We weren't in the Caribbean at the last post - but we are now, well Disney Caribbean resort. Its very nice, just like the real thing, except everything works great and the people are nicer. It is organised as island villages, we are in Jamaica, each with their own pool and Port Royals with the kids big pool, wrecked pirate ship, games arcade restaurants etc etc. We have been really enjoying the walking paths and chilling out on the lakeside beaches.
Monday, March 9
Sunday, March 8
In the Caribbean
Well we have arrived in the good old US of A, the journey was good. We managed to check on OK with BA to get our seats, unlike the last time when we totally forgot and just turned up at the airport. The BA check in was heaving and we got tangled up with a coach load of Saga-goers, who weren't sure which way was up. Car hire was a good deal with Dollar. They have changed their checkin so that you have accept each term of the agreement on a computer screen. Thirteen or so screens then several for the second driver. Nice car- Chrysler (or is it Fiat) 200. Loads of features beyond my understanding. Voice activated, keyless, ethanol. I dunno, will have to swap my Wallender for the car manual. Bought a T Mobile SIM, all inclusive for the time we are here. Came with a temp number that will change in due course. Lets see. Spent the week with good friends Phil & Jo.
Friday, February 27
Pandemonium
Not a good traveller, my anxiety builds the nearer we get to departing. Despite exquisite planning (my forte) it only seems to make me worse. We have this bizarre situation where we can fly out to US with 46 kilos (can't lift it) each, can cruise transatlantic with unlimited luggage, but can only fly back from Spain with 20 kilos each. That's Ryanair for you!!
Unanswered questions - how will print Ryanair boarding passes with no printer, what do Ryanair charge to check in at El Part - more than the cost of the flight, I expect. Ah well, let's get a few beers down & see if that eases the stress.
Sunday, February 22
Getting Ready
Well, we have decided to set at last. The original plan was to have another spin around the globe visiting places missed last time and re-visit some we really liked. The outline trip was; Hong Kong; Tokyo; Singapore; Cairns; Sydney; Ecuador; Galapagos; Chile; Madrid and home again over 3-4 months. Got it all priced to leave in Feb 2014. However my back quit and following spinal injections ended up having an op to remove some bone, unstick disks from spinal cord and trim them up. That went OKish and at last I am cleared to travel, so that's what we are going to do.
We are flying off to Florida, staying with friends, moving to Disney then off to Gulf of Mexico to chill out. We end up in Fort Lauderdale and cruise back across the Atlantic to spend a week in Barcelona and then fly back to Blighty. You never know the summer may have turned up by then.
We are cruising Royal Caribbean on the Allure of the Seas, which is aparently the biggest cruise ship in the world. Is it too big? Too many people? Will we overeat? Lets see!
We are flying off to Florida, staying with friends, moving to Disney then off to Gulf of Mexico to chill out. We end up in Fort Lauderdale and cruise back across the Atlantic to spend a week in Barcelona and then fly back to Blighty. You never know the summer may have turned up by then.
We are cruising Royal Caribbean on the Allure of the Seas, which is aparently the biggest cruise ship in the world. Is it too big? Too many people? Will we overeat? Lets see!
Saturday, March 16
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 13
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.
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.
Sunday, February 10
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 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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
