered the following day from ITX Warehouse.  Who run a fantastic service.  I already had HDD and cables, no SSD here.


My first intention was just to make use of VLC, web browser, maybe even look at MS Media centre.  But during the day of reading I stumbled across XBMC, something which everyone I spoke to afterwards had heard of and tried.  I must have been under my rock that day.  But the screen shots looked amazing, open source, ie free, live cd, all major OS' supported.  Interesting Mr Bond.


With the hardware assembled, which was the normal breeze I fired up the USB boot key created using instructions from mini-itx.com.  FAIL.  Maybe the keys, or something else but I couldn't get the PC to boot so ended up creating a XBMC liveboot CD and installed using that.  XBMC installed and started to load but bombed out just at the part the GUI launches.  So I suspect video drivers.  Being LINUX I knew this was a bad road to be walking down, and as this was R&D and I already new wireless mice and keyboards where on the horizon, ie more LINUX driver fun, I opted to fall back on tried and 'trusted' (well, trusted is probably the wrong descriptive) Windows 7. Unconsciously I made a 32bit decision - just habit I think.


Windows installed, drivers updated.  Installed XBMC and fired it up.  Oh I like this, allot. Pretty intuitive, adding the SMB media paths from my NAS all just worked and then I found the Library view which showed all the pretty covers, plot summaries etc .. Movies, TV Shows, Music .. all worked seamlessly.  The 'scrapers' went and matched all the TV shows, music and all but two of the films, which I fixed using NFO files.


The IONITX dealt easily with a local 1080p file.  Not so streaming across the LAN - Homeplugs, nor WLAN, which is expected.  That actually had me delving deeper into my homeplug speed only to discover its crap, seriously so.  I have something in the house which is killing the t/put.  I need to investigate that or hope AV2 resolves it.


I'm still experimenting with the look and feel of XBMC but so far its a hit for video 720p and below and music is fine.


I added a plugin for iPlayer - which works, and TVCatchup, which doesn't.  Although it did once, odd. 


So far so good .. Although I have ordered a new 60mm 'silent' fan.  The one with the case is a little noisy.


EDIT : TVCatchup now working again.  Nothing done.  Also found a great iPhone app which uses the HTML interface to control the server.  XBMC Remote.