Field Trial

I bought an Emprex 2.4GHz MCE remote on Amazon, only about £15. It has a good layout with the WMC green button and specific buttons for EPG, Music, Recorded TV, Live TV, Photos etc. I chose 2.4GHz because I want to put the HTPC in a cupboard and wireless remote should work OK unlike the IR variety which will need to have a USB extender cable so the remote can see the IR sensor. Good idea in theory but not in practice - From a distance of around 5 metres  and  the sensor installed directly in the USB port, the remote proved unusable. You would press a remote button - no action, so press again or press something else - still no action. Wave the remote in frustration, the connection comes good and all your instructions are carried out in one go. So I installed the 2.4Ghz sensor in a USB extender cable and all was resolved.

I also purchased a case from a Milton Keynes company called XCase. Its pretty basic, shiny black, full ATX MoBo size, takes full size PSU, single DVD drive and 2 sata drives, so pretty chunky. Cheap, tho' around £35, and it came with a free MCE remote. You wait for a remote, then they all come along at once! This one is an IR remote.

The Emrex is on the left and the free IR remote on the right. They both work Ok once you get used to the layouts, the Emprex is better to use but the IR version also has mouse function whic is great when you come to use IPlayer and Catch Up TV as you have to use a separate wireless mouse with the Emrex. Lets see which turns out to be best.

I installed the system in the living room, albeit with its old PC case and turned over the system to DB for field trial. Its been in use for about a month now and DM reports that she can work it fine for all the WMC functions, just like Sky only cheaper. The live TV, recording TV, DVD and recorded Movies, music and photos all go great. The feature where the system picks your photos at random as a screen saver while you play music is very absorbing. We had friends around the other day and it seemed to pick a lot of pictures including them which intrigued them. I told them that WMC includes a mind meld WiFi feature and it knew they were there!

The next stage is back to the mancave to to build into the new case, rationalise all the home movie clips, research a sound system, 2.1, 3.1 etc etc, get rid of all the old separate DVD, music and PVR cluttering up the living room and install back in the living room. I need to resolve how best to work with catch up and other streaming TV. The dream of integrated EPG not there yet.

Progress at last

Did a lot of research around the magicweb, it seems that there is a lot of expertise and experience out there re WMC. What I observe is that there is an awful lot of searching but not much finding on the web and the Microsoft MVP's don't seem to be much help in many cases.  Anyway I tried a lot of options with the diffent packages and I had an extensive look at the Intel Graphics HD4000 control GUI. It is not fantastic by any means and Intels own support forums reveals a lot of frustration with users of the product. I tried a number of options and solved the SD distortion by moving to custom scaling.

There seem to be issues with DVB-T2 HD transmission in the UK and the ability of PC graphics to cope with it. There is mention of a"29/59" frame rate issue where the transmitted stream carries with it data about the frame rate and should there be a problem with this then the PC graphics will not respond quickly enough resulting in glitching of one form or another. I went back to the settings and disabled all of the bells and whistle settings and this seemed to do the trick. The HD channels have played OK ever since, but lets wait and see.

The final task was to load up the final photos, videos etc. What a nightmare this turned into. It started because some of the  photos were oriented wrongly and I need to rotate them. Tried this WMC but without much success. WMC said it was unable to do this, muttering about unable to save the file.

I looked using trusty Picasa and could rotate but not save. Windows explorer offers the facilty to rotate under right mouse click, but said no joy the file is read only or in use with some other idiot program. This little benign statement started a war with  Windows security systems - whata tangled web that weaves?

Checked read only - yup folder had a little blue button on read only. Selected this to switch off "read only" applied to all file folders sub folders etc. Went back and tried to rotate - no joy. Went back to folder - read only still in force. Tried again with no more success. Looked at the files themselves, all looked to be not read only! Still could not rotate - same message. Now looked at share and security settings - mind numbing Looke at the users including system accounts - gave full permissions. I had already moved away from Windows 7 inbuilt system and moved to what I was more familiar with since NT days. None of this gave any greater success. Re-booted to clear any lingering program holds on the files. Still no better. Back to the interweb. Some opinion was to resort to the old DOS style commands (CMD) and use the attrib command. Well, after sorting out the syntax - do you know what to do with spaces in the folder names? - that run OK, but still no rotation. I tried various thing on a photo file and I finally got a hint that UAC was tangling with me. It wasn't popping up any you need Admin approval type boxes. User Account Control is the system that seeks permission to change things. Well I switched UAC off and all the problems went away. I don't really understand why I had the problem, my laptop has Win 7 and I have never experienced this sort of problem before. I am not the only one suffering if you have a look at the web.

All sorted now and handed over to DB to test.

Trial Failure - Uhhhhhhh

The trial started with DB. She liked the features, the easy recording and the pause, go back features of the TV. The remote on the smartphone couldn't be tried as it needed the HTPC to be connected to the LAN. Only Wifi is available in the living room, no wifi on the HTPC. Godda cable it or fit a wifi dongle.

The biggest problem is that the TV and Video play is distorted in SD (DVB-T) but OK in HD (DVB-T2). Distortion is at the edges like it is overstretched. If you have a circle in the middle of the picture, at the edge it will be egg shaped. This shows up particularly badly when the picture is panning. I have tried a few settings in WMC itself and also in the Intel Video driver without any success. The HD picture is fine, not distorted but flickers every second or so - not good.

I have download VLC a free opensource media player with a good reputation. This plays the SD with no distortion and the HD with no flicker. So what do you conclude from that? Driver, surely both packages will use the same Video driver on the hdmi port!  Codec's, could be using different codecs thats for sure. Some other WMC issue?

Tomorrow, I will try and see if I can try some other options to find where the setting/problem is. I will try

1. Running over VGA instead of hdmi
2. Trying Windows Media Player, which may use the same codec and drivers as WMC.
3. Trying WMC playing from my laptop to the same TV, both hdmi and VGA

Lets see what that reveals.

The graphics is Intel HD4000 running onboard the Asus P8Z77 MoBo

The 10 Foot Problem

The beast is up and running, a set of data is downladed, movies, photos, music, videos, TV recordings and its time to try it out. The first thing is how do you control it from the sofa in the living room? (the 10 foot reference in the title) I really wanted is to have a facsimile of what is on the TV screen, so I can see all of the control screens of WMC and browser, not 10 feet away, cos the peepers are not great, but on a tablet 10 inches away. Is it possible? It seems so at first look.

I looked at several options  - standard windows features like Remote Desk Top, Remote Assistance, -  the office type features like Net Meeting or Linq as it now know or the equivalent proprietary stuff like Teamviewer, Join Me, Quick Screen Share. Then there are the commercial Android Apps like the specific WMC controllers or the more general purpose Android PC Mouse and Keyboard simulations. Finally there are the real wireless PC Mouse and Keyboards.

I could not really get the windows features to work well enough. RDT works, but it normally works in a single user mode, so logs off the TV PC before you can control anything. I didn't pursue the multiple session hacks that are around.  RA also works and of course keeps both screens working once control is delegated to the remote controlling PC. It is not great though, very jittery and it doesn't seem to work once you go full screen on the TV PC, the local controlling screen goes totally black and you cant see to control anything further. I tried Quick Screen Share, which is a nice piece of freeware, but I had the same sort of problems as I had with RA.

I next tried one of the Android Apps, Unified Remote. I installed this on my smartphone. It can use both Bluetooth and Wifi. I used Wifi and it was perfectly functional. It comes with specific menus, like WMC, Window Start Button as well as a touchpad mouse and keyboards.

My next task is to actually set it all up in the living room and let DB loose on it for testing.

Data Load

You recall I mentioned the nightmare of data tidy up, well its time to load data to the new machine. The twin freeview tuner card turned up today and it installed no problem at all - very sweet. It integrated nicely with Windows Media Center with no problem The EPG is quite good and you can do the usual recoeding via the right button, series link etc etc. The tuner is HD as well.

I have now loaded all my music, movies, videos and photos.

This is the tuner card, it is PCI express, quite a small card, as you can see.

I expect to get the Blu Ray player tomorrow, which will finish the build, at least for phase 1. Once that it is up and running I will install in the living room to let DB trial it. Then I am going to try various ways of controlling it from the armchair. I ahve no firm plans as yet but I am thinking abount using a smartphone or tablet running android - lets see what apps are out their. Alternatively perhaps via the laptop. Would remote assist work or remote desktop with multiple sessions?

More Buying and - SCAMs

I have been researching media drives and the TV tuner card. I wanted some capability to use DVD's Blu Ray - to play and burn. It needs to be quietish, remember I am a bit mutt but other younger folks will need to use it as well. I am a little confused about speeds and what impact that has on the playing, recording experience. I narrowed the search down to a couple of contenders Pioneer BDR 208DBX and the LG BH16LS38. They both seem roughly equivalent in price and performance around £65. It seems the Pioneer has the edge on quietness - the proof will be in the spinning.

I looked at TBS, Blackgold and Hauppg..., Huapge...,  Hauppauge. The TBS and Blackgold seem broadly equivalent offering DVB-T2  (HD) in single twin and quad in the over air freeview. The Haupp, other one doesn't offer HD yet and I can't spell it so I discounted it. Looking at the blogs and comments I opted for the TBS PCI-E DVB-T2 Dual TV Tuner. I went for the twin tuner over the quad as I also considering a Freesat card option and I think there is a limit of tuners that the hardware/software can handle. Four is the limit number, I have in my mind.

I never pass through a stage without problems. This time it is web buying. I ordered the Blu ray drive from DABs and the Twin Tuner card from Amazon but sold by ARC UK. Sound reputable to you? I placed the orders and all seemed fine. Later that evening I started to get SMS txt's on my mobile. They were saying your order is ready for delivery, Text1 for this, 2 for that and 3, for something else. I wasn't expecting any deliveries just yet so I looked more closely. None of the txts has a correct reference number of any sort. My guess is that one or both of these companies is selling off your mobile number, the buyers try to get you "active" on texting which make their sale list more valuable. That may be a charitable interpretation, it could be you text the numbers and get stuck in some malicious virus, big phone bill or phishing scam. I am going to pursue the sellers and see what they have to say. I saw recently that two Birmingham got a £400K fine doing just this sort of thing with phone lists.

Anyway I am off to eat jellied eels, drink beer and watch the 6 nations, well someone has to do it!

Breakdown & Build Up

After sorting out the existing HDD data, I started to breakdown the old machine, HP Vectra VL800. This was fairly straight forward, most of the unscrewing, unclipping and hammering is pretty self evident. It seems a reasonable quality case.

 

This is the guts - you see the IDE parallel ribbon cables to the old ATA drives.  The ATA drives are in a sideways mounted cassette.

 

 

The ATA drives are not directly compatible with new ATX/SATA drives. They have different power connectors and serial interfaces with different connectors. You can buy IDE-SATA and SATA-IDE converter interfaces that handle both power and signal if you want to transfer your existing data. If you want speed, then you should really upgrade to SATA at 6G speed and not use the old ATA.

 

This is the connecting cable between the MoBo and the front panel LED's and on/off switch.

 

Needless to say it is not comapatible with the pin header on the ASUS MoBo. Searching that stupid interweb didn't yield any easy answers either from blogs or online stores. Apparently it is called 10-1 pin panel in the ASUS handbook. That didn't help either! Anyway I wandered down to my local Maplins this morning and found some simple single wires terminated with male/femail pins that seem to do the conversion job.

 

I have now re-assembled the new MoBo, new PSU and new HDD and connected them all together, along with the fan wires. The chassis has an old 3 pin cable fan which I have plugged into the PWR FAN socket. There is also a CHA FAN socket which I assume is for a chassis fan. It is 4 pin and may well be speed configurable by the MoBo to keep noise down. The CPU fan also seems controllable. I will crash into these hurdles at BIOS & setup time. lets wait until then.



 

The Devil is in the ?

We plod on. No one tells you when you set off on this type of project, the nightmare that is sorting out your life on hard drives that have existed for over 10 years. Four HDD's 1 USB terrabyte backup all to be re-sorted and integrated in a way that a media machine can sort handle and present nicely.

Hardware.  You see lots of stuff on the interweb extolling the cheap and cheerful media approach, you know - "get yourself a supa HTMC for under $500"  Well, I don't want to do this too many times, so I am looking for a machine that will be running in ten years time, - with all the increases in download and speed that will occur over that period. My last Windows 2000 machine is coming to the end of its tether now, but has survived over ten years and runs OK even now. It is only Microsoft and the banks that has curtailed its life.

In the end, the choice based on "webexpert" advice has been between Asus and Asrock for motherboards (MoBo), a 1 terrabyte SATA disk and a TSB Twin Tuner. All my PC's have had Intel Inside (dong, don dooonng) and have run pretty well, so after looking at the performance charts I opted for an Ivy Bridge i5 3570K 3.4GHz CPU.

For MoBo, I thought that the ASUS P8Z77-V LE looked a good mid performance board. When I went to look to buy one of these, they didn't seem readily available although everyone seemed to have the more basic LX version on sale. I finally went for  the ASUS P8Z77-V LX & 8GB DDR3 1600. Lets see if that combo can handle what I want. I added to that a Segate Barracuda 1 TByte SATA HDD.

Tomorrow should see me stripping the old PC tower and with any luck starting build.

Shopping Time

Well after thinking about the specification I have been looking around the various web and high street stores to see what is available and to also learn more about what I am trying to do.

Media Software - I have been looking at other experts blogs who are supporters of both Linux and Windows. You sometimes have to read between the lines of what various proponents are saying, but given that I want to try and integrate all of my media and I do not want to do much "under the hood" stuff in the programs, plus it has to work with DB, who lives with me and controls me for the most part, I have decided to go the Windows route with Windows Media Center(or one of its offshoots) I have WMC on my Win 7 laptop, so I have been trying to see what it can do.

I have come up against various obstacles  but generally it seems to be reasonably integrated. I set up folders called My Photos, My Videos, My Movies, My Music in the Win 7 Libraries. I copied in 8 standard movies in the DVD environment, VOB's and IFO's, mainly jpg photos, MP3 music and .MOV videos taken on my camera.

WMC did handle this all right although there are plenty of little niggles to overcome.

Music has a fair number of meta tag problems and WMPlayer or Center can't really sort them out. Get some variation in the meta tag and WMP/C will insist in filing all the variations separately, so you get multiple Album entries with one or two songs under each. WMP allows you to change tags BUT in some circumstances it is unable to actually change the tag at all. I use MP3Tag and a WMP addon called Tag Editor Plus which lets you manage the tags by right clicking individual or multiples of MP3's in WMP. Despite all this the only route to salvation in the toughest cases was to use MP3Tag to delete all the tags and re-populate. That has always done the trick for me.

Movie art was also a little bit sticky. DVD's carry their own art, but it is not accessible on a hard drive, so all of the entries in WMC were pretty blank with no synopsis art or anything. The solution for me was to use a free product called DVD Library Manager. Once you set this up it produces a list of your Movies on the hard drive and lets you select standard sites, Amazon, IMDB to download all the info and store it for you in a dvdid.xml and as long as you kept this in a flat folder with the art and movie, then it all looks great in WMC.

Music and Photos seemed to go without hitch, just a matter of folder organisation that suits you best.

I have discovered that Microsoft have abandoned internet TV streaming support on WMC, so I had a look at XBMC. People have been using XBox for streaming and TV for some while so it may be an avenue to follow. I downloaded it and it runs OK and you can see it is related to to WMC. At first sight it looks to me that I would have to do more work to integrate all the things that I want in term of searching for suitable addons to make it do what I want. I will look at it further and some of the other options that are available as I get building.

WMC seems to be a nightmare if you let it search and source all over your network, I had to stop it doing that sharing stuff it does.

Anyway I am just off to donate blood and then down to the Emirates to see what Suarez & Liverpool can do to us.

The Project!

Its January in the UK, the days are short, the nights(and days) are dark. Too cold for fishing, can break the ice but my butt freezes too easily these days. So.... what to do? A project what else. My PC is getting long in the tooth - Win2K, 256K RAM, it all spells frustration. Go out and buy a PC( or MAC) in the sales. No way Jose, much too simple. I have decided to have a bash at building a machine using the remains of the old Win2K beast. I have seen "experts" saying this is possible, even a good idea, so lets see.

I started by the usual anal research using my thoughts on a functional requirements list.

1. Play TV off air, freeview or freesat. Record same - must have a decent EPG. Watch  while recording. HD if poss.
2. Has to sit in the living room., noise issues, control issues, eyes not too bright these days.
3. Play photos - decent organisation, must be able to set up a reasonable structure.
4. Play my music, decent quality sound, not the best but not squeaky rubbish. I'm a bit mutt as well as dodgy sight.
5. Play catchup TV in the UK, same EPG to cope with both
6. Must be able to link with other PC's upstairs, Window 7 and XP at the mo.
7. Thinking to do the office type things on the PC's upstairs, and download what ever's to the living room PC.
8. Play disk media - DVD's CD's
9. Play stick media, USB

Anyway I am off and running, I will post on my thoughts and progress with piccies from time to time. Any thoughts from like-minded people out there always welcome.