Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

Windows Home Server is an upcoming operating system from Microsoft, and appears to be an important cog in Redmond’s attempt to dominate your living room. With features aimed at the home user, WHS could be an interesting addition to the “digital” home. From Microsoft’s Press release:

Delivered on hardware from leading partners, Windows Home Server will help families with multiple PCs connect their home computers, digital devices and printers, in order to easily store, protect and share their treasured photos, music, videos and documents. By automatically backing up home PCs, centralizing a family’s digital “stuff” and allowing access to it away from home, Windows Home Server will help simplify and enhance family life.

Windows Home Server on the surface appears to be a promising addition to the Windows arsenal for managing all of your media center content. By having a “back-end” server in your house, the media center computer that would reside in your living room can be less obtrusive. Having a central repository for all of your digital content makes sense since you would be able to access the same content throughout your house. Kids can watch their movies in one room while parents can watch their movies in another.

However, digital rights management could severely impact the attractiveness of a Windows Home Server. Besides home-made movies, there are not too many options to legally stream video to another computer or network device. DVDs cannot be legally ripped to a hard drive and HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray discs have not implemented Managed Copy as of yet. With the release of Vista, Digital Cable Tuners that support high definition cable television through CableCards have been added to the arsenal of media centers. This is an important step in making media centers a mainstream product. Digital tuners are a great idea but are extremely crippled in what they can do through the implementation of digital rights management. According to Pvrwire’ article on CableCards:

All files stored on the hard drive will be encrypted and don’t expect much copying or placeshifting to happen. No copying is permitted and while streaming media to Vista Media Extenders is allowed through a home network, copying media to a Zune or other portable media device is not permitted.

A user won’t be able to copy video files from one computer on their network to another but they will be able to stream them to a Media Extender. Windows Home Server allows streaming to Media Extenders as well. If you cannot copy video files captured by a Digital Cable Tuner to a Windows Home Server, the extra storage offered by search a server is not nearly as important. Without video, a 1 TB server is not a necessity.

This leads to the question of whether a Windows Home Server can have Digital Cable Tuner installed in it. If that is the case, then Media Extenders could be used in a living room or bedroom. This seems like a limited use of the home server though.