David Gardiner - HTPC

Upgrading the Media Center to Windows 7

2009-10-11T20:48:00.001+10:30

After my success with upgrading my not-so-modern PC to Windows 7, I thought I'd take another plunge and do an upgrade of my Vista Media Center machine. This is the family TV so any problems would not go down too well!

The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor didn't flag any major showstoppers, but it did suggest uninstalling the ATI Control Center (which I did). It also warned that I may need to upgrade the drivers for the iMON device (this is the front-panel display on the Antec Fusion 430 Silver case and IR receiver for the remote control). Conveniently, just before I installed Win7, iMON reported that there was a new update available so I allowed that to go through, hoping it would help avoid some of the problem some people have had.

I inserted the Windows 7 Ultimate x86 DVD, ran setup and selected 'Upgrade'. Probably about an hour later (and 2-3 reboots) it was all done.

A quick check confirmed that yes, live TV still worked (phew!) – and so did the remote control.

Going to the Guide showed the new layout, but oh dear – there were no listings for any of the ABC or SBS channels – hmm that could be a problem. But that was enough for one night, so I left it there.

The next morning, I woke up to discover that the kids had already figured out how to watch the previous night's recording of Ice Age – which was a good sign that nothing had changed too dramatically!

I recall seeing mention in the Australian Media Center Community forums that Windows 7 would finally allow use of the FM radio tuner included in the Hauppauge HVR-2200. I went to the FM Radio menu but it said I needed to add a tuner, even though the upgrade had found the 2 digital tuners ok, so I followed these steps:

Then I was able to go to the Radio menu item, choose FM Radio, then enter the frequency for a local radio station!

I was intrigued about what to do about the missing TV guide information for the ABC channels in the guide. Mike Hayton (from Microsoft) posted this explanation of how the guide gets updated, so I configured the Automatic Download setting to ensure the guide gets a chance to grab the latest listings..

So, thus far everything has gone very well. The upgrade went without a hitch and everything appears to be working at least as well as before. One problem I did have with Vista MCE was for some reason I was never able to upgrade the ATI video drivers beyond around version 8.4. Every time I tried a newer version, the machine would BSOD. So far the upgraded machine seems stable with the latest video drivers from Windows Update (8.632.1.2000 17-Oct-2009).

I see from New Magic's drivers page that there's an updated driver for the HVR-2200 for Windows 7. I'll have to check whether that got installed through Windows Update, otherwise I'll install that just to keep current.

Media Browser for Vista Media Center

2009-08-19T20:54:00.001+09:30

I came across this useful Media Center plugin recently. As well as providing an alternate interface to browse media files it also includes an RSS reader which I've successfully configured to watch some interesting video podcasts:

dnrTV - .NET Rocks TV
10-4 – New features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0
TED – Talks from the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences
Scrap Time – A Scrapbooking video podcast for Narelle

It is free, and is being actively developed on Google Code.

A new TV

2008-10-07T13:53:00.001+10:30

I finally decided on a new TV for the home theatre, after my attempts at getting the 1970’s era CRT to work failed.

I chose a Kogan 1080P-32 – a Full-HD LCD TV. Importantly, it supports HDMI input and as the name suggests can display full high definition – 1080 Progressive. Kogan are an online store, so it did mean that I had to order something sight-unseen – a bit scary when you’re spending a reasonable amount of money. Happily, the TV was couriered quickly and safely and I haven’t had any problems with stuck pixels.

I then had to connect the screen to the home theatre box. Some retails sell HDMI cables for more than $100, but instead I bought a 5m cable from MSY for $10.

It seems to work quite well with Media Center. The only issue I’ve had is that when you close Media Center and do other stuff in Vista, the display is a bit blurry. I’m not sure if that’s a problem with the graphics card or something else. Not a huge problem but it would be nice to sort it out.

I then hired a Blu-Ray DVD to try out. This also worked ok, once I realised I hadn’t installed all the PowerDVD bits. For some reason, PowerDVD doesn’t integrate with Media Center, so you either have to manually swap over to PowerDVD, or install another player like ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theatre. This is a bit better, though it still isn’t completely integrated as the stop/play buttons on the remote control didn’t work properly.

The net result is that everything is working well. The monitor that we were using for the TV is now back on my home computer, and we’re now looking around furniture shops for a nice home entertainment unit to put it all in.

One sad note – A couple of weeks ago we were watching TV when the machine started locking up (always in the most crucial part of the TV program!). I eventually discovered that my 1Tb WD disk had developed a bad case of badsectoritis. It was just over 1/2 full and had been fine up until now, so I can only guess that maybe there were a bunch of bad sectors in the second half of the disk that we started to hit, or some kind of electronic malfunction. In any case it will need to be sent back under warranty to get sorted out. In the meantime we can survive on the other disk.

Finishing the Home Theatre PC

2008-08-13T08:00:00.000+09:30

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:

iMON (for the VFD and MCE Remote Control)
Hauppauge HVR2200
ATI Catalyst Video and AHCI

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!

Building my Home Theatre PC

2008-07-08T23:25:00.001+09:30

Mark from Mats Systems emailed me last week to say that the components had come in! So I promptly popped by the shop on Saturday to pick up my order.

I’d spent a fair bit of time using Static Ice to research the best prices for all the bits, but in the end I decided the convenience of a local retailer won out against the added freight costs of ordering from interstate (even though the interstate vendors’ retail prices might be initially cheaper).

I’d previously bought an LG Blu Ray/DVD drive and GS8400 video card from MSY, and the remaining components were ordered through MATS.

After unpacking all of the various bits, I decided the first thing to tackle was the Noctua NH-U9B heatsink for the CPU. The motherboard (a GA-MA78GM-S2H) comes with a standard AMD cradle, so I removed that using my very useful "bent nose" pliers to pop out the plastic anchors (Narelle bought the pliers for me years ago, and at the time I wondered what they were, but it turns out they've been one of the most useful tools in my toolbox!). I then installed the replacement cradle for the Noctua heatsink in the motherboard.

I then lined up the motherboard and screwed in the two extra brass stand offs into the floor of the case.

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I then laid the motherboard in the case and screwed it down.

This is when I made my first mistake.. When holding the motherboard to lower it down, one of my hands was grabbing the conveniently located gold-coloured heatsink (between the CPU and the PCI-Express slots). As I did this, I heard a "crack" and the heatsink suddenly felt loose. "Oh no! What have I done?!"

Fortunately it was easily repaired with some heatsink cement that I'd bought last year following a similar incident.

In went the RAM, and the cables for the 1394, VFD USB and Audio (initially I had the "HD Audio" connected, but later I swapped over to the PC'97).

I then took the Blu-Ray drive out and mounted that in the external media caddy. I'll admit it took me a couple of goes to figure out the right way to align the drive in the caddy. When it is located correctly, the case's silver eject button pushes against the drive eject button.

Maybe now would be a good time to complete installing the Noctua heatsink. In trying to figure out the best alignment for the sink, I placed it on top of the CPU, and then realised I had a bigger problem... It was too tall!

As you can see from the photo above, the heatsink is clearly visible poking above the top of the case. There's no way the lid is going to fit on with that installed! Looks like the Noctua (with a height of 125mm) is not suitable for this case. My original specs actually referred to a Scythe Ninja Mini, which at 115mm probably would squeeze in ok. In the meantime, I decide to revert back to the AMD heatsink and fan that came bundled with the CPU.

I then went to insert the Hauppauge HVR-2200 Tuner card and realised something wasn't quite right. It's a PCI-Express 1x card, but that heatsink I had to fix up was in the way. Hmm.... I wonder if maybe when I reattached it, it was put in backwards? Checking the photo on Gigabyte's product page for the GA-MA78GM-S2H confirmed my mistake. That was quickly rectified and then the tuner card fitted in nicely.

Next I installed the hard disks into the disk holder. That was straight forward, except that I realised I only had one "4-pin Molex to SATA power" adapter cable. For the moment I was going to be restricted to using one disk at a time.

That seemed to be all of the essential components installed, so I plugged in the mains power cord and fired up the machine.

Only to be greeted by deafening silence.

Hmm, what had I got wrong? I reviewed all the wiring and it looked ok. I then noticed that there was an empty square socket on the motherboard the looked suspiciously like it would be a perfect fit for one of the unused plugs from the power supply. Strange, I thought I'd already plugged in the power for the motherboard. Checking the motherboard manual (page 23) confirmed my error - that's the power supply for the CPU! (You can see it in this photo - it's the white cube-shaped socket in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo). I plugged in that cable, tried the On button again, and this time success!

The machine booted up, but when it got to scanning for local disks, it took ages to decide there weren't any. Coincidentally, I also noticed that the Seagate drive was making funny beeping noises.

I played around with the BIOS settings, swapping from IDE, to SATA, to AHCI, but nothing seemed to fix the problem that the drive wasn't being found. No matter, I thought I'd try installing Vista anyway - maybe the drive would appear then. No such luck. Vista confirmed that it too couldn't see any drives. About this time, I also updated the BIOS from F3 to F5 - (the latest as of a few weeks ago).

Very odd. A quick Google of the symptoms revealed others have had similar problems with the Seagate drives, so in the interests of testing the system out, I swapped the power over to the Western Digital drive. The difference was obvious - the drive was found by the BIOS immediately.

About that time I had to go out, so rather than let the Vista install complete, I just shut down the machine. Probably not a good move, as the next time I started it up, I was greeted by an obscure "Bootldr is missing" message.

The strange thing is that even when I tried to boot from the Vista DVD, the message still appeared. It was like the BIOS was checking the hard-disk even though I'd told it to try the CD first. Very odd. In the end, in desperation I disconnected the SATA cable from the drive and rebooted. This time, with no hard-disk to confuse it, the BIOS offered to boot from the CD again, and I was able to start the Vista installation process again. Once this was underway, I reconnected the SATA connector again.

Vista then displayed the drive in its list and allowed me to reformat it. However presumably because Vista thought this drive was now "removable", it refused to allow me to install on it. No matter, I just rebooted at this point, and was able to repeat the process again, this time without the "Bootldr is missing" message causing problems. I finished the Vista install, but as it was done on the WD drive, I didn't activate it, knowing that I eventually intend to use the replacement Seagate drive for as the system disk.

So after those minor speed bumps, I finished installing Vista Ultimate and drivers for the various components. I then fired up Media Center in Vista and it worked like a dream. It located all the digital TV channels we have in Adelaide, and was able to display the TV in living colour. At this stage, I was using one of my computer monitors, but the next step was to try out the Composite TV-out socket to see if we'd be able to hook this thing up to our ancient CRT TV.

Much to the bemusement of Narelle, I took the system down to the room where the TV lives, and proceed to hook it up to the VCR. Sadly, after a few goes with various settings, I resigned myself to the fact that it just wasn't going to work. For some reason, while the VCR can happily receive composite video from our existing DVD player, it doesn't like the output from the 8400GS NVidia-based card. I plugged the VCR back in and Narelle was able to watch her programme again, instead of a frustratingly-blank screen.

My final attempt to get this to work will be to try one of the RF Modulators from Jaycar, but I'm pretty pessimistic about the chances of success. Assuming that fails to work, then I think it's "get a new TV" time.

The only other news is that Mark from Mats Systems confirmed the Seagate drive is a dud and is replacing it. I also got a full refund for the Noctua heatsink, as I was able to return it in mint condition in its original packaging. I think it would be a great heatsink, just not for this size case! He also supplied me with an extra Molex to SATA converter, for when the replacement drive comes in.

In conclusion, all I need is the replacement drive and to sort out the TV situation and I think we're up and running. For my first "build from scratch" computer, I'm pretty pleased with the result :-)

Looking at LCD Monitors (Home Theatre PC)

2008-06-09T23:41:00.001+09:30

I've had a couple of comments that trying to use our ancient CRT TV with the HTPC is not a great plan. So I've been doing some additional research into buying a new TV. The criteria I've been using include:

Less than $1,000
Full high definition
At least as large as the current CRT (~52cm/20")
HDMI input
Not overly power hungry
Decent colour and contrast
Audio support
Good WAF

The first big choice seems to come down to plasma or LCD. I'm leaning towards LCD at the moment, as I don't want a ridiculously large display (which the plasmas seem better suited to) and and would prefer something that doesn't suck heaps of power (and consequently $$$).

The next thing is that many manufacturers sell both LCD TVs and LCD Monitors. Now unless I'm missing something obvious, it doesn't look like there's that much difference between the two categories. Some of the "TV" models have in-built tuners, but as the HTPC will have that I'd rather buy one without and save a few dollars.

Contrast ratio is also important, and here bigger is generally better.

Response time is also apparently relevant, as that determines how well it can display fast moving images. Smaller (faster) is better.

So here's some of the models I've come across so far:

Model	Size (inches)	Contrast ratio (dynamic)	Response Time (ms)	Price (AUD)
ViewSonic VX2835wm	28	800	3	635
BenQ V2400W	24	1000 (4000)	5	629
Samsung 245B	24	1000 (3000)	5	712
LG L246WH-BN	24	2000	5	460
Samsung 2493HM	24	1000 (10,000)	5	599
Samsung 2693HM	26	1000 (3000)	5	699

I still haven't made a decision and it would be good to actually have a look at some of the candidates in person. I'm open to any other suggestions too.

Home Theatre PC (Components)

2008-05-29T15:58:00.001+09:30

For a while now, I've been thinking about building my own Home Theatre PC (HTPC). I've got an unused Vista Ultimate license that I'd like to put to good use, and using it for a Media Centre fits the bill. While you can buy a prebuilt HTPC, but I thought it would be both fun and educational to build one from scratch. There are a number of good resources when planning to build a HTPC, but I've found the most useful are:

After throwing around various combinations of parts I've come up with the following list:

| --- | --- | | CPU | AMD Athlon X2 4850e | | Case | Antec Fusion 430 Silver (includes power supply) | | Tuner | Hauppauge HVR-2200 | | Fan | Noctua NH-U9B Quad Heatpipe | | Motherboard | GA-MA78GM-S2H | | RAM | Kingston (2x1G 800) KVR800D2N5K2/2G | | Drive 1 | 3.5" HDD SATA-300 250GB 16MB Seagate | | Drive 2 | Western Digital 1TB (WD10EACS) | | Keyboard | Shintaro wireless | | Remote | Microsoft MCE Remote Control | | DVD | LG GGC-H20N/L Blu-ray/HD reader, DVD & CD writer |

I posted this list to the forum (like a lot of others do) just to check it was reasonable. The main criteria I've worked from are quiet operation (and hence 45W CPU) and provision for the future (high definition). I made use of the Static Ice price comparisons to gauge what were good prices. If I lived in Sydney I'd probably buy most of the bits from IT Estate, however once you factor in shipping, the local retailers MATS Systems and MSY are pretty competitive. I was originally planning to get the Pioneer BDC-S02, but opted for the cheaper (and in-stock) LG instead. The other curious thing is that we've got a very old TV that used to belong to my parents - an early 1980's Philips model that only has an RF (aerial) socket. Not exactly what most home theatre systems are made of, but it works, and I'd prefer not to have to replace it before it completely dies! So my plan is to use a cheap video card (a Gigabyte 8400GS 256MB GV-NX84G256HE) that unlike the onboard video has a TV-OUT socket, and use an RF Modulator to convert that to something the TV should like. If that fails, then maybe we'll just have to buy a new TV. Once I've purchased all the components, I'll post an update on the build progress.