David Gardiner - Media Center

Windows 8 Media Center (there and back again)

2013-01-31T21:32:00.001+10:30

Our Media Center PC has been running reasonably well since I built it way back in July 2008. Wow – almost 5 years old – actually that probably explains the state of the remote control (currently being held together with duct tape!)

Anyway after successfully upgrading my laptop and reprovisioned desktop (formerly the Hyper-V/Homeserver) to Windows 8 I decided I'd update the Media Center as well.

Upgrading was relatively painless in itself. I took a backup of the Windows 7 install (just in case) and then did a fresh install of Windows 8 x64 and then activated my free Media Centre license. I'd previously been running 32 bit Windows 7, but didn't anticipate any problems.

One interesting side-effect of using the 'English (British)' install of Windows 8 was that some of the terminology in Media Centre was slightly different. What was called "original air date" was now "original date broadcast"

And predictably, "Program Details" became "Programme Details" (though because that was now wider than the pop-up menu, the text would scroll side-to-side so you could read all of it!)

So that was all well and good, but there were a few things that didn't work so well.

Presumably because of the new Windows 8 start screen, there is no longer a setting to make Media Center start at Windows Startup (kind of handy for a dedicated Media Center PC). The workaround for that was to create a batch file that is run via a scheduled task triggered at login (a bit of a hack).

The other problem that became quickly apparent was that despite Windows 8 generally having a better reputation for performance than Windows 7, in this instance it seemed that there were some specific problems. Audio for live TV was consistently getting out of sync with the video. I suspected that the hardware may be struggling to keep up with pushing the data around. Only 2GB of ram and using the original on-board video adapter might be an issue.

I thought I'd try replacing one thing at a time, so swapped in a newer video card (borrowed from the desktop box). This seemed to solve the audio sync problem, so I went and purchased a separate card – an nVidia GeForce 630 card. Installing this was straight-forward, but then revealed a new problem. For some reason the video output from the nVidia card was too wide for our TV. Despite using HDMI and setting the screen to 1920x1080 (the same resolution as the onboard ATI video card was using), I couldn't get it to shrink. Unfortunately our TV didn't have any controls to change the size of the picture either.

The next problem became evident later on. Almost every day the first time the Media Center PC was turned on I was greeted with a "This computer has unexpectedly restarted" message. Searching the event log revealed a consistent errors such as:

The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000009f (0x0000000000000003, 0xfffffa8001cc2880, 0xfffff80007108b30, 0xfffffa8007050360). A dump was saved in: C:\Windows\MEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 012813-315480-01.
Windows failed to resume from hibernate with error status 0xC0000001
The system firmware has changed the processor's memory type range registers (MTRRs) across a sleep state transition (S4). This can result in reduced resume performance.

Initially the errors related to 'Sleep' so I switched over to using Hibernate but as you can see that didn't improve things.

After enduring two weeks of this I decided enough was enough. After doing another backup (so that I could give Windows 8 another try when some of these issues might have been resolved), I dropped in the Windows 7 Recovery CD and restored back to Windows 7 (taking out the nVidia card at the same time).

So while Windows 8 has been great for the other computers in the house, I think we'll stick with Windows 7 Media Center for now.

Renaming date-named folders using PowerShell

2011-04-09T16:53:00.001+09:30

Since I've been using the Windows 7 Import Pictures and Videos wizard to upload photos from our digital camera, we've used the directory naming scheme of YYYY-MM-DD. Prior to this, I'd written my own custom photo importer in C++ as I didn't like the naming schemes that Windows XP offered. Unfortunately I'd chosen YYYYMMDD instead.

I'm now consolidating all our digital photos onto our Windows Home Server. This makes them easier to browse on the big screen using Windows Media Center, and has the added benefit that they also get backed up to the cloud via a subscription to CrashPlan.

I discovered the downside to having the different naming schemes when you go to view the photos in Media Center – it displays the folders out of order because they don't all follow the same format.

PowerShell to the rescue:

cd \\\\homeserver\\photos
dir | Where-Object {$\_.Name -match "^\\d{8}$" } | Rename-Item -NewName { $\_.Name -replace "^(\\d{4})(\\d{2})(\\d{2})(.\*)", "\`$1-\`$2-\`$3\`$4" }

This finds directories matching the old naming scheme and renames them to conform to the new one.

My C++ importer imported all photos into a single folder, so to avoid overwriting the same folder if you imported twice on the same day, I would add a .0 (or .1 etc) to the end of the folder to ensure it was unique. There weren't too many of these though, so I dealt with them manually.

Trial by Media Center

2011-01-10T17:54:00.001+10:30

My Media Center has been misbehaving a bit lately, much to my (and the family's) annoyance.

First off, it the receiver started showing "tuner not available" errors. Restarting the machine would resolve the problem, but only temporarily. Installing the newer Hauppauge driver 7.9.1.28162 seems to have mostly fixed that (from the Hauppauge UK website). Along the way to resolving this, I also tried swapping the card into the other PCI Express slot, just in case that helped.

Then the Microsoft Remote stopped working. The display on the front of the Antec case said something like "bad command" for any button I pressed. Opening up the iMON software, I enabled sounds for invalid commands, and sure enough every button press resulted in the warning sound. Bizarre! The batteries in the controller were still fresh, so the only thing I could think of was to find the original IR receiver that came with the controller and plug that in. I'd never used it as the Antec case came with a receiver built in. In any case (ha ha), that seemed to resolve that one.

Then a few hours later, the sound spontaneously muted. Attempts to increase the volume worked briefly, then the volume would automatically wind back down to zero/mute. Alternatively, it rolled right up to 50 (100%). Rebooting and that one went away – not sure what's going on there.

So I'm keeping a close eye on things. Maybe the MCE is feeling jealous that the XBox 360 is getting some of it's screen time 😀

Extra copper

2010-12-12T07:58:00.001+10:30

I had one regret when we did our house extension a few years ago. I'd neglected to install network points next to the TV antenna outlet that I'd put in our family room (what was I thinking!). This meant that the Media Centre has been operating on wireless for the last few months since we relocated it from another room. Not ideal, even though it's very close to the access point, and I also suspect the wireless drivers are responsible for the Media Centre machine constantly waking up from sleep-mode even though nothing was scheduled to record.

Replacing a skirting board provided an opportunity to hide some cables and remedy the situation. I was initially just going to put one cable in, but then figured that if I'm going to put in one, I might as well put in two. Plus, there's that special family Christmas present that might appreciate a network connection pretty soon (It rhymes with "Textbox Elect", and we're exercising great restraint in not opening the box until December 25th! We ended up getting the 250GB bundle from Harvey Norman – though don't let them try and sell you a more expensive bundle with a ripoff $50 HDMI cable)

I'd pulled the cables up into the ceiling in the family room a few weeks ago (along with replacing the skirting board), but only yesterday got time to finish the job and run them into our storeroom (where the modem and switches are).

I managed to pull one of the existing cables back up into the ceiling, tie the new cables onto it, then pull them all back down through the wall cavity into the storeroom (if that hadn't worked, I'd have had to resort to drilling a hole in the ceiling cornice and running some conduit down the wall).

I'd bought a new wallplate and fittings from Jaycar, so I connected those up and hooked in the existing F-type connector. I did discover that the wallplate was probably intended to be mounted vertically (as the network points would only mount sideways), but I can live with that. It's all hidden behind a sidetable/cabinet anyway.

I then plugged the cables into my 1GBit switch and tested them out in the Media Center. Even though the cable and fittings are only CAT 5e, so far I've managed to the existing cables to run at 1Gbit. Not this time, both were only connecting at 100Mb 😢. I didn't have a lot of spare cable to play with at the wallplate end, but I wondered if I had untwisted the copper pairs too much when I'd hooked them up to the wallplate jacks. I re-did one, taking extra care to keep the pairs twisted until right up to where the wires got punched in. Bingo, 1Gbit! I tried the same with the second, but unfortunately it was still at 100Mbit. Oh well – one out of two isn't too bad.

Now just to wait patiently for two more weeks until we can play with our XBox 360 and the Kinect controller. Should be a great way to work off Christmas lunch!

Writing a Media Center Application in Visual Studio 2010

2010-10-17T16:10:00.001+10:30

My ISP (Internode) provides a number of unmetered streaming radio stations for its customers. A while back I'd followed some instructions on how to set up shortcuts in Media Center to link to some of these stations. This worked pretty well, until the ISP reorganised their server and all of the shortcuts broke. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a simple Media Center application that could grab the current radio list from the published radio stream RSS feed, list those stations in Media Center and allow selecting a station and getting Media Center to start playing it.

Download and install the Windows 7 Media Center SDK. This install some samples, the SDK help file and some templates (but only for Visual Studio 2008).
Go to Charlie Owen's blog and download his Addendum.zip. Amongst other things, this contains both project and item templates suitable for Visual Studio 2010. Follow the instructions to copy the templates into your Visual Studio templates folder.
Download and install the latest WiX 3.5 build (WiX 3.5 includes support for 2010)

Now you can start Visual Studio and you'll see a new project template in the C# language section. There's a few more things I needed to update to get everything working properly:

Search for "Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A" and replace it with "Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A" (eg. devinstall.cmd)
Search for "Windows Installer XML v3\bin" and replace it with "Windows Installer XML v3.5\bin" (eg. build.cmd)

Then it's just a matter of getting up to speed with the intricacies of Media Center application writing!

The source code for the application (InternodeRadioMCE) is published on Google Code. It is very rough at the moment. As I get more familiar with the Media Center programming model I hope to improve it a bit!

And the photo? It's of Rocky River (courtesy of our recent holiday to Kangaroo Island) – and the closest thing I could think of to a stream (as in streaming radio!)

Interactive TV in Windows Media Center

2010-07-08T20:22:00.001+09:30

I happened to be switching between channels the other night and went to enable subtitles for a particular program (a feature of MCE in Windows 7 that I've grown to really appreciate).

I was surprised to see an extra menu appearing - "Interactive TV". Wow, I wonder what it does? Nothing apparently but it is intriguing. I'm not sure if this is something new in MCE, or a new feature for the television transmission in my area.

A reply to my query on the Australian Media Centre forums suggests this is a new feature that some channels are now transmitting.

Assembling the Hyper-V Server

2010-02-20T12:36:00.001+10:30

Once I figured out my preferred components I emailed MSY and put in an order with MATS. However it turns out that just because MSY have something on their parts list, doesn't mean they have it in stock. I ended up having to go to their Plympton and City stores, and got the PSU from MATS as MSY didn't have that at all.

The case I used was from an old desktop PC. It can accept an ATX board, but as the previous motherboard was a slightly smaller model I had to do some "creative" metal work to move the hard drive bays around so that they could still fit inside the case and not bump into the motherboard.

Things that changed

| --- | --- | | RAM | 2 x G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL | | Drive (Data) | 2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1.5-TB Hard Drives | | UPS | Eaton Nova 625 AVR |

Noctua CPU Fan vs Ripjaw RAM

One reason I preferred the G.Skill Ripjaws RAM was that the heat spreaders were less intrusive than those on the "Trident" model. Having said that, once I went to clip the fans onto the Noctua, the wire clips on the RAM-side were in the way of the RAM. A bit of physical effort with a couple of pliers managed to bend the wire clips flatter against the heat sink such that the RAM could just slide past into the sockets on the motherboard.

Faulty RAM?

I added an old DVD drive I had lying around and went to install Windows Server 2008 R2. The installation proceeded as expected, then I noticed that the machine had suddenly rebooted. On restarting a message indicating that "Windows had not expected to shutdown" appeared. That's odd. Allowing it to continue then displayed a message that the installation had failed and to try again.

Hmm.. Just out of curiosity, I fired up the Memory Diagnostics tool and after ticking over it came up with a message indicating there was a problem! Restarting the machine I went back into the BIOS to see what it said there.. Only 6G of RAM??? Hmm. Now a visual inspection of the sticks of RAM and something looked wrong!

Reseating the RAM in the sockets and re-running the memory diagnostics and everything was happy again.

Enabling AHCI

I realised after I'd installed Windows Server 2008 R2 that I'd left the BIOS at the default settings, which included the SATA emulating IDE instead of AHCI. Because the boot disk was also connected this way, you can't just change the BIOS and reboot – you need to tweak the registry so that the ACHI driver gets loaded properly.

BSOD

"A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within an allocated time"

Lots of references to this online – some solutions suggest lowering the bus speed slightly. I fiddled around with these a bit but the crashes kept happening. I have no experience over (or under) clocking so I was quite out of my depth. Finally in desperation I changed the BIOS settings to the "fail safe" defaults. This appears to have done the trick.

Cooling

An unfortunate side-effect of trying to re-use an old desktop case is that I don't think the cooling of the various components is as good as it could be.

Using HWMonitor I am seeing the following temperatures being reported:

| --- | --- | | Component | °C | | CPU Core #0 | 41 | | CPU Core #1 | 36 | | CPU Core #2 | 43 | | CPU Core #3 | 38 | | HDD ST314003 #1 | 53 | | HDD ST314003 #2 | 55 |

I'm thinking getting a proper-size case and possibly some extra cooling might help bring things down to a better level. It would also mean the disks would be slightly more secure in the case!

Networking

I now have a number of machines capable of gigabit networking but my trusty Billion 7402GL modem/router only has 4 100Mb network ports. I purchased a new Asus GX-D1081 8 port gigabit switch to enable better network performance. This also meant I could connect the Windows Media Center PC directly (it was previously using a wireless connection). After confirming the switch worked correctly, I then changed the network settings on all the gigabit-capable machines to enable "Jumbo frames" at 9K. I'm pretty sure this has resulted in a noticeable improvement in performance – especially when browsing pictures through the media center that are stored remotely on the Windows Home Server box.