MaximumPC 2004 06

7 MAXIMUMPC JUNE 2004

STEP 3

Create a sensible storage scheme

Before you begin heedlessly ripping

DVDs or recording TV shows, you need

to develop a standardized scheme for

storing your digital goodies. Some

people recommend using a dedicated

partition for each type of media—music,

TV, and DVDs—but we find that a bit

restrictive. We do recommend isolating

your PVR files on one partition, though.

Because PVR files are constantly being

written and deleted, the drive that the

PVR writes to will quickly become frag-

mented. Once you’ve created that parti-

tion, you’ll want to use the remaining

space for ripped DVDs and music.

Before you can create the partition,

you need to decide how much drive

space you want to dedicate to your PVR.

Keep the following metric in mind: If you

use DVD-quality MPEG-2, you’ll eat a lit-

tle less than 1GB of disk space for every

hour of recorded video. We allocate at

least 80GB for our PVR duties, but if you

watch loads of TV, feel free to set aside

even more.

To create the PVR partition, go

to Start, then Control Panel, then

Administrative Tools. Click on Drive

Management, and then right-click the

empty space on the drive. Click Create

Partition, then type the size you want

your partition to be in megabytes—

remember that 1GB equals 1,000MB.

Once the partition is created, you’ll need

to format it. Use the NTFS format and

the default cluster size. Name the volume

“PVR.” Make sure you open Beyond TV’s

control panel and tell it to save recorded

video files to the new partition.

While you’re inside the Drive

Management utility, go ahead and create

a third partition. This one will hold your

ripped DVDs and music, and should fill

up the rest of the drive. Format this drive

using the NTFS file system and name it

“Media.” Once the partition is formatted,

you’ll want to create a couple of directo-

ries on it—one for ripped DVDs, and one

for MP3s. Right-click the DVD directory,

and select Sharing. Click the “Share this

folder” button and press OK. Do the

same for the MP3 directory.

Once you’ve created a dedicated partition for your PVR files, you need to open

Beyond TV and point it to the new drive.

STEP 4

Putting the “u” into user

With your basic drive structure complete, it’s time to create

some user accounts and groups. Whether you use Windows

XP Professional or Windows Server 2003, the components

are in the same place for the most part. You can control

exactly what level of access every user has to every direc-

tory, whether they’re logged in to the computer directly, or

merely connecting across the network. First, you’ll need to

create some user accounts, though.

Everyone who regularly logs in to your machine should

have a user account. To create accounts, open the Computer

Management applet again—remember, it’s in Start, Control

Panel, Administrative Tools—and select the Local Users and

Groups tool. Open Users, and create some users. Simply

right-click an empty area and select New User. Fill in a user-

name and password and press Create. Rinse and repeat

until you’ve created accounts for everyone who should have

access to your server.

Now, this is the tricky part. If you have a lot of users, it’s

a real drag to go into each folder you make available on the

network and manually change the permissions every time

you add or remove a user. To avoid doing this, you can cre-

ate groups, and assign the permissions you want to each

group. Then you can place individual users in your groups.

NETWORKING CONFIGURATION

TIPS

It’s easier to find your media server if its IP address

never changes. You can give it a static IP address,

but you need to ensure that your router’s DHCP

server won’t try to assign the same IP address to another

computer. Consult your router’s documentation to find out

how to exclude an IP range from the DHCP service.

It’s also easy to host a small personal web site, or

set up a streaming server to access your tunes, TV, and

movies from outside your home network. Via your router’s

firewall feature, specific types of requests that come to your

IP address can be automatically forwarded to your media

server’s internal address. Check your manual for input on

port forwarding.