We Got Served

Here we are in the early years of the home server – have you ever stopped and asked yourself what it’s going to take to drive mass adoption of these devices in the home? If you haven’t (and why should you?) don’t beat yourself up about it, but It’s a question that is vexing a lot of people in various hardware and software companies in Europe, North America and Asia.

The common perception is that three things need to change from where we are today:

1. Awareness

Awareness of home server/NAS devices is building in early adopter communities (like this one!) but it’s not something you’ll see on the front page of the Wall Street Journal or FHM. Speak to most people about a home server, and they’ll probably think you’ve just invested in getting a butler to help out with your day to day lives.

So, definitely awareness of home servers and what they can do needs to improve.

2. Price

We’re living in tough times and there’s less people in the world with the kind of disposable income to afford an additional device in the home – home servers (particularly WHS based devices) are simply too expensive today to be adopted en mass – particularly given the lack of awareness and understanding of what they can do to justify that expense (see point 1)

3. Ease of Use

It’s fair to say that whilst Windows Home Server did a great job in making backup and media sharing relatively simple (especially for the more technically minded), we still have a way to go. Developers at HP have continue to extend this ease of use on the WHS platform with their MediaSmart Server line which includes media sharing applications which are easy to configure and use. When it comes to their Linux-based NAS competition, however, these systems expose a lot of controls that works brilliant for the tech enthusiast but once again, isn’t going work for your mum (unless she’s a complete geek too.)

All three of these issues are being tackled in various forms by those businesses interested in selling and supporting millions of home servers over the next few years (Industry pundits Parks Associates estimate over 12 million home server/NAS will have been sold by the end of 2012).

The next company stepping up to the plate is Cisco, who, under a refreshed “Linksys by Cisco” consumer brand are launching a variety of networked devices alongside their regular router range, promising to make advanced networking, backup and sharing of media across the home a cinch.

Their first attempt has recently hit the market in the form of the Linksys Media Hub, which arrived here at WGS for us to review. I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on this device for a couple of months, since I had a walkthrough of the product at CES in January.

At that time, I was not only impressed by how easy the Media Hub was to set up and use – but more importantly, it’s interesting to see how Cisco are positioning the Media Hub. You don’t hear the words “server”, “network attached storage”, or “NAS” anywhere near the device (in documentation or when using the unit). It’s positioned in a much more friendly was as a hub – a central point for all of your media, with PC backup very much a secondary feature.

In their CES press release, the company stated:

Designed to simplify access to and interaction with digital content, the Media Hub gathers, organizes, and presents all the digital video, photos and music that users have spread amongst various devices in the home. With a Media Hub, consumers can enjoy all of their media through an easy to use interface that is not only accessible in the home, but throughout the world via a web browser. The Media Hub is the perfect solution for consumers with extensive digital media libraries who are looking to eliminate the complexity of managing their collections.

Certainly Cisco are seeking to attack point 3 above with this device. Let’s see how they get on.

Versions Available

Cisco are releasing three versions of the Media Hub:

NMH305 – 500Gb Hard Drive

NMH405 – 500Gb Hard Drive with LCD Screen and 6 in 1 Card Reader

NMH410 – 1Tb Hard Drive with LCD Screen and 6 in 1 Card Reader

Our review unit is the mid-level NMH405, so let’s open it up and see it in action.

What’s in the Box?

The Cisco Media Hub is well packaged in a branded box which contains everything you need to get up and running, including:

• Cisco Media Hub
• Ethernet Cable
• Power Cables
• Installation CD
• Manual

The first signal of Cisco’s desire to drive ease of use comes as soon as you open the box  with a card wallet at the top of the box marked “Start Here” which includes the installation CD, a clear instruction to load the CD before setting up the Media Hub, a warning that the Media Hub is not compatible with Windows Media files in Firefox, plus links to telephone support.

Clearly, many years of frustration in trying to help users install and configure their routers (still not cracked that one, by the way) have led to a set of installation instructions that are very clear and simple to follow.

When it comes to the installation guide, you’ll be initially worried at picking up a 140 page manual. Don’t fear, though, there’s guides in 9 languages (English, Danish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish) enclosed – the English section is just 14 pages.

The manual offers a comprehensive step by step walkthrough of the installation and configuration of the Media Hub, with full colour screenshots throughout – it’s a nice piece of work which should allow those who are new to this type of product get up and running successfully.

First Looks

The Media Hub is a small (7.80″ x 4.37″ x 6.61″ (198 x 111 x 168 mm)) device in an attractive brushed silver and piano black finish. It’s designed to be out there on show on your desk rather than hidden away in a cupboard.

The top of the device has a button which you depress to reveal the two hard drive bays.

Hard drives a fitted to a caddy which easily slides into the Media Hub, almost like slides of bread into a toaster. It’s a pretty neat design – even Poppy, the resident WGS cat, was impressed enough to take a look (but was subsequently disappointed to discover a lack of actual food in there).

Around the Back

The rear of the unit is dominated by two things – firstly a large fan that cools those hard drives, and secondly a very large sticker which covers the rear ports. I don’t know why, but I’m feeling this strange compulsion to run the installation CD first before attaching any cables. Don’t know why…..

With an evil cackle I ignored the instructions, and ripped off the sticker to uncover a single USB port, Gigabit Ethernet socket, reset button, 12V power socket and just above, a notch to fit a desk lock for security.

Up Front

The front of the Media Hub sees a full colour 1.8” LCD Screen (176 x 220 resolution, 64K Colours), another USB port, power button, power light and that 6 in 1 card reader, which supports CF/MD/MS/SD/XD/MMC cards.

Installing the Media Hub

So, I take heed of the instructions and drop the installation CD into one of my computers. A flashy video kicks in telling you all about the great things you’ll be able to do with your new Media Hub and then the installation itself begins.

So far, so polished. You’re guided through the setup process step by step with diagrams to show you exactly what to do when:

Then it all comes to a grinding halt. I received an message stating that the setup program could not detect the device – this despite the fact that the device is shown as having an IP address on the router, that the device can be seen in iTunes, that if you look on the device’s screen it states it’s connected, that the device can actually be accessed via its IP address in a web browser. Only Linksys’ own setup program cannot see the device and after repeated attempts, resets and playing with Windows Firewall settings, I have to exit the setup.

This is a big failure, Cisco – a fall at the first hurdle, which is a shame as everything’s been done well up unto this point. Whilst the more technically minded may be able to work around this kind of issue, your target market has just taken the box back to Best Buy/PC World and asked for a refund.

Basically, with this error, the Media Hub’s backup software (NTI Shadow) and Media importing software has not been installed. The workaround (should you need it) is to extract the file setup.res with Winrar and install these two applications separately. They’re called backuptool.exe and LinksysTools.exe respectively, but more on those shortly.

Importing Your Media

When you setup access to the Media Hub using the installation CD, a tool called Media Importer is installed on each computer which has access to the Media Hub. This application runs in the background on your computer and automatically finds and copies Photos, Music and Video files over to the Media Hub.

You can easily configure which folders are monitored by the Media Importer, as well as deciding whether you want Music, Photos and Videos copying over, or a combination of the three. A folder tree is presented and you simply check which folders you wish to be monitored. Any changes made to files, or new files added to monitored folders will be reflected on the Media Hub.

However, if you don’t wish to use the Media Importer at all, it can be switched off, and files moves across manually via accessing the Media Hub in Windows Explorer.

The Media Importer works well, although transfer speeds aren’t great. The screenshot below shows the importer in action, transferring files from a notebook using a wireless (802.11g) network. I’d hope that in reality, transferring 2Gb of data takes a shorter time than the 13 hours stated!

Cisco state that most popular file formats are supported (i.e. identified as media files and transferred) within Media Importer, and indeed across the Media Hub. The full list of supported formats is as follows:

Audio: MP3, M4A, M4B, MP4, 3GP, WAV, OGG, FLAC, AAC, MP2, AC3, MPA, MP1, AIF, ASF

Photo: JPG, PNG, TIF, TIFF, BMP, GIF

Video: MP1, MPG, SPTS, MP4, AVI, VOB, DivX, 3GP, VDR, MPE, DVR-MS, Xvid, M1V,

M4V, MOV, MPV

Playlists: M3U, M3U8, PLS, WPL

One feature I really do love on the Media Hub is importing media directly by plugging in a memory card, or USB key into the hardware. The 6 in 1 card reader on the front of the media hub supports all the main memory card formats – simply take your card, pop it into the slot and you’ll be asked if you want to import your media. The Media Hub will then pull the media from the card and, depending on its file format, copy it to the appropriate music, video and photo folders. Very cool and score another for ease of use.

Managing the Media Hub

You’ll control the Media Hub predominately via a web interface, which we’ll cover shortly. Remember that LCD screen on the front of the hub? You can manage aspects of the Media Hub using that screen and a small four-way control button tucked underneath.

From the Media Hub hardware you can backup a PC, check available storage, manage settings for the unit’s backlight and screensaver as well as upgrade the system firmware. I say upgrade, but there’s one watch-out here – the Media Hub actually allowed me to downgrade the system from the in-box 1.0.18 version firmware to the 1.0.13 that it believed was the latest version on the web. Another rough edge to iron out.

A couple of nice visual tools available from the on-screen display are the now obligatory pie charts showing the mix of files held on the media hub, as well as a network diagnostic showing network connection status and what looks like a graph of throughput speed (although it isn’t labelled and could just be eye candy).

Use of these controls is more like likely going to depend on where your Media Hub is located – if it’s on the desk next to you, you can casually check status and run a manual backup if you feel the need. If it’s under the stairs, you’re probably not going to make a specific trip just to use the controls. So, the screen is definitely a nice to have, bur if you’re on a budget, the NMH305 comes without the screen and you’re not losing too much really useful functionality.

Backing Up Other Files On Your PC

It’s worth mentioning up front that Cisco aren’t pushing the Media Hub as a backup device, but more of a media storage/sharing/streaming device. With the Media Importer running in the background, copying your media files over to the hub it is, in effect, doing a great job of backing up your Music, Videos and Photos but Cisco also bundle a PC backup application called NTI Shadow which is there to provide support for backing up other files such as documents.

NTI Shadow allows you to schedule continuous backup jobs for the folders you want to  protect on your PC. These jobs can be set to run every x minutes, scheduled to a date and time or set to backup whenever any changes are detected in the data held in those folders.

The application can also be set to archive files, preserving a previous version of files that are backed up. All files are backed up to a Backup folder on the Media Hub and can be restored from within NTI Shadow (which will open up a Windows Explorer window pointing to the Backup folder, and request you right click and select Restore on the files you want to copy back to the original folder).

NTI Backup is a pretty basic solution to file and folder backup and does its job well. It’s not a full PC backup solution, you don’t get OS restore and a whole heap of other bells and whistles that an image-based backup solution like Windows Home Server offers, but it does copy files automatically to the Media Hub that you define, and I guess that’s all it’s intended to do.

From an ease of use perspective, on the one hand I can completely understand Cisco bundling an application like NTI Shadow to cater for those users who want to protect files other than Music, Video and Photos but it would be simpler to have everything in one easy to use interface via the web browser.

Hanging Out With the Hub

As mentioned, it’s via a web browser that you’ll spend most of your time hanging out with the hub. Simply open up a web browser (actually, Firefox currently has a few compatibility issues with the Media Hub), so make that Internet Explorer and type in whatever friendly name you gave your Media Hub (or in my case, as I didn’t get to complete the setup, the default name – mediahub).

If your browser isn’t running Flash, you’ll be prompted to download it, as we’ll be using a rich media interface with this guy.

The media browser looks fantastic – easily the best looking interface we’ve seen to manage media on any home server device to date. HP are starting to get close with the Flash-based MediaSmart interface, but the Cisco Media Hub interface is warm, friendly and engaging. The front page pulls together a quick view of your storage status with the most recent music, videos and photos that have been transferred to the hub. Each file has a thumbnail for easy recognition and videos automatically have a thumbnail generated for them (much like Windows Media Center).

Better still, music, videos and photos can be played immediately from that first screen with an embedded media player, if you’re the impatient sort. Check the play button next to the Brett Anderson track (great album by the way)

Drilling down into the Music, Video and Photos areas, all of your media is displayed in a variety of views depending on how you wish to browse. Let’s take Music first, which initially offers Album, Artist, Recent (as in recently imported) and Song views. You can also browse alphabetically. Note the player at the top of the screen which lets you listen to music whilst you browse.

Double clicking on an album gives you a full track listing, options to play the album in its entirety, play a track within the browser or in an external player like Windows Media Player and add a track to the playlist.

There are nice little usability touches all over the interface – note how easy it is to browse to other albums by the same artist via the control in the bottom left of the above screenshot.

Searching for content is also simple – a search bar at the top of every screen allows you to search for keywords across all of your content and brings results together into one list. Again, playback controls appear on each entry so you can playback content found with a single click.

Photo browsing is also very slick, although album art is included in the photos folder which is really annoying. It would be great to have this excluded. You can view by Album (folder), Date, Name (filename) and again Recent. Here’s the album view – that music player is still present at the top of the screen, so you can listen to music whilst checking out your photos.

Photo slideshows are improved by a thumbnail browser which fades in when you move your mouse to the top of the screen and lets you fast track to a particular shot.

Up on the top right you’ll find controls for changing the speed of and pausing the slideshow, along with a full-screen mode. As with music, the experience of browsing photos is very well delivered indeed – just enough control without going overboard on random editing features you sometimes see in photo browsers.

Video is a much simpler affair, browsable by Name or the ubiquitous Recent view. You can browse by thumbnail or via a list view and are offered the choice of playback within the browser or via an external application. I found video playback speeds on my home network absolutely fine for standard definition video over a wireless network.

The Media Hub also comes equipped with a File Browser, which is the fifth selection in the menu. This provides a full tree view of all of the files and folders on the Media Hub, with options to create and delete folders, copy, move, delete and rename files, upload files from your computer to the media hub, as well as download files from the hub to your PC. It offers easy access all of the standard file management tools you need in the Media Hub’s great user interface.

For those concerned with access security, the File Browser is also password protected to ensure you can restrict access to those who can be trusted.

Configuring the Media Hub

For those who want to dig into the finer details of the Cisco Media Hub, you can configure various elements including Network, System, Disk and Backup settings – again, this is all done through a web browser, and will be the best looking settings page you’ve seen in a while I promise!

System settings include the ability to change the name of the device and the workgroup it’s accessing, the device IP address if you want a static IP and DHCP settings, password, date and time, language (choose from English, French, French Canadian, Spanish, German, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch) as well as the ability to reboot the device remotely.

Disk settings offers a very cool shaded pie chart view of your storage, split by file type and total space free/used, health status of your disks and their RAID configuration. If you have two disks installed, you can switch on disk mirroring via RAID 1 for extra protection. Instructions are also provided here for adding and replacing drives as well as disk recovery in the case of failure. This area is as geeky as the Media Hub gets, and it’s still just a simple walkthrough with simple, easy to understand language.

Backup is simply a great big button that kicks off a manual backup using NTI Shadow (see below).

Last but not least, Services is possibly the most interesting as it’s here you unleash a few extra pieces of the Media Hub’s potential, including Remote Access, Windows File Sharing, an iTunes Server, the Media Hub’s DLNA Media Server and an FTP Server.

Let’s deal with Remote Access first. We all know the pain of configuring devices on our network for remote access. Whether it’s automated services that are meant to configure ports on UPnP router which don’t work, the vagaries of manual port forwarding on various routers, and so on, it’s a scenario that breaks our need for ease of use.

Windows Home Server’s remote access, once configured (and configuration with certain routers can be a challenge) offers remote access directly to your home server and any computer on your home network (running a premium enough version of Windows) and was a big step forward in improving ease of remote access. Let’s see how Cisco do.

In the Services menu, a big button stating “Configure” is highly tempting to press.

Do so, and you’ll be asked to enter a remote device name…

and, erm, apparently that’s it. You get a message stating that remote access will be available in a few minutes.

I have to admit to a smirk of disbelief at this point. Windows Home Server has failed in the past to correctly configure my BT Business Hub router correctly for remote access, so I’m going to be surprised if the Media Hub manages it.

To access your device remotely, you simply visit http://www.ciscomediahub.com and log in. The remote site has a similar look and feel to your Media Hub’s own environment.

A few minutes later, and I’m not sure what witchcraft is at work here, but remote access has indeed been configured correctly first time, without any user interaction, using the exact same router that I have to configure manually with Windows Home Server.

Wow. It just works. Really, really well.

You’ll see the Media Hub offers the exact same rich experience remotely as it does when you connect to it on your home network. As you would expect, speed of access and quality of playback will depend very much on your remote access speeds, but it works very well indeed. Top marks for nailing remote access, Cisco.

The remaining Settings are relatively straightforward, allowing you to enable and disable the Media Hub’s file sharing, DLNA Media Server (the Media Hub is DLNA 1.5 compliant, ensuring it can be accessed by a wide variety of digital media receivers, networked music players and TVs) and iTunes Server. Much like the HP MediaSmart Server, the Cisco Media Hub comes equipped with an iTunes Server which means it appears as a device in iTunes and media can be played easily. Finally, you can also configure access to the Cisco Media Hub via FTP, although clicking Enable here doesn’t provide any further instructions on achieving this.

Summary

I’ve got to say, whilst the Cisco Media Hub has a couple of minor niggles, and in my case, one major setup hurdle to sort out (I’m guessing not every user has experienced this issue, but it’s unforgivable for those that do), I’m hugely impressed by how rewarding it is to use. Not just simple, easy, straightforward – but rewarding, particularly when it comes to playing the media that you have stored upon it. The user interface looks great both viewed locally and via remote access – music, videos and photos are easy to browse and play back and once set up, the Media Importer does a great job in collecting and copying your files over to the hub for storage.

Cisco have set new standards in ease of use and user experience that other home server/networked storage manufacturers will be challenged to live up to. The Media Hub does not try to do everything, but what it does do, it does fantastically well.

I love the fact that all technical language is pretty much non-existent in all documentation and on the system itself – the simplicity of use extends all the way into the language used to describe and communicate the various features on offer.

Downsides? Whilst NTI Shadow is on board, this is not really a strong backup device – Windows Home Server does a far stronger job of protecting PCs on your system and allowing remote access to machines across the system. There’s no extensibility, so we’re reliant on Cisco providing any additional features through firmware updates rather than via third-parties (although as Synology and HP have shown, with multiple new features hitting their models for free with software updates, this can provide a great added value opportunity). Finally, it’s limited in size with just two bays – in the future, I’d love to see a 3 or 4 bay system made available to those users with bigger media collections, but I guess the two bay system is a great start for households whose digital media collections are starting to get unwieldy.

If you believe a home server is too powerful for your needs, and you’re looking for a simple and easy to use device that can store and serve up your music, videos and photos around the home and online, then (with a couple of rough edges ironed out) the Cisco Media Hub is a perfect choice.