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Today's story is a lesson in patience. 

Lothar's Rule #1: Don't get too attached to any particular electronics.  Just when things start working smoothly for you, life (or your wife, if you really screwed up) will slap you in the face. 

In this day and age, you would expect it would be very easy to get HDTV on your HTPC. However, options for the DIY'er are still pretty limited. If you live in a good area, broadcast HDTV will work, but lets not mention all of the problems that can be had when trying to get broadcast TV. Plus, that still leaves us without the premium channels in HD.

Option #2 was essentially hailed as THE killer hardware that would bring mass acceptance to the Media Center platform. Well, so far we aren't quite there. Of course, I am talking about CableCard. That is an entirely different article but for now the fact that it will cost you over $1500 to get access to a lower end single CableCard system is enough to deter most people.

Enter option #3, the HDHomerun, the network QAM tuner. Silicon Dust was the first to go after the QAM market and properly develop drivers to work with the major software package. QAM offers HD straight from your COAX cable without the mess of CabelCards or STBs. The catch? Providers choose what channels are encrypted and as such you may not get the ones you really want. As an example, in my area Discovery HD is encyrpted but AEHD, TNTHD and TBSHD are not. So you are really taking your chances.

So you want QAM? You are going to have to get a tuner card or a HDHomeRun to tune the free QAM. The HDHomeRun works with most major software packages, however, SageTV is the only windows software package that works for the Hauppauge 1600 and Avermedia M78. Check out Matt's tuner guide for more info on Linux compatability.

After that? Well you are likely going to be involved in some extensive channel scanning and then mapping DTV channels to your standard digital cable channels so you get the proper EPG data. I am currently in this step with SageTV and am finding this to be a bit of a PITA .

Whats the point of this blog post. Not much really, I just wanted to drive the point home that there is another alternative to getting HD to your HTPC :).

 

For you Windows Media Center users, did you know...

If you click the EXIT button on your remote when you have a TV Recording selected, it will automatically ask you if you wish to Delete the recording?!?!? This saves a bunch of time if you need to delete a large number of shows and don't want to take up as much time. (The other way to delete from the TV view, is to right click, then select delete...so this saves you that extra 2 clicks!

and...

During the guide setup, when you have to scroll down through 51 pages of legal stuff...if you click the LEFT ARROW BUTTON, it will take you to the Next page button?!?!

how about...

Those of you who have been trying to Share your Recording TV per Mike's Guide (other Mike, not me) but have been unsuccessful, try this: Add the Recorded TV folder in your main MCE Watch Library (Tasks > Settings > Library Setup > Add Folder to Watch > Find your Recorded TV). I had gone through all the steps, but it wasn't until I did that, that my recorded shows from my other system showed up. Give it a shot if you're getting frustrated!

 

Just a few hints & tricks that hopefully will make your Media Center life more enjoyable. I'll try to learn some more & post back. Enjoy!

If you've been around for a while, you know that I'm a big supporter of Mythtv. Everything about it is free (until September, when Zap2It stops offering free program guide info, but that's neither here nor there). The OS is free, Mythtv itself is free. It's just really nice. However, we're going to depart from that for this build because the goal here is (quiet) DVD upscaling for those that don't want to take the leap to HD DVD or BluRay quite yet. High quality upscaling can really make a difference if you're using a projector with an image 120" in diagonal.

So in my ideal world, I would have a massive Vista box setup as a server in my closet or basement, somewhere I wouldn't have to see or hear it, nor would I have to worry about anyone messing with it. Then in each bedroom or living room, I would set up Media Center Extender devices, or even small clients if need be. I know, the only current MCE Extender is the Xbox360, but this will be changing soon. So, I'm not going to go obscene here on specs, but just want a solid PC I can run as my server/MCE system.

 

Case: Coolermaster CM Stacker 810

Since noise wasn't going to be an issue, I basically wanted to use a simple case which could house basically as many hard drives as humanly possible. The Stacker can certainly fit the bill there, with a ton of space inside. 

Price: $160

Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 XE

I know they got bought out by OCZ, but they still (for now) make the same quality power supplies which are known for being ridiculously reliable.  This 510 watt power supply has a 650 peak, meaning it's got plenty of headroom for whatever you need. Besides, we're simply using on-board video, so most of the PSU's drain will be from the hard drives.

Price: $199

Motherboard: Intel DG33FB ATX Motherboard

For a server system, Intel boards with Intel processors just scream stability. And besides that, this board has everything we need, from 3 x PCI-express x1 slots, to on-board video, and the price is reasonable as well. 

Price: $110 

CPU/Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40 Ghz)

Handling 8 TV streams is not going to be the easiest thing in the world, and since we're building for the future anyways, no reason to not spoil myself and take one of the fastest chips out there, with 4 CPU cores in it. Should be a breeze streaming anything from this machine. Heck, you could even transcode several movies if you had to, and this wouldn't hiccup. 

 Price: $320 

RAM/Memory: 2 x Corsair Value Select PC2-5300 2GB (VS2GBKIT667D2)

Corsair has long been known for quality brand of memory, and 4gb is the Max we're going to be able to utilize with the 32-bit version of Vista, so there you have it. 

Price: $77 ea, $154 total 

Video/Sound: Going to stick with on-board. Since we're using this as a server, no video or sound will be directly output from this system.

Price: Free as in beer 

Hard Drives: 6 x Samsung or Hitachi , 500gb SATA 7200 Hard Drives

Yep. 3 terabytes! Yummy! Well, truth be told, these would be setup in a RAID 5 configuration, so it would be less than 3 terabytes, but then at least I'd have some sort of failsafe in the event a drive dies. I chose 500gb's instead of 750 or 1tb, for the simple fact that it's the sweet spot right now. You can find 500gb drives for under $150, where as 750 & 1000 are easily much much higher, for not that much storage. I chose Samsung or Hitachi because they have simply ruled the quiet hard drive market for some time, and continue on. Hopefully Seagate can come back strong with some quiet drives, but for now, I'm sticking to tried & true.

Price: ~$120 each, ~$720 total

RAID Card: HighPoint RocketRAID 2322 PCI-Express 8-port SATA II

Even had the motherboard had on-board RAID, I probably still would have opted for this card, as going the dedicated RAID card allows for a much safer experience in case anything happens. I've heard too many horror stories with on-board RAID controllers...and besides that, having a dedicated card in the PCI-Express slot should make for some nice performance boosts. 

Price: $250 

TV Tuners:  2 x HDHomeRun ATSC Tuners, 2 x VistaView Saber 2020 NTSC Tuners

The HD HomeRun's are far from the cheapest option for ATSC/HD signals, but for now, they remain the only way to get QAM within Windows Media Center. And besides that, they're quality devices that justify it. Two tuners in each means I can have up to 4 streaming HD shows at the same time!

This will be the first time I recommend something other than the Hauppauge PVR-500 dual tuner (which I use currently), but with the release of VistaView's 2020, this offers you a newer quality product, with the convenience of finally being able to utilize those PCI-Express slots on your motherboard. The low-profile design should also keep airflow moving nice & smooth (something the gigantour PVR-500 could not brag about).

Having two of each type, means a total of 8 tuners available! Perfect for any sports season. :-)

Price: $170 for each HDHomerun, $160 for each VistaView...$660 total

Keyboard/Mouse: No need for anything fancy here, it's in a closet. Ask your neighborhood geek, or craigslist, I bet you could find one for practically nothing.

 Price: Free (or $10 if you're lazy)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate, x86 32-bit Version OEM

I know this is technically called a server build, and for that I might have wanted to go 64-bit, but if you've read my blog, you know that's not going to happen (at least right now). Performance with what we have, as an extender machine, should be great with 32-bit Vista.

Price: $200

 

Grand total....$2773...JUST squeaking in under $3k. Not too shabby, and definitely future proof for at least a little while. Should take most of you a while to fill up those hard drives, and when you do, the case & RAID card can easily handle more. My hope, of course, is that in time Windows Home Server edition will fill this need, and include some definitely needed Media Center-integration. I definitely prefer their simple drive striping method to that of the hassle of RAID, but alas, not quite yet an option.

If you're looking to save a few bucks, it's pretty simple. You could opt for a regular dual-core instead of the quad, that should save about $150-200 at least. You could get a generic case and save around $100 as well. And the list goes on, but you get the idea, $3k is really a max, and I'm sure with some deal searching, you could do better. 

 

 

We are almost 6 months into Vista being released to the public, and if you look around forums across the web, users are still not exactly sold on upgrading. There are many reasons that could be attributed to this: cost of Vista, not supported hardware, etc. But, I think the #1 reason is that people just don't see the worth to spend the time and money associated with upgrading. A while back, Matt Goyer (when he worked for Microsoft) posted a blog about all the new features that were in Vista, in response to critics who said nothing new was added.

I'd like to take a bit to go over that fairly in-depth list and address it piece by piece with a concentration on how it relates to the world of Home Theater PC Enthusiasts such as myself.  To do so in the easiest way, I will sort each section by Hype and Reality which will help determine a final score.  By "Hype" I am referring to what the buzz was about this feature before launch, and "Reality" will mean how it was implemented / accepted after launch.

Digg It!

If you check out the upper right hand corner of this page, you will notice there is now a Submit News button. This marks the beginning of MissingRemote.com Community Edition. Starting today, all news, well at least most news, will be coming from MissingRemote.com users. YAY! This will allow Mike and myself to focus on providing original content for the site and hopefully allow for a greater range of news! We will be kicking this off with a contest announcement tomorrow but in the mean time feel free to start submitting news. The staff will be moderating and formatting the news for now so a link is fine. However, feel free to talk about the news story, we will be sure to include it.

What other "Community Features" will we be adding? Well, its pretty early in the ball game for this round of upgrades so I don't want to spill the beans and the changes will come gradually in the following months :). Thanks again for coming to MissingRemote.com :).

-Alan

We here at MissingRemote often talk about all the benefits that come with a DVR/PVR, but rarely do we get a chance to clearly show there are some cons to it. Well, this past week I was given a clear reminder as to the danger that will always exist when you rely 98% of the time on your DVR (in my case, a Media Center Computer).

A little about my usage history. I don't know when anything is on live except for basketball games, and that's only because ESPN will show the time on their homepage. Other than that, I couldn't tell you the different time/day of Lost compared to The Ultimate Fighter...and those are some of my FAVORITE shows. Ask me about a show I care less about and as they say in Micky Blue Eyes, "Foggettaboutit!"

Remember this? I don't :-(

For the most part, my Vista Media Center has worked near flawlessly. I can't remember missing a show due to a crash or any other problem...until this week. The Event: The biggest soccer match of the year (that's actually televised in the US), the UEFA Cup Finals Championship. Of course it is on mid-day, but no problem, I set my Media Center a week in advance. The day came, I know the game happened and I spent the remainder of the day avoiding any sports website and ignoring anyone who might have mentioned the game.

Now, the joy of having a PVR/DVR, is that you just go about your daily business without worry because, all your shows are being recorded. So I worked all day, worked out afterwards, then got home and settled around 9pm, ready and excited to watch the game I had been pining for all day. So I start Media Center, and look in Recorded TV, and sure enough, there's my UEFA Cup Soccer Game. All is well in the world I thought...that is, until I pressed play.

Instead of seeing two of the world's greatest (arguably) club soccer teams, I was greeted with a Baseball show?!?! No worries, I set it to record an hour extra of the game, so this must just be running late. But then it kept going. And going. And then when that ended, Boxing began. I'm an avid Boxing fan, so I knew this would be long, and then it finally set in my head--I'M NOT GOING TO GET TO WATCH THE GAME. That didn't stop me from fast forwarding through 3 hours of boxing, just to be sure.

To this day I have no idea whose fault it was--was it Media Center's Guide? ESPN's original time frame? Me for not quadruple checking? Who knows. All I know is I missed a great (arguable) game, one which would never have happened if DVR/PVR didn't exist. Sure this is a rare incident, and maybe only the 2nd or 3rd time this has ever happened (and I've been using Media Center since the original), but the fact remains it happened, and by the time I realized it, it was too late.

I guess my moral of this story, is definitely enjoy your PVR/DVR, but understand the risk involved...because you just may miss that once a year event you've been waiting for!

This weekend my wife hosted a baby shower at our house, so we had a bunch of people over. I soon found myself removed from the family room and the computer room 'cause guys weren't allowed... So what's a guy to do with no HTPC?

Luckily for me, my brother was over and brought along his Mac . With time on my hands, and nothing better to do, we set out to get this on my Mythtv network. The most difficult part here was actually getting his laptop on my wireless network (128bit WEP, supressed SSID, MAC filtering). Once that was done, it was a simple matter of finding the correct binary for the Mac frontend (from here). With a quick config, which involved specifying the Master Backend IP Address, and username and password for the MYSQL database, we were up and running in litterally 5-10 minutes (from download to watching tv). It took us two tries to find a current binary to load - the first that we found didn't use the most up to date protocol that was being used on my server. Once that was all resolved, we had a full frontend on his Mac laptop. This included everything that you'd find on a Linux frontend such as LiveTV, Recordings, Videos, DVDs, Music, Images, etc etc. I wish there was an equivalent for Windows (right now, the best that I've found is an app that will connect to the server so that I can watch recordings with all the propper commercials flagged).

So now, any time that my brother comes to visit, he can bring his Mac over and watch tv with the rest of us if he wants (assuming I don't boot him from my network that is ).

As a side note, I will confirm my earlier notions that a Wireless G network can stream SDTV easily, but is not nearly fast enough for HDTV. When we tried that, we had major stuttering. Nothing new here (hopefully), just one more data point.

Hopefully someone found this interesting or worth reading. It's just amazing how expandable Mythtv is and how easy it really is to setup. What are you waiting for? Try it out!

As a compliment to our upcoming ATSC/NTSC combo round up I wanted to share how I test the TV tuners. Read on for the nitty gritty.

I was recently at Microsoft's campus for their annual MVP Summit, and got to spend some time with Jessica Zahn, of the eHome group there. Besides being very nice, she was showing myself & fellow MVP Bryan Socha (aka Accident) some Vista TV features. While that was good and fine, what blew us away, was this very little known trick.

If you have ever installed Windows Media Center, any version, surely you hate the EULA screen (shown below from 2005) as much as I do, since it required you to scroll 68 pages with a remote. Well, did you know that you can press UP ARROW TWICE, and it will take you to the buttons that say you accept? Neither did I!! But trust me, this has been around a while and WORKS!

So remember this tip the next time you install MCE & save some time!

EDIT 3/20: One of our Members, G White, pointed out that you can do the same with even LESS WORK: Just hit the right arrow button on your remote once and it jumps down to the "I agree" button.  Thanks G!!