I got my PowerlineHD equipment today – its certainly not Gigabit, but iperf reports around 90mbps and NFS transfers go at about 6MBytes/sec, so faster than 54G wifi can manage, and fast enough to stream SD video for sure (not tried HD yet). The one downside is that it seems to be interfering with the radio in the kitchen, although the wireless keyboards and Bluetooth headset and phones are fine.

I just found that WMP11 can’t select which audio stream is played from a DVB-S m2t (AVCHD) file. So I turned to Linux to figure out how to fix a Windows bug as usual! Turns out the fix is easy and takes about 1m20s: ffmpeg -i infile.m2t -acodec copy -vcodec copy -map 0:0 -map 0:4 outfile.m2t The 0:0 is the video track and 0:4 is the English audio track we want to keep; 0:1/2/3 are the voiceover audio and subtitle tracks we want to remove.

Now my server is finally back online (apparently although hosted in Germany somewhere, the support staff are in flood-ridden Australia) so I thought I’d update the blog. I’ve rebuilt my desktop machine now I’ve got the HDTV card. I finally fitted the 64Gb Kingston SSD boot drive, installed Fedora 14 and put the 1Tb SpinPoint F3 hard disk back in to supplement the rapidly-filling 1Tb F1. I noticed how much of a difference the SSD makes when rebuilding the Nessus plugin cache – on a HDD it takes literally minutes, on the SSD its almost instant!

I’m thinking of getting a WinTV Nova HD-S2 card for my PC as there’s a satellite feed right by the computer in my bedroom – albeit with an aerial connector on it, so I’d need a female aerial to female F-type adaptor. I could watch/record Freesat HD in my bedroom and stream it over the new GigE to the Revo downstairs (which has hardware accelerated HD playback – currently using about 30% CPU watching 720p from BBC iPlayer) and also watch SD Sky using the box in the lounge.

I received my new Acer Aspire Revo R3610-M nettop which comes preloaded with Windows7. Plugged it in a wireless is pretty crap on it (could also be the BT Business Hub as I’m getting a stronger signal from nextdoor’s BE-box!) its good enough for surfing but not stable enough even for SD movies. I Installed Fedora14 and it didn’t even pick up the RT3090 wireless-N card, which is supposed to work with the RT2x00 drivers (awful drivers I’ve used before).