Photo of David Gardiner
A blog of software development, .NET and other interesting things
  • Aug 13, 2008

    Finishing the Home Theatre PC

    You might recall that I discovered one of the hard disks I’d purchased for my HTPC was defective. It was sent back, but I’ve had to wait for a replacement to arrive. It finally came in, and on Saturday I picked it up along with the Shintaro Wireless Keyboard.

    As an interim measure, I’d installed everything on the WD 1Tb drive, but now I could use the Seagate drive as the system disk (Operating System, etc) and leave that 1 Terabyte of space for recording data.

    While I had the case open, I also took the opportunity to remove the extra video card (my experiment with composite video had failed, and the onboard video should be more than adequate).

    I then re-installed Vista onto the new drive (which pleasingly was noticed immediately by the BIOS – no problems this time!)

    As it was more than a month since the original build, I checked to see if any new drivers were released:

    I thought I’d be clever and configure the Free*EPG TV Guide settings before starting up Media Center, but that didn’t seem to work. After I’d gone through the Media Center configuration process and then closed MCE, I ran the Free*EPG tool again and things went better.

    Everything was up and running again.

    Shared media

    I’ve heard about Media Centre Extenders, but never saw anything about how MCE can talk to other regular Windows machines. Well it turns out it is quite simple. You can point MCE to a network share in the Library settings, and then  you can browse all your digital photos and listen to your CD collection remotely.

    Add-ins

    I also wondered if there were any interesting add-ins for MCE. There’s quite a list mentioned in the Media Center forms on The Green Button.

    I’ve installed the following to start off with:

    • Heatwave – displays the current and forecast weather
    • TVTonic – Internet TV and video podcasts

    TVTonic comes with a whole lot of channels to choose from, but you can also add your own custom RSS feeds to the list. I added the feed for dnrTV, and it worked straight away.

    A quick warning though – don’t forget that you’re downloading all that video, and like me you might discover that’s a great way to use up almost all of your broadband quota for the month! At least Internode are responsible and send you warning emails when you’re getting close to the limit. We normally don’t get anywhere near the 10Gb a month limit, so this is something I’ll need to monitor.

    It does raise an idea for my own MCE add-in – A Media Center Usage Meter for Internode. Now just to find the time to do it!

  • Aug 12, 2008

    Visual Studio 2008 SP1

    Yes, it’s now available..

    and probably a few other bits too.

  • Aug 8, 2008

    All the best, Brenton and Hayley!

    Brenton and HayleyIf you happen to watch the Channel 9 News on a weeknight in Adelaide, then you’re probably familiar with their weatherman, Brenton Ragless. You might also recognise his dulcet tones from one of his radio and TV advertising voiceovers, CFS spokesperson,  radio presenter on LIFE-FM, or maybe even the funny guy on the PA at the Blackwood Christmas Pageant.

    I’ve known Brenton over the years through cake decorating (no, not us - our Mums) and Church circles, and now that he’s a big time TV personality, it’s quite nice for my kids to say “Daddy, isn’t that the man you know?”. I’m not famous, but at least I know someone who is :-)

    Well the great news is Brenton and his fiance Hayley are getting married tomorrow, and I thought it would be nice to publicly wish them well.

    I’m not sure if I’ll be able make it to the ceremony, but I hope everything goes well (even if the weather looks like it might be a little inclement – you’d think Brenton would be able to fix that!)