This week­end, I did some­thing really cool (for me). I got to watch a March Mad­ness game on my TV that CBS wasn’t show­ing in my local mar­ket on my TV, with­out pay­ing the cable com­pany. Life is full of short vic­to­ries, and this is one of mine. More impor­tantly, I real­ized I’m liv­ing in the heav­enly juke­box I used to talk about in my pre­sen­ta­tions years ago.

I’ve been actively build­ing my cloud for the last six months, but I’ve been build­ing towards this for the last ten years. The caveat is that the way I’ve built this setup works for me, and one-size def­i­nitely doesn’t fit all. I’m lucky to have the resources to build my cloud, and I know most peo­ple won’t go to these lengths to get more media. It should all be eas­ier and work bet­ter than it does in 2010, but there’s no one really great solu­tion yet (that I know of).

Why a cloud?

It started last August when I decided it was time to inves­ti­gate a cen­tral­ized backup solu­tion, a way to lis­ten to our music col­lec­tion from any­where, and the abil­ity to lis­ten to dif­fer­ent music in dif­fer­ent rooms of the house. In my ideal world, I also wanted sim­i­lar access for video, a way to eas­ily watch inter­net video (eg, YouTube, Hulu) on my TV, and the abil­ity to stream Net­flix to my TV. The off­site stor­age is impor­tant to me (I used to backup to Mozy, but I also want to own my data, and the idea of repli­cat­ing sen­si­tive doc­u­ments on servers owned by com­pa­nies focused on the bot­tom line (Drop­box, Microsoft Live, etc.) wasn’t very appeal­ing to me.

I did a lot of research and couldn’t find any­thing that let me do every­thing, but Win­dows Home Server soft­ware came close, so I pur­chased an HP Medi­as­mart EX485 server. As the name implies, the Medi­as­mart series is designed to give con­sumers access to their media from any­where. It comes with Win­dows Home Server soft­ware pre-installed and out of the box, it’s sup­posed to do the fol­low­ing things:

• Backup all of the com­put­ers on your net­work auto­mat­i­cally on a sched­ule you set. This includes dif­fer­en­tial back­ups and restores.
• Peri­od­i­cally grab media from all of those com­put­ers and copy it to the server.
• Main­tain your router and DNS set­tings so that your server is acces­si­ble from out­side of your network.
• Give you access to all of your doc­u­ments, files, music, and video from anywhere.

I say “sup­pos­edly,” because I’ve never been able to get the media col­lec­tor to work con­sis­tently, and the inter­face to the music col­lec­tion is under-described by the term “sucks.” I had to rip most of my CDs for the first time at a higher bitrate, so I just ended up copy­ing files to the server man­u­ally in big chunks. I’m also the main per­son in the house who pur­chases music, so I can main­tain that rou­tine pretty easily.

My Juke­box in the Cloud (so named by Deanna)

The inter­face prob­lems and lack of func­tion­al­ity were big­ger issues, though. For exam­ple, there’s no way to get details about songs, rate them, or cre­ate playlists, all of which is pretty unfor­giv­able in a prod­uct designed specif­i­cally for con­sumers. After fur­ther research, I installed Orb, which is some pretty cool, free soft­ware that does a big piece of what Win­dows Home Server does. It gives you remote access to files, music, pic­tures, and video on the com­puter where it’s installed, plus you can man­age inter­net radio sta­tions, favorite songs, rate songs, cre­ate playlists, and cre­ate a dash­board view. Did I men­tion it’s free? If you have a com­puter you always leave on, you can emu­late some of my setup for free using this software.

My music library in Orb

Where Win­dows Home Server beats Orb is in its abil­ity to update port for­ward­ing on the router auto­mat­i­cally, backup all of the com­put­ers on your net­work, and offer a RAID solu­tion for that stor­age. I have 400GB+ of files, music, pic­tures, and video on one 750GB drive, but I was able to drop in a sec­ond drive, and the soft­ware auto­mat­i­cally started mir­ror­ing files to it for redun­dancy. That part was pretty amaz­ing, and I can access all of those files remotely, whether that means at work or in dif­fer­ent rooms in the house. Pretty sweet.

Con­nect­ing the server to the home system

That was all well and good, but I also wanted to play music with­out hav­ing to queue it up on a lap­top first, which meant we needed a way to get the server con­tent to play through the home the­ater sys­tem. Plus, we wanted to start stream­ing Net­flix videos to watch on the TV, as opposed to our com­put­ers. I again started doing research, which led me to the dis­cov­ery that the Xbox 360 that was just sit­ting on the shelf (we play more Wii than Xbox) was actu­ally a solu­tion wait­ing for us to rec­og­nize it.

Because the server and Xbox are both Microsoft prod­ucts, they talk to each other pretty eas­ily. This opened up a whole new world for us, because now we could show any pic­ture and play any music or video from the server on the big HDTV and the sound through the audio receiver and 5.1 surround-sound sys­tem with­out the need for a com­puter in between. In addi­tion, the Xbox gives us that desired access to Net­flix, Pan­dora, and even Last.FM through the exist­ing sys­tem. I can also cre­ate my playlists in Orb via a web browser and play them through the Xbox. More sweetness.

Watch­ing “Bat­tlestar Galac­tica” via Netflix’s stream­ing ser­vice through the Xbox on the HDTV

My biggest com­plaint about this setup is that the Xbox isn’t designed to be a media cen­ter, even though it has all of that func­tion­al­ity built into it. This means the inter­face isn’t very good here, either (no playlists, incom­plete dis­play of meta­data, long lists to scroll through), but I didn’t have to buy any addi­tional equip­ment, so that was a big plus. If Microsoft ever decides to spend time work­ing on inter­faces, it would have some killer prod­ucts for the con­sumer market.

More video

This setup does almost every­thing on my orig­i­nal list, but I still wanted to be able to watch Hulu through the exist­ing sys­tem, and I didn’t want to have to man­u­ally down­load YouTube videos to watch them on the TV. Look­ing around, I came across the amaz­ing PlayOn soft­ware ($40), which was the final piece of our puz­zle. By load­ing this soft­ware on the server, we gained the abil­ity to watch Hulu, YouTube, and some cus­tom PlayOn chan­nels for The Daily Show, The Col­bert Report, and NCAA March Mad­ness games on demand. Really sweet! This piece was a lit­tle bit more dif­fi­cult, but it all works if you fol­low the instruc­tions.

Pick­ing an episode of “Mod­ern Fam­ily” to watch from Hulu via PlayOn through the Xbox to the HDTV

Mak­ing it all eas­ier to use

I then tied every­thing together with a hand-me-down Log­itech Har­mony remote to make it easy to man­age all of the var­i­ous pieces. The “watch TV” but­ton turns on the TV to the right input, the audio receiver to the right input, and con­trols the cable box. The “watch a movie” but­ton turns every­thing on with the right set­tings to watch a DVD, but pretty much every­thing else except the Wii runs through the “lis­ten to music” but­ton, because that’s what starts up the Xbox. This is espe­cially help­ful because with­out the uni­ver­sal remote, I’d prob­a­bly be the only one in the house who’d be able to turn things on and off for dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties. Another big plus is that we can con­trol the Xbox with easy-to-understand but­tons, rather the game con­troller that came with the con­sole. I can’t rec­om­mend a Log­itech uni­veral remote highly enough.

Con­clu­sion

For the most part, this is all work­ing very well for us. We lis­ten to our music a lot more, includ­ing at work, and some­times the inter­net video piece really comes in handy (like dur­ing March Mad­ness). We espe­cially like stream­ing Net­flix (which can also be done through the PlayOn soft­ware if you don’t have an Xbox). At this point, the biggest issue is that I still need a way to backup the server off­site, but I can’t find a rea­son­ably priced ser­vice for this (most com­pa­nies charge business-level prices because they haven’t yet rec­og­nized there’s a grow­ing con­sumer mar­ket). Someone’s going to make a killing offer­ing a con­sumer backup ser­vice for media, but that day hasn’t arrived yet. I’m look­ing at other workarounds right now, but I haven’t found an ideal solu­tion. (Have you? Leave a comment!)

It’s been a long road to get to this point, but it’s excit­ing to have all of this geeky func­tion­al­ity work­ing. In the future, I hope to get rid of a lot of paper by scan­ning it to the server, and I may inves­ti­gate adding a TV tuner to record pro­grams directly to the server and set­ting up print­ing over the inter­net to our home printer.

How you can do some of this

This is pretty geeky stuff, although most of the process was eas­ier than I thought it would be. It’s also a Microsoft-centric approach, some­what by acci­dent. I still think Microsoft needs to do a bet­ter job with its inter­faces before its home server/media cen­ter prod­ucts could go main­stream. How­ever, there are ways to do pieces of all of this eas­ily, with­out Microsoft prod­ucts, and some­times even for free.

• If you have a com­puter that you leave on all the time, you can stream music and video or access files from it for free by installing Orb. You can even hook up an exter­nal drive to that com­puter if you need more stor­age. (It works on Macs, too.)
• If you have an old com­puter lying around or can pick one up cheap, you can pur­chase Win­dows Home Server for $99 and con­vert that machine into a home server. I only paid the $500 for the HP Medi­as­mart server for the con­ve­nience fac­tor of hav­ing it pre-installed with the soft­ware and a 750GB hard drive. If I’d had more time, I might have built it myself.
• You don’t need an Xbox to get con­tent from the server to the TV/home the­ater sys­tem. Inter­net TVs and DVD play­ers are on the mar­ket (every­thing will have access to the inter­net built-in even­tu­ally), and there’s mid­dle­ware like the Roku. Because I was able to get the Xbox work­ing in about 10 min­utes, I didn’t inves­ti­gate which of the other options might be best. Inter­est­ingly, TiVO is enter­ing this mar­ket with its new TiVO Pre­mière box, but it’ll still require a monthly fee, which I wasn’t will­ing to pay. I don’t think it pro­vides access to the user’s col­lec­tion, although it does bring in all of that inter­net content.
• There are also other ways to stream sites like Hulu and Net­flix to your TV. You can install the PlayOn soft­ware on a reg­u­lar com­puter (as opposed to a server) to watch those chan­nels, but you’ll still need the mid­dle­ware to get the stream to the TV. Of course, you can also just install PlayOn on a com­puter and watch the chan­nels on that com­puter, or hook it up to a TV using an A/V cable. That’s what I used to do, but I wanted to be able to use my lap­top while watch­ing “TV.” Note that PlayOn will also work with a Nin­tendo Wii or Playsta­tion 3.
• Jason Grif­fey has writ­ten about using the Drobo sys­tem for back­ups. I prob­a­bly would have gone this route if I didn’t also want the remote access to my media files. How­ever, if you’re look­ing strictly for a backup solu­tion or if you aren’t backup up your data, this is an excel­lent option.

What else have you tried? How are you build­ing your cloud?