Blogs

A short while ago I had a failure in my MythTV server.  Luckily, all of my data was ok so I just transplanted the hard drives and tuners into my development system and was on my way again.  While I had everything open it quickly became obvious exactly how loud my OS hard drive had become.  I knew that it was noisy but the P180 case did a good job of keeping things quiet.  So I figured that now is a good time to replace it as long as I had everything all strewn about anyway.

To give you a bit of background, the OS hard drive that I am starting with is a 10GB PATA drive that is about 10 years old.  The "new" drive is a 250GB drive that is only a couple of years old.  The utility that I used to image the drive is called Clonezilla.  This is a tool that you load on to a bootable drive (i.e. a CD or a USB flash drive).  With both the old and the new drive installed in the PC you boot into Clonezilla, select the drive or partition that you want to back up (clone), select the new drive or partition and wait till everything is copied.  Depending on the amount of data being copied this can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours.

Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine a room that is 12ft x 10ft. You might be thinking to yourself that this room would make a nice guest bedroom. I’m sure that’s what the builder thought when he designed the house. Now I want you to fill that room with a love seat, an oversized chair, a coffee table and an entertainment center that houses a 40” LCD TV, PS3, Wii, Surround receiver, a sub woofer and of course, my home theater PC (HTPC)--my rear speakers are actually hanging from nails. Nails. But there is hope.

Ever since we moved into the house I have been waiting for that magical confluence of money and spare time that would free me from this claustrophobic impostor of a TV room. Well, that time has finally arrived and I am in the process of building out an unfinished third floor for this purpose.

If you've been perusing the Forums today you will notice a couple of new additions. The first is probably an obvious one, a CableCARD forum. With the growth of number of tuner devices being released we want to make sure there's a clear home to ask any and all questions you may have about this technology.

The second is actually a group of forums, specifically for SageTV users. With the acquisition of SageTV by Google earlier this year, we saw the request for a new permanent home from its users. We have launched the SageTV Forum group with 5 sub-forums, and will expand as needed. We hope everyone finds this useful, knowing that MissingRemote is not going anywhere!

More improvements coming in the near future, so hope everyone is enjoying them!

Having just installed my second CableCARD product, I thought it would be good to share my experience. Last December, I posted about my experience installing the Ceton InfiniTV 4. Back then, I had to pay a $75 installation fee and schedule an installer to visit my home only to hand me the CableCARD and call in to have it activated. Meanwhile, set-top box users had the less expensive option of self-installing which hardly seemed fair.

Fast-forward to today when we now have a mandate from the FCC that has brought the self-installation option to CableCARD users. A quick call to my provider, Cox Cable, had a self-installation kit drop-shipped to my front door the next day. I am now required to pay a $20 activation fee which is fair and reasonable. For $20, I get the kit shipped to me and a free return shipping label is included. All the cables needed for installation are also included along with the CableCARD, tuning adapter and installation guide.

The installation guide (attached) is straight-forward and easy to follow. I am positive that even technology luddites could successfully follow the guide. That said, I did run into some snafus in the process.

With the introduction of the SiliconDust HDHomeRun PRIME digital cable tuner (DCT), there are a good number of questions both from the Missing Remote staff and more importantly, our readers. Thus, we took the initiative to seek answers to those questions in an effort to clear up as much uncertainty as possible. Thanks to Theodore D. Head, President and CEO of SiliconDust, for taking the time to respond to our queries.

 

Q: For those unfamiliar with SiliconDust, tell us a bit about the company. When was it established & what have you made your mark on the market with?

 A: Silicondust USA Inc was established in 2007 with the consumer launch of the HDHomeRun Dual Digital Network Tuner - taking the TV tuner out of your computer and putting on the home network via your router. Allowing the freedom to watch pause record Digital over the air or unencrypted cable anywhere in your home on any windows, mac or linux device - we are the innovators of the Network attached TV Tuner for computers.

 

Q: We saw an announcement from Elgato on Mac compatibility, how did that come about? How's the feedback been so far? Is this any indication that Mac support might come to your CableCARD tuners?

I started this blog posting back in February, and about the same time took over the management of the start-up I was working for, so while the blog post lingered, I continued to use it for my own purposes to track the changes I made to the system. There are definitely a number of useful nuggets in here, especially if you want to use an SSD for recording and then move them to a NAS device. I know some people on this site believe this is a bad idea, but I've been doing it for two years now without a problem, so I figured I'd finally clean it up and post what I had. The last thing I wanted to do is create and maintain a complete inventory of all the software on the machine as I was doing here. I found a very slick free program called WinAudit which generated a nice CSV file for me which I then had to pivot in Excel (not using the pivot function, which doesn't handle text well :(

Hi folks, just wanted to take a moment to update folks on what keeps the site alive, beautiful wonderful affiliate advertising. The Amazon, Newegg and any other product links you see throughout the site help support the costs associated with running this website (whenever you purchase something that you clicked through to the store from our site we earn a small percentage of that sale).

As we are now using Skimlinks our links have changed, so please update your bookmarks if you had saved them for Amazon and Newegg to reflect the new ones. Thank you to all for your continued support!

I'm hoping most of you reading this are familiar with MissingRemote.com, we are a website that caters to most of the folks on AVS here, and we do blogs, reviews, news and the like.

Thanks to our readers we have been growing lately and have the opportunity for someone who is interested in writing for the website. This is a partially paid gig (but it's not a ton, so you seriously will want to love this stuff). We are looking for someone passionate about home theater and home theater computer parts, but also someone that is technical and can put all that into words.

Here's what we are looking for in terms of commitment from this person:

1. Minimum 2 News Posts per week
2. Min. 1 Blog per Month
3. Min. 1 Guide or Review per month

So what will you receive? Certain articles you will be paid for, and then you will also have access to some very cool hardware units which you would review, and then possibly would keep. If you're curious what types of items we review, just click the "reviews" tab at the top.

How to apply:

• E-Mail mike (at) missingremote.com
• Tell me a bit about yourself, your history, where you frequently post
• Any links to any blogging or other reviews
• And then a writing sample of minimum 400 words. You can just pick a device in your home and basically just write a review for it, so we can get a feel for your writing and technical style.

Thanks!

Congratulations to our latest winner, Stardog Champion, who won our latest contest for the Boston Bruins Stereo Headphones!

Stardog, you will receive a PM from me with additional information. You have 48 hours to reply and accept.

Thanks to all who participated!

In our first look at ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre 5 (TMT5), we found the updated version a huge step forward; however, there were a few outstanding issues we highlighted that were stopping TMT5 from attaining feature parity with stand-alone players and media streamers available on the market.  Since that time, CyberLink has responded with an updated revision of their popular PowerDVD (PDVD) software, bringing it closer to the level of polish and overall user experience offered by TMT5.  In that context, we’ve been given the green light to share some exciting news about an update that should be going into public BETA within the next few days.

With all of the home automation talk lately (Android @home) and the fact I have been addicted to home automation, slowly turning my entire home into a fully automated system. I figured what better time than now to start a home automation series blog.

About ten years ago when I went over to a relative's house warming party. The first thing I noticed was all of the light switches in their home were not "normal" light switches. A few beers and several hours later I was enthralled with his home automation setup, and wanted to learn anything and everything I could about it. That is when my home automation addiction began. At that time his setup was pretty simple, all X-10 devices, and only controlled the lighting. A few years later he had switched to Insteon and that is when the system went beyond controlling just lights. The system was fully automated, with two way control, controlling the thermostat, lawn irrigation system, and even home theater equipment. Every time I visit I learn more about what I can do and gather tips and tricks on how to integrate what he did into my own setup.