Media Centre » Just Me

25th March 2008

Why have a HTPC?

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

The Self-built Media Centre in question

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

My Photos - allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
My Music - The Music collection
My TV - schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

posted in Elly, Media Centre, PC, ellybabes, htpc | 0 Comments

16th May 2007

The new HTPC in my life, Part 2

The really observent of you will no doubt have noticed my stupid mistake already, if not then the above photo, along with the last one on yesterdays post, shows the mistake I made. Yes, that little mounting bracket around the CPU socket was supposed to have been fitted before the motherboard goes into the case. Not a big mistake, by any means, but it was enough to highlight, to me, how much things had changed since I last built a PC from components. So, I decided to halt assembly until my old friend Bernard was able to drop round and help me.

With Bernard ~~helping~~ doing most of the assembly that part of thing’s proceeded fairly uneventfully. That is until it came to installing the DVD-writer! the drive itself bolted in very easily and appeared to be lined up correctly. When we went to attach the aluminium “drive door” we discovered that this was not the case. We had to loosen the drive cage mountings and hold the drive into the correct position and then tighten everything up again and while there was less than 1mm in the difference this was prolly the single most time consuming part of the assembly.

Once the drive was located corectly, it should have been a simple enough to just stick the “drive door” in place with the provided double sided sticky tape, unfortunatly the original drive door had a little bit of plastic located in such a way that we couldn’t get the door to line up correctly. Thirty seconds with the Dremel later it fitted.

At this point I’d like to remind you that this was a brand new drive, I hadn’t even tested it to see if it worked, so with the benefit of hindsight it was a pretty stupid thing to do, seein as how I had voided the warranty!

It seemed a shame to hide all that copper under a cover but cover it we did.

Then came the tedious part of any new PC build HT or not, the software! About 20 minutes were spent configuring various different Bios’s, Motherboard, Raid controller and then after, some partitioning and formating the Windows 2005 Media Centre Edition was slotted into the shiny DVD drive and the Operating system Install began, rather than bore you all with that, click this link for a great step by step guide courtesy of The Green Button. I just followed the instructions provided there and everything was straight forward and it Just worked, as the Mac faithful like to say

The Last 2 parts of the software installation were interesting. Part of the reason I used an Intel Board for this Machine was because I wanted to checkout what all the Viiv fuss was about and I have to say, I’m sorry I installed the Viiv software, in almost every way. It’s completly useless as a media server unless your network hub is Viiv approved! it won’t allow streaming of shows or any media for that matter

Still, there are other options for sharing your own media, legally, but I think this post is long enough and I’ll leave that for another.

The other Item was the LCD panel, I installed the driver and application and it displayed time and date immediatly

when I hit the green button on the remote MCE poped up and the LCD displayed “Welcome to MCE” played a few music tracks and the artist, album, track info etc. starts scrolling past

same when watching a movie or TV show. There was no configuration required at all. The only downside is that unfortunatly it doesn’t transmit IR so we still have to use the Microsoft receiver/transmitter to change channels on the set-top box. Not really a big problem though other than the extra cables.

All in all, Both myself and Elly are very pleased with the results, it’s whisper quiet except for the first 5 seconds of bootup, but then it runs 24/7 so that’s not really an issue.

Having this in the living room is great, it’s our main PC in the house so it gets used a lot (32″ widescreen HDTV makes a great monitor :D)and unlike most people’s preconceptions windows rarely complains, in fact our NTL set-top box needs to be rebooted more often than the HTPC. Now if only there were some way I could connect the cable directly to the HTPC I’d be in home theatre heaven.

posted in MCE, Media Centre, The Green Button, htpc | 0 Comments

15th May 2007

The new HTPC in my life, Part 1

On of the things that happened while this blog was sleeping was that our old HTPC gave up the ghost. Now to be fair this was not a young machine and it wasn’t built to be a HTPC originally but it got “re-tasked” when it was about 3 years old. The day that it passed on it was over 6 years old! Not bad considering it ran 24/7 for 3 years or so.

Anyway, having lived with a HTPC for a few years it was immediatly critical that we (myself and Ellybabes) got it replaced and after considering a shuttle option and having difficulties with Shuttle resellers not offering the model we wanted and the only one that did flat out refusing to support the config we wanted, we made the decision to build our own.

So after a bit of shopping around I ordered all the components from a few different online stores…

Elara, Provided the Motherboard. When others Let me down, Kin sorted me out in a matter of days. Thanks
Quiet PC supplied the case, CPU heatsink & fan, Graphics card, Power supply and some excellent advice.
Dabs provided the Ram, hard disks and the DVD Writer

I decided to reuse the Hauppage PVR-350 tuner card from the old Media Centre to save a little on cost and prayed that it wouldn’t be one of those “christ I wish I hadda” moments

After about a week and a half all the parts arrived within 2-3 days of each other. The hard disks were the last to arrive and there’s only so much you can do with the rest of the components, so I took a few photo’s.

Some of the boxes arriving.

The fantastic Zalman Packaging.

And the visually Stunning MSI Silent Graphics Card

So after the unboxing I snapped the case before starting to assemble.

which was severely hampered by my stupidity

So what did I do that was stupid? Well, your just going to have to come back tomorrow to find out what I did wrong and how I solved the problem, completed the assembly and installed the operating system.

posted in MCE, Media Centre, htpc | 4 Comments

15th March 2007

F1 Season Kicks Off

The 2007 FI Grand Prix season begins tonight with the first practice session of the new season. I’m not going to stay up for it, but I have set it to record on the Media Centre, so, I’ll be watching that while I have breakfast in the morning.

Then tomorrow night I’ll be staying up for qualifying. Saturday being Paddy’s day and the race being that night, I’m really glad that Monday is a holy day. I pray I can recover, before tuesday.

Hopefully, I’ll find a minute or two over the weekend to post a little more as well.

posted in F1, MCE, Media Centre, Race, championship, grand prix | 0 Comments

31st January 2007

While this blog was “sleeping”…

So, I had a few technical difficulties of my own making and it took me a while to get thing’s back up and running, but as we all know life doesn’t stop just ’cause your blog is offline and I have been busy. here’s a quick round up in no particular order…

Our old media centre PC decided it had enough and shuffled off this mortal coil

We built a new Media Centre PC

We switched phone, broadband and TV providers
I spent a day in St. James hospital (Turned out to be nothing serious:))

Christmas

New Year

Wedding planning

I started my new Job

Another Barcamp

Honeymoon planning

More wedding plans

But at least I’ll have a few posts worth to write about next week. While My sweetie is away for a few days for work reasons.

posted in Blog, Elly, Honeymoon, Media Centre, My Sweetie, Wedding planning, broadband, company, ellybabes, phone | 3 Comments

11th October 2006

Wednesday is gadget day (no. 4) Firefox 2

This week is a bit of a deviation from the script as it were. I’m leaving the reviews for now and I’m gonna post about FireFox 2 RC 2 (that’s release candidate) so this isn’t the final release but very close. That’s a very strategic play by Mozilla as Microsoft are about to release IE 7 as a “Critical security update” and essentially force the IE 6 users to upgrade whether they like it or not.

Anyway back to FireFox 2, whats new? well it’s not the tabbed browsing although they have added a “close” button to each tab which is a nice touch.

There is a new spellcheck as I type feature which for some reason doesn’t seem to work on my laptop but does on my office desktop, even though it’s enabled on both. That could be due to the laptop though but I will come back to that later.

My personal favourite new feature though is the “recover my tabs” feature, essentially if the browser is stopped unexpectedly you can open all the same tabs the next time you start FireFox. It also means that if you just leave the browser open when you shutdown your machine, your given the option to open the exact same tabs when you reboot. so if your like me and open tabs as you see interesting links but don’t always get to read them they are there when I next open the browser. It’s also great if windows falls over.

The last thing I want to mention is how efficient the code this browser uses is. The reason I mention this is because of my newsed laptop. As some of you are aware I recently acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio 505 notebook, it’s about 8 years old and the is limited by a 333Mhz Celeron CPU and 128Mb of ram not a giga-anything in sight I have been using it as a web browser, newsreader and of course for blogging as it’s small and light and means I’m not hogging the Media centre if someone else wants to use it.

I had tried to load the original FireFox on this machine but found it unbearable slow even with only a single tab open, whereas I barely noticed a difference in performance with IE 6. I am typing this post on an 8 year old laptop in FireFox 2 with 5 tabs open and 3 of those are web 2.0 sites. Mozilla I don’t know how you’ve done it but I’m stunned with the performance I’m getting on my retro hardware

It will be interesting to see how this stacks up against IE 7 and even more interesting to see how long it takes for Mozilla to finalise this release candidate. Looks like the browser wars are most definitely back on.

posted in Blog, Features, MCE, Media Centre, Microsoft, Useful tip, Vaio, Web Tech, Wednesday is gadget day, Weekly, browser, code, firfox, interface, mozilla, sneak preview, spellcheck | 0 Comments

31st August 2006

Gadgets

Right so, my “about” page says I like my gadgets. Yet I haven’t said to much about them.

In truth time is a precious commodity and there are lots of things I would like to cover on this blog that I haven’t, as yet, had the time to. but thats a whole other post

Anyway, back on topic, I’m gonna include a list of my favourite gadgets and over the coming days/weeks I’ll post about each.

Hewlett Packard iPaq 6515
Media Centre PC
X-box 360
MP3 player
FujiFilm S5200 Digital Camera
This Blog
The mobile bloging gadget
Heart Monitor

There are lots more that I haven’t mentioned so bookmark this page, as I’ll be adding to the list and linking each gadget to the relevant post as I post them

posted in 6515, Blog, Entertainment, Fujifilm, Hewlett Packard, Lifestyle, MCE, MP3, Media Centre, Music, PC, S5200, Technology, Web Tech, X-box 360, gadgets, heart monitor, iPaq, interface, mine, mobile blog, phone, photo, picture, sneak preview | 2 Comments

26th August 2006

Web Radio

A while back I discovered a web radio service called Pandora. I’ve been using it ever since, why? cause it plays toonz that I like. “Big Deal” I here you shout well have a read of this, it gives you a little insite into what makes this web radio station so different and imho better than any I have ever used before.

If your a music fan or musician with an “OpenEar ™” (That’s like an open mind for ears :)) then there site is a treasure trove, that will suck up hours of your time. As an example of the kind of treats that it has helped me find, we’ve all heard this but who else has heard this version or a better example, from this song I found this one ’cause there similar??? (click the little play buttons for a sample

All I have to do now is wait for this to be made with “decent” speakers built-in so I can put them in every room of the house, ‘cept the living room of course cause the media centre PC is already plugged into the sound system there.

posted in Entertainment, General, Lifestyle, MCE, MP3, Media Centre, Music, News, PC, Pandora, Radio, Song, Treasure Trove, Useful tip, Web Tech | 2 Comments