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.

Guests Galore I

They're here!!!! Went to pick up Sue and Len at the airport. Linda was anxious, so we had to leave early. Len looked a real picture in his full flight tights, a bit Max Wall, if you remember him Their plane was delayed, still, better than Lesley & Steve - Last Choice cancelled their flight altogether! Weather has been strange again - very summer like, high heat - high humidity - showers. .

Sue & Len have been enjoying their first day - they are soooo jet lagged that come 8:30 in the evening they are doing good impersonations of zombies. Richard, Laura & team left today - another 2 hour delayed flight. Must be global warming causing it.

We finally saw the shuttle launch. Every time we have tried a shuttle event we have failed, from the landing we planned to see when the shuttle burnt out during re-entry and the last night launch where it was cancelled in the last minute of countdown and the Hubble repair, where they couldn't get the puncture repair outfit working. Pretty spectacular - it is so bright at night you can barely see the shuttle - pretty loud as well, the sound hits you seconds after you see the launch. Do you remember the Yanks wouldn't let Concorde fly because of noise, must have changed the regulations since then

Been ICING at Gaylord Palms. This is an annual event where a team of Chinese sculptors come over and create massive ice sculptures in the convention centre. The convention centre is kept at 23 degrees below freezing, which is quite an achievement considering it has been over 25 deg C during the day. I think they use over 2 million pounds of ice, which is 100 tonneish in real speak. The pictures tell the story. The Gaylord has a massive atrium, big enough to contain 4 restaurants, a castle, a swamp, a sailing boat on a lake(?) full of sea fish in which they run a Christmas show of song, dance, smoke, and a light display, v nice.



Eating too much, but getting some golf in - next guests play golf so perhaps there will be more of that to come.