RehabMan

[RehabMan]

I was thinking about the Gefen product as some others have also reported success with it.

Where do you place the HDMI Detective?  I assume between the HTPC and the AVR?

[RehabMan]

Interesting… I tried that tool on my dual-monitor dev machine.  Several times, I was able to get my main monitor (Dell U2410, DVI to DVI on ATI 5670) to stay black.  The secondary monitor (Dell 1901FP, VGA to VGA on same ATI 5670) always came back up. For grins, I ran MonInfo on the secondary, so I could use it to see the EDID data when the main monitor was blank.

Interestingly, the EDID data for the blacked-out monitor was fine.  All same as when the display wasn’t blank.

I have a couple of take-aways with this tool and/or this “black screen” problem:

– The “black screen” happens with diverse hardware.  HTPC is Core i3 integrated Intel HD graphics to AVR to TV.  My dev machine is ATI 5670 dual monitor DVI/VGA.

– Maybe it is HDCP related… My 1901FP is not HDCP aware (too old), where-as my U2410 is HDCP compliant.

– Still very intermittent.  I had to try quite a few times to make the problem happen.  I assigned hdmiOn.exe to a keyboard shortcut, just so I could run it quicky.

– It seems that since “black screen” happens with my dev machine using hdmiOn.exe to turn the displays off/then on again, I think it is likely it would not fix the problem I’m seeing at the HTPC.

– This seems more and more like some sort of Windows bug.  Maybe it has been there a long time — there are reports of exactly the same bug happening as far back as XP Media Center.

– Even if hdmiOn.exe could help me, I was hard-pressed to find an event in Task Scheduler I could use to trigger it.  Perhaps a custom app could monitor for changes in display status and trigger an event which would trigger the app.

More experimentation to come… when I have the time…

[RehabMan]

Running latest drivers from Intel site for Core i3 Intel HD graphics.  And yes.. no discrete video card (I tried an ATI 5570 that I have laying around, but two problems: 1) things got too hot w/ the fanless 5570 right next to the Ceton, and 2) 29/59 refresh rate bug on HBO content).

TV going from standby to on.  Also same for AVR — standby to on.  TV/AVR are on. HTPC was always on.  Media Center running full screen, but all I see is black screen.  I think if I move the mouse, I see the mouse pointer, but that’s it.  Ctrl+Alt+Del, then see blue Ctrl+Alt+Del screen, then ESC to get back to full screen Media Center.  Everything happy after that.

Very intermittent… only happens every other day or so.

[RehabMan]

Funny thing is my problems only start when I go to demo the system to somebody over at the house… or when my wife tries to use it… It works fine when I’m testing it.

It pains me when I consider that the only box on my network still running a “Windows XP era” OS is my server.  Ouch.

[RehabMan]

It sounds like you’ve thrown plenty of hardware at it.  I have a HP EX495 (Pentium E5200) and I see the same issue.  I think it has to do with the drive extender tech in WHSv1.  When that thing kicks in, it tends to drive streaming performance down.  I have all Caviar Black drives (except for the original Seagate shipped with the system) and I still see it, so it is not really something that can be fixed with faster hard-drives.

My thought is this will all be fixed with Vail, the next version of WHS.  It uses a completely redone version of drive extender where it is accomplished at a much lower level than the current DE.  I plan to build a new machine to run Vail… unless HP provides some sort of upgrade path…

Another thing to watch out for is network drivers.  I found the latest RealTek drivers to be really bad… had to rollback after updating as streaming performance was absolutely horrible after a recent update.  If I build a machine for Vail, I’ll be sure to choose a motherboard that has Intel GB ethernet on-board.

[RehabMan]

[quote=”Mikinho”]
I”ll need to test but I believe the 1-minute delay will still be there.  Media Center will still need to authorize the tuner for use, the delay in the usage isn’t due a boot up process on the Ceton card.[/quote]

Bummer.  So the authorization might be on the client side.  I thought it was something that might be happening upon power-up of the Ceton card, since it doesn’t have to happen if you simply exit Media Center, then re-run Media Center.  Maybe this is something that is happening in the Ceton service process.

[quote]
With network bridging you can do that in Vail, the VM is if you want an always-on machine to do all the recordings.
[/quote]

I could live without the recordings happening on the Vail machine, although I understand why people want to do that (one less machine on all the time).  If you use the VM solution, you are stuck with using extenders to get to the content (protected content) and to make changes to the scheduled recordings… and for me we just haven’t seen any decent extenders yet (xbox 360 slim is close, but still too loud).  Then there is the issues with codecs on extenders, limitations on file size, lack of HD audio bitstreaming, etc.  Extenders (for me) are nice to use in a pinch, but not as an everyday thing.  I want a full HTPC at every TV and if they have access to live TV through the network bridging that’s just icing on the cake.  Someday, maybe we’ll get homegroup sharing of (protected) recordings and then everything will be great and extenders completely not needed.

Cool that we can host the card where ever we want though….  I see another Ceton in my future… I think.

[RehabMan]

I’ve been watching this thread since I too would like to move the Ceton tuner from the HTPC, mainly because I’d be able to keep the Ceton (I’m seeing temps in the high 60s) cooler if it was hosted in my WHS server, since the server(s) live in my garage where noise is not an issue.  Crank the fans up!  Also, I was hopeful that this would allow my HTPC to sleep and still allow instant access to the tuners since they would not have the minute-long authorization period as they would have never been powered down…  (waking the HTPC from sleep, then waiting a minute for the Ceton to become available is not acceptable, so now I just keep the HTPC on all the time).

My question is why would it be necessary to run a W7 VM on the host PC to make the Ceton share over the network.  Doesn’t it just need a “warm body” — a networked PC capable of loading the drivers or some subset that allows the network bridging to happen?  That is… I hope it does not require a Media Center capable machine as host… as that would open up the possibility of hosting it inside of WHS Vail.

[RehabMan]

[quote=”bbig119″]
What do people do about IR receivers with a case like this? Personally, I would rather trade the integrated card reader for integrated IR.
[/quote]

I’m with you there on the integrated IR vs. card reader.  But I haven’t played with the card reader to see how well Media Center deals with card insertions.  Would be neat if it automatically went into Pictures with the inserted card…  But yeah… I’d rather have an integrated IR.

I use a USB Media Center compatible IR receiver that I ordered from Amazon.com.  It came with a remote that I will never use.  In a way, a USB dongle IR receiver is both a blessing and a curse.  A curse because it is “something extra” and a blessing that you can relocate it to somewhere closer to the TV quite easily (which is where we tend to point our remotes).

// Dean

[RehabMan]

Ended up getting this passive low-profile ready 5570:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161342

I bought the low-profile/fanless just in case I wanted to use it in a more HTPC oriented case in the future.

Also got the memory and the new CPU.  All hardware plus Win7 installed and working well.  The PC went from a complete clunker to a decent machine.  It is no Core i3, but it is going to work great serving my garage TV. Without the graphics card, it would make a not-so-bad WHS “Vail” machine.

The CPU upgrade turned out to be quite necessary because not all my HD content is hardware accelerated…. In particular quite a few HD-DVD (and Blu-ray for that matter) is VC-1 encoded, which for whatever reason, is not accelerated by the ATI 5570 card.  Playing back VC-1 content runs those cores up to 60-70%, so I think I would have been in big trouble with the original Athlon 64 3200+ chip.  The $50 upgrade to get the x2 (and faster at 3.0 GHz) was worth it.

[RehabMan]

Thanks everyone.  The fact that I can use PCIe x16 2.x cards in PCIe x16 1.0 slot helps the selection process out quite a bit.

[RehabMan]

I do wish they would remove the (giant) Volume control on these things though…

[RehabMan]

Be aware that the PowerColor 5750 card linked to is a full height card.  I have that one in my desktop machine.  Nice card for passive cooling.

[RehabMan]

I’ve had pretty good luck ripping HD-DVD discs to MKV with the HD-DVD/Blu-ray Stream Extractor combined with mkvmerge GUI (mmg) from the mkvtoolnix package.  You can google it for some guides and download it here: http://code.google.com/p/hdbrstreamextractor/.  It is a GUI front-end to eac3to.

Of course, you need something like AnyDVD to read commercial HD-DVD discs.

I’ve been taking advantage of some of the fire sales of HD-DVD movies on ebay and now have over 100 HD-DVD discs in my collection.  Lot’s of hard disk space used on my home server though…  But now I finally feel like I’ve received some value from my Xbox360 HD-DVD drive!!

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