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Blogs

Dec 31 2012

Blog - 2012: Looking Backwards and Forward

By Mike Garcen

Well, it's that time again, 2012 is almost completely behind us. As with every year, there is a lot that's happened in the home theater world, some good, some not so good. We'd like to take a moment to reflect upon everything that happened and narrow down some of our favorites--what did we love most, what disappointed us most, and for 2013 what are we looking forward to. Hope you enjoy!

2012 Things We Loved 
  • Ceton Echo & Ceton Companion
    4 Watts and a Media Center Extender that will actually be supported. Frequent updates continue to make the experience better & better.
    • "having a solid media center platform that wouldn't require me to run a dedicated HTPC and have to support it day in and day out."
    • "I love the ability to quickly scan for new show premieres and manage my Windows Media Center using the Ceton Companion wherever I am."
  • Cases, Cases, Cases
    It's been a great year for HTPC chassis, from tiny to huge, there has been passive low profile cases from Streacom and Wesena, and then Fractal Design and Lian Li have made some great larger cases to suit your needs. For the HTPC being dead, there sure are a lot of options to build your own!
  • Dish Hopper 
    It would take A LOT to get me to give up the convenience of CableCARD + HTPC, but the Hopper is a step in the right direction. Not only because it provides a decent amount of storage, but also because it's the first mainstream DVR solution that makes ads optional - something that we've enjoyed for years. Of course the studios objected, so litigation is pending, but it's nice to see some MSO validation for something so critical to how my family consumes TV.
  • Rasberry Pi
    This diminutive DIY computer has stirred up a ton of interest in the maker community and among hobbyist developers. The Raspberry Pi has been pressed into service for arcade cabinets, custom routers, and even a supercomputer, but one of the most exciting applications has been to turn the Raspberry Pi into an XBMC-based media streamers. The next version of XBMC will come with official Raspberry Pi support, and with projects such as Xbian, Raspmc, and OpenELEC all in development to provide a turnkey XBMC solution, a fully-capable XBMC streamer can be had for the price of a Roku.
  • Home Automation Products
    "Growth in affordable, simple and low-power home automation products that can be controlled from any computing or mobile device."

 

2012 Disappointment
Jun 25 2012

Blog - Congratulations Jace & Rob Wright - Winners of the Ceton Father's Day Contest!

By Mike Garcen

Congratulations go out to Rob Wright, winner of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 USB Tuner, and Jace, winner of the Ceton InfiniTV 4 PCIe tuner!! I'll be sending an e-mail to both of you to confirm shipping address. 

Thank you to all who participated! Hope everyone had as much fun with the responses as we did reading them!

Jun 15 2012

Blog - Contest - Win a Ceton InfiniTV4 USB Quad External Tuner

By Mike Garcen

THIS CONTEST HAS ENDED!!! THANK YOU ALL WHO PARTICIPATED AND GOOD LUCK!

Two contests at once, has Missing Remote lost their minds?!?! Yep! But our loss of mental capacity is your gain!

For those of you that are still slacking, you still have time for the Father's Day sale from Ceton! In honor of Father's Day Ceton is currently running a save $30 when you buy two InfiniTV4 (USB or PCIe) over at Amazon.

Generously, they've provided us a USB external model to help you (or your dad) have an awesome way to celebrate paternity via a give away here at Missing Remote. Thanks Ceton!

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Dec 26 2011

Blog - 2011 Year in Review

By Mike Garcen

Another year is about to conclude, and I wanted to take the chance to highlight some of our most popular articles throughout the year. Real life sometimes gets in the way of reading the site, so hopefully this will help if you might have missed a certain special review or guide. Feel free to contribute what YOUR favorite article has been.

Here are the top 10:

  1. How to Enable Concurrent Sessions in Windows 7 Service Pack 1 RTM
    No real surprise here. Still our most popular guide to date, showing you how to get multiple logins at the same time on your Windows 7 box without having to kick off a user.
     
  2. Intel Core i3-2100T and DH67CF Mini-ITX Motherboard / Intel Sandy Bridge: Core i5-2500K and DH67BL Motherboard / Intel Core i5-2400S and DH67GD Micro-ATX Motherboard
    I combined these reviews from Andrew since I think they deserved to share the top spot. Sandy Bridge was truly revolutionary and was great news for all us HTPC enthusiasts. Even 11 months later, these boards are still solid.
     
  3. How to Watch TV without Cable
    Examining all the various non-traditional cable TV options available for watching your favorite television programs, without having to pay a fortune.
     
  4. Beginner's Guide to HTPC Software
    Taking a look at what software exists for use on your HTPC as your media center. This category is more than alive as some of these interfaces have become so beautiful you almost want to just sit at the home screen and drool. Maybe that's just me.
Dec 23 2011

Blog - All I Want for Christmas v3, by MissingRemote Staff

By Mike Garcen

Now 3 years strong, our tradition continues. In the first year of our list, we saw some good, some bad ideas. Year two was a lot of the same. Let's see how everyone feels about our staff's wish list for 2011 Christmas time!

Andrew van Til (Babgvant)

In my case it reads a little better backwards Smile

  1. The AVR-3311 didn't find its way under the tree last year (or the months that followed), mostly because with the the AVR-1909 still performing well it was smarter to add surround sound to the secondary viewing location via Mike's choice - the Yamaha YSP-2200.  With more 3D Blu-ray titles trickling out, and my kid's increasing demands to "watch it in 3D" it's getting more cumbersome to connect up another HDMI cable to the TV on movie night so I'm hoping to solve the HDMI 1.4 problem this year.
  2. For that reason my wish list is just getting a number bump to the 125W Denon AVR-3312.  With support for Audyssey MultEQ XT, 0.05% THD, and built in Ethernet providing IP control, firmware updates, DLNA and access to some audio over the top services it's has all of the good stuff that put the AVR-3311 on last year's.  Adding in an extra HDMI port and a slightly more modern look; I can't complain too much about the wait.

 

George Schmauch (Skirge01)

Dec 09 2011

Blog - MythTV Reloaded - Day 21

By Tim A

I'm happy to say that after weeks of work (I can't believe that it actually took that long.  I'm so ashamed) I have a frontend that works very nicely.  I should have posted this a few days ago but I've been happily enjoying my new setup.  For the most part it's been working great. I have really been enjoying the quick suspend/resume.  This is the first time that I've been able to get it to function properly on this system.  It's much nicer than the 2 minutes or so it used to take.  Anyway, I noticed that I have a couple of button mismappings on my remote - commercial skip forward and backward are swapped.  Easy enough to fix.  

I haven't had a chance to test out DVD and BluRay playback.  I can report back when I've had time to do that.  I don't think I have BluRay setup quite right yet but if I get DVDs to playback reliably I'll be a step up from my old setup.  It used to work on my old frontend (an installation that I had before my previous setup) but then when I upgraded to what I was previously working it was very hit or miss and I eventually gave up and hooked up a dedicated DVD player to the TV.

I think that my HD playback has gone up a notch in image quality as well from this upgrade.  The new drivers (and possibly the underlying video rendering system) seem to be allowing me to run a much smoother playback.  In the past, high speed panning scenes (football) would have a tear in the middle of the screen but I haven't seen it since the update.  Audio continues to work well - optical out to my receiver; that TV doesn't have HDMI.

In the end I'm very satisfied with this upgrade.  I have everything working as well as or better than my previous setup with the sole exception of Mythweb which I still need to setup.  But that'll be for another day.  For now, I'm going to go back and play with my newly functional toys.

Dec 04 2011

Blog - MythTV Reloaded - Day 20

By Tim A

So, there was one more enhancement that I decided to make to the frontend before putting it back into service.  While I was looking into getting the suspend function mapped to a button on my remote, I ran across this page on the MythTV wiki.  While the command shown for suspending the PC didn't work for me, I did like the idea of adding an entry on the main MythTV menu for putting the computer to sleep.  That way, if for whatever reason the frontend was being controlled by a keyboard or remotely, it would still be possible to put the system to sleep easily without the remote.  I was able to follow the instructions pretty much as written but changing my theme for the one in the example.  The only thing that was different was that I needed to make a second entry for the button icon.  When the icon is highlighted the icon was supposed to stretch to fill a slightly bigger box but without this second entry there was no stretching.  As a result, all of the icons shown after were offset from their tile outline by about 5-10% and it looked pretty bad.  So I found the place to put the second entry (an exact copy of the first entry, just in a different spot in the code), restarted the frontend app and away I went.  Everything looks great, and I have a new sleep icon.  

So, now I think that I'm really ready to put the system into use.  Until then, enjoy.  I know I will.

Dec 03 2011

Blog - MythTV Reloaded - Day 19

By Tim A

Today was spent primarily on cleanup work.  Most of the time was creating the lircrc file for MythTV to use, which maps the remote control button codes to commands within an application.  Luckily for me I had a backup of the lircrc files that I had been using before the upgrade.  The only problem is that all of the button names changed with the update of LIRC. So instead of "Play" I had to change the config file to act on "KEY_PLAY".  They standardized all of the names on me.  So most of my time was spent figuring out what the proper name was for all of the buttons on my remote and mapping those to the correct commands in MythTV.  

Once that was done I had all of the functionality that I had in my previous install. I figured, however, that as long as I was doing this I might as well go for gold.  There were two scripts that I had found and tweaked early in my MythTV days that I was never able to get working on my previous installation of MythTV.  The first script cycled the MythTV frontend application via a button press - so if it hung I could kill the app and if it crashed and died I could restart it.  The second script suspended and woke up the computer via a button push.  I was able to wake up the frontend via a button push but was not able to get suspend to work prop ferly; every time I wanted to watch TV I would have to wait for a minute or two while the frontend booted.  Annoying, but luckily my wife was very tolerant on this problem.  As luck would have it, the frontend cycling script only needed a couple of tweaks to get it running.  The suspend script ended up using a completely new power management interface to get suspend to function properly as a user and not root, but luckily someone had already figured out how to do it and it was a non-trivial matter of Googling to find the solution.

Dec 01 2011

Blog - MythTV Reloaded - Day 18

By Tim A

So today I was doing a bit of stress testing of the frontend system to make sure that it was ready for me to put back into use.  It turns out there were still a couple of bugs to work out.  You may recall from this blog post that I ended up using Fedora 15 with KDE as the desktop environment.  It turns out that under certain circumstances there is a problem with this setup using 100% of one of the CPU cores.  I happen to run into this situation.  I didn't notice it right away since it's a dual core system and the other core is sitting idle most of the time but I did setup the system monitoring widget and noticed that one of the cores was completely pegged out.  Running top showed me that it was "plasmadesktop" that was hogging all of the resources.  A quick Google search showed me that this happens to people running the version of KDE that comes with Fedora 15 and newer.

It sounds like this happens when a system wakes up from suspend and is running multiple "panels" - the bars at the top and bottom of the screen - and various widgets.  Basically, this is resolved by disabling or removing the various widgets and panels that were added in addition to the original ones.  Since this is a dedicated frontend I removed everything that I had added, including the system monitor that I added that found this problem in the first place.  Once this was done I put the system to sleep a couple of times and made sure that I did not have high CPU usage when it woke up (or a couple hours later).  It seems like removing the panels and widgets took care of the problem for me.

Nov 30 2011

Blog - MythTV Reloaded - Day 17

By Tim A

Well, it turns out that I'm a moron.  Apparently everything was pretty much working for me already.  I had all of the pieces, I just didn't put them together correctly.  After days of work I finally have LIRC recognizing my remote inputs properly.  Basically what happened is that I configured the startup script for LIRC to load the correct driver for my IR receiver with the correct device and the correct parameters.  I had the correct config file being used to interpret the key presses correctly.  I had it all.  The problem was that I was doing all of my testing by launching the LIRC daemon from the command line instead of via the startup script that I had configured so none of my tweaks were being taken [facepalm].  Needless to say, after verifying this by running the command line with all of the correct parameters and then again verifying by rebooting the system and having it launch automatically, the remote control is now being properly identified and controlled via LIRC.  I can now launch irw and see all of my key presses as they happen.

At this point there seem to be only a few tweaks left to make before the system is ready for use again.  First, I need to setup the MythTV frontend application to automatically launch at login.  Next, I need to make MythTV always appear on top of the screen; it is currently being covered with the top and bottom panels of the window manager.  Finally, I need to configure the LIRC configuration file to interpret the button presses and pass them to the various applications, like MythTV.  Once I've got that in place, I think that all of the major components will be in place and I can put the unit back into service.  Yay.

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