Moving the Blog

I've decided to take my blogging over to MSN Spaces. Much slicker interface over there!

HD DVD in my Media Center rig

One more addition was just made to the beast. I just grabbed an XBox 360 HD-DVD player from someone, brand new for $155.00! So? What good does that do your MCE rig? I'm certain you're asking. Well...ask away! This puppy is just a USB 2.0 Toshiba HD DVD drive. Simply plug it into the Vista box, it recognizes new hardware, goes online, grabs drivers for the XBox 360 HD-DVD ROM drive and installs everything absolutely perfectly! The hardware installation was the easy part. The tough part is the MC integration. As of right now, Vista does not support HD-DVD integration natively. I'm certain that will change at some point soon, but right now, you need to run a 3rd party application. Well, that's a bitch! You mean I gotta close out MCE, grab my mouse or keyboard, launch another app, etc? That totally defeats the purpose of having this sweet 10 foot interface. So, as with everything else, there's always a way around this.
Cyberlink's Power DVD supports HD-DVD playback beautifully within vista. So, all that's required is to register the application with Media Center, and tell it that when a HD-DVD is inserted, launch PowerDVD in full screen mode. Easy! Just follow the documentation written up by Mike right here
I love when people figure out the tough stuff for me!

Softsled?

For the past 3 years, the MCE community has been chattering about a scrapped MS project called Softsled. The premise of this project was to have a "Software extender" for Media Center functions. Basically, you would be able to connect to your main MCE box from another machine, have access to all the media and resources, including TV Tuners on that box remotely. Great concept, however, for unknown reasons, MS scrapped this project. As it stands right now, we have 2 options for extending Media Center functionality:
1 - Hardware Extenders. The XBox 360 is the only hardware MC extender for Vista right now. This is just not practical, however. It's loud, hot, and expensive. There is no way you could put this in, say, a bedroom as a secondary viewing station for your media center solution.
2 - Web based apps such as WebGuide4 and Orb. These work..however, the quality is pretty lame. These are not solutions for in home viewing.

Rick Drasch has decided that it is high time that the open source community pick up the ball where MS has decided to drop it. He is trying to drum up developer support for an open source Softsled implementation. As an avid MC user, I applaud his resolve and will certainly be following his progress on this one. If I were a developer, I would most certainly be looking into ways to help out, however, my development skills were on display the one time I tried writing a 'Hello World!' app, which instead returned 'Goodbye, Asshole!' Since then, I've been a bit gunshy when it comes to writing code.

Good luck with this one, Rick!

Everything's in Place

After getting in 18 holes this morning, I came home and pulled everything together. The STBs are hidden in the cabinet, the cable DVR is disconnected, and the PC is sitting in its probable home right next to te cabinets. I'm sitting here, watching gof in Hd and it's flawless on my replacement 7600GT. I'll be bringing the 'rental' back to Circuit City tomorrow.
About 3 weeks worth of tinkering, 2 different sets of RAM, and a grand total of 4 video cards later, my Vista Media Center PC is exactly what I was hoping it would be. Fast, smooth, quiet and cool (literally and figuratively.) I've got it loaded up with about a week's worth of the LW's programs, 10 movies ripped onto it, all of our music and pictures, 2 standard def tuners, 2 high def tuners, and the option to go to Firewire recording as well, if I want to. i put the cables in place, but have not connected them yet.
So, when Jen gets home from visiting her family tomorrow evening, she's not going to have the cable DVR in place, and is just going to be looking at the PC and the surround sound receiver.
Of course, these projects are never "done" but this is finally in a condition in which it's stable and ready for every day use.

Possible New Remote?

Wow! I can't believe this has been out for over a month and I missed it:
http://www.remoteshoppe.com/index.php?itemid=360

Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard here. This is a GORGEOUS device and given how much I adore my current Harmony, this would be an easy leap to make. The biggest selling pont I see so far would be the following:
Select the Watch TV (or PVR) Activity Settings you’ll see an option to program favorite channel macros with images like channel logos.
One of the LW's biggest complaints about MCE/VMC is the lack of her Favorites button. A simple button on the remote that let's her move on to the next station on her favorite channels list. Sure, I've heard all kinds of recommended workarounds, such as just go into the guide and select Most Viewed from the catagories, but none of these are Wife Friendly at all.
< /soap box >
Rather than pointing out how we, the end users, should change our habbits to accomidate limitations, someone needs to step up and change the technology to match our habbits.
< soap box/ >
Well, this baby just might do the trick.
Additionally, this guy knows what he's talking about, and what the single most important item of any device is per the following line:
This streamlined design will significantly increase the spouse-acceptance-factor
Ahhh...the WAF goes mainstream! We all knew it was a matter of time.

The hurdle on this one would certainly be the price tag. It's $499, with $150 off at HighDef Lifestyle if you use the promo code H1000C. That's still a bit steep, but I'm certainly going to keep my eye on this thing and see how low the price goes over time.

This Weekend's Plans

The replacement 7600GT from NewEgg will be on my doorstep when I get home from work today. It's just going to be a matter of slapping that bad boy in the case, removing the one from Circuit City and then bringing it back...although...hmm...SLI? Nahh, I could not get away with that. I'm already over budget and need to cut it right here, but it's a thought.

Once the card is in, it's time to begin the cleanup work. Hide cables, complete UI items, and finalize this project. Although the project will never be truly finalized as I'll always be tinkering with it, I am relatively certain it's living room worth and will pass all WAF tests. As the LW is away this weekend, it's the perfect opportunity for me to get everything completed and pull the Time Warner DVR out of the equation. When she gets home, there will just be a sleek Antec P180 looking at her. The only thing I'm concerned about right now is the length of the IR Blaster cables. I'm not certain they are long enough for me to put the STBs where I want them (hidden and out of the way) so I may have to alter my plans. Of course, I could just splice the wires and run longer ones, but I really don't feel like getting into that. I'm terrible with electrical tape!
Once this project is done, then I'm moving over to my old Sony PC. I slapped a Avermedia 1500MCE TV tuner card in there and am thinking about putting MCE 2k5 on it. This would allow me to utilize the 2 legacy XBox extenders we have upstairs. We'd only have access to live channels less than 100 but that'll be OK. Oh crap, that reminds me...I've got to set up the network share and permissions for sharing recorded TV with a MCE 2k5 box. It's a bit of a painstaking process and I've seen some reports of it not actually working. Oh well, it'll be interesting to see how it goes.
I'm considering setting up the Firewire solution on this box for HD shows that are not available over QAM. The problem is that Tim Moore (the developer) has discontinued development on it, and it was in a bit of a flakey state. His tunertracker.dll was quirky as it seemed to have difficulty remembering which tuner was which. I would go to record something, and it would say it was recording one item on, say, channel 51, however, it was really recording what was on the other tuner, which was usually my wife channel surfing! It made for interesting watching later! However, if I do implement firewire, it'll be for recording only, and only a couple channels, such as ESPN HD, Discovery HD, etc. Yes, Paul, I'll sacrifice a toaster to the cause if I have to!

So, in short, we're nearly at the clean up phase here. I'm going to pull the plug on the cable DVR before Jen lands on Sunday night so, we'll be committed to the cause!

NVidia 7600GT Looks Good so far

Well, after over 2 days of working with the 7600GT, I'm pretty sure we've got a winner here. It's performing as expected and I have yet to run into any crashes. HD looks sweet, standard def content is good, ripped movies look good...so far, no complaints.

I've begun populating the Recorded TV folder with a bunch of the LW's programs, so when the 100% committed switch somes up, it'll go as smoothly as possible and she'll have everything she needs right there. After making adjustments to the TV's display properties, she's been very happy with the TV quality. If she's happy, then Im happy!

Hollywood Studios Just Don't Get it Again!

This is insane! I don't know how I missed this ruling last month, but it's quite disturbing and yet another indication that Hollywood studios and the federal court system simply do not understand technology. Apparently, Cablevision lost in a ruling against technology that would allow them to roll out a new digital video recorder service that stores programs on servers in its network. The opposition to this technology was the Hollywood studios which included Twentieth Century Fox, a unit of News Corp., Viacom's Paramount Pictures, General Electric's NBC Studios, CNN and Turner Broadcasting System. The basis of the opposition was that the studios claim that Cablevision didn't get their permission to rebroadcast the programs. Cablevision argued that because the control of the recording and playback was in the hands of the consumer, and not Cablevision, the devices were compliant with copyright law.

Well, the studios won and yet another technology advancement has been shot down by technophobes who would rather crush new and emerging technologies because they do not fit into their established business model, than embrace this new horizon and determine how they can make it work for them. The Napster syndrom, amplified. At least the RIAA had evidence of hemeraging revenues. The MPAA is just knee-jerking to everything that is different than what was being done 10 years ago. The worst part about this shotgun approach is the effect it will have on the next innovation. Unless it happens to come from within the Hollywood community (and honestly, what was the last innovation from those idiots) they will immediately claim copyright infringement and barrage the creator with a lawsuit. Generally, these types of leaps forward come from individuals with an idea, or small companies who don't have the budget to wage a legal war against the Hollywood Squares, so...this idea stays locked in someone's head due to fear of litigation.
The RIAA went through some serious growth in the past 6 years, and the music industry is better for it. The genie was out of the bottle already, and they were forced into adopting a new business model. They managed, and you know what? No one went broke! No label went under due to music sharing and the industry now has a new revenue stream. Online music sales! What a novel idea! However, Hollyweird has no intentions of letting that genie out. They have rammed a cork in that bottle deeper than your average prison cell mates'...well...nevermind that analogy...you know what I mean.
Please, what on earth is it going to take to wake these people? Generally, something rather large has to occur in order to shake up somethnig this established. Hmmm...'occur'.... I wonder... "occur"...'OCUR'... Perhaps thise large even will happen on the OCUR front when someone finally hacks the oppressive restrictions placed upon use of these devices. And yes, it will happen. Maybe when it does happen, and all of a sudden, the Napster effect slams these people right in the wallet, they will wake up and realize that these advances need to be embraced, not squashed. They need to change their business model to be moth, artist and consumer friendly, for without either, niether can survive...hmm...come to think of it, I can survive just fine without artists. So, who really needs who in this equation???

NVidia Back In

I could not wait for my RMA to clear with New Egg, so I pulled my X1600 out when I got home from work and took it to Circuit City to exchange for a 7600GT. The prices were identical, so it was an even swap. After a bit of tinkering, it's in and performed just fine. I'm curbing my enthusiasm at this point as I thought the X1600 was doing well until we used it for a while, then it went to crap. However, after watching 2 episodes of 24 in HD tonight, I'm cautiously optimistic. I've still got a few issues I'm wrestling with, but it appears to be pretty solid. And yeah, it's WAY faster than the X1600. There are no noticeable artifacts at this point in SD broadcasts and there is no tearing in HD content.

As soon as I get the RMA'd card back from new egg, this one is going back to Circuit City as it's $70 more than the one I'll be getting from New Egg!

Week 3 Begins

The weekly update:
Stability has been achieved. Have not had a single blow up all week. This is goodness!
G.Skill out, Corsair in. Sorry, but given the flakeyness of the G.Skill RAM, I had to return it for some reliable Corsair RAM. It's a brand I know and trust.
ATI not impressive. OK, so my ATI X1600 card is doing great on the stability front. However, I'd expect that from a $20 card and demand it from a $200 card. Well, another thing I would demand from a $200 card is performance and this is where the X1600 seems to be falling short. Upon regular usage, the X1600 leaves artifacts all over the screen, the blacks degrade over time, and HD broadcasts develop horizontal tearing. NFG!
NVidia gets a reprive. With the issues I'm seeing with the ATI card, NVidia ha the upper hand in my box. Once NewEgg.com processes my RMA and ships the 7600GT back, it'll get another crack.
My Movies Removed. Again, this is an app I loved, however, it's .net 1.1 framework architecture is just too archaic for a project like this. I've decided to go with the integrated Vista Media Center DVD library. So far, I've dropped 10 movies onto the 200GB HD. I'm holding off for now, however, as I might be doing a total rebuild at some point.
OS is still a potential variable. For now, Vista is still the call. However, this could change at a moment's notice. I need to see how NVidia's Vista drivers are.

Artifacts Artifacts Artifacts!

Man, I just love jumping the gun on everytyhing! Everything was flowing along pretty well in stage 2. The PC ws doing a great job of pumping everything through the XBox 360 to the TV. So, it was time to go to stage 3...connection to the TV. At first, I thought it was going perfectly. Everything seemed to be OK and everything was working. Comskip was great, my DVD l;ibrary was fine. I was happy. And then, we put it through its paces under normal usage. Yesterday, I sat down and atched the Masters, Jen watched some of her programs last night, and I'm completely underwhelmed. After about 5 minutes of viewing HD content, the picture developes horizontal tearing across it. This is particularly noticeable during fast motion action, so following a golf ball on the picture was impossible. And it got worse as the day went on. Even in SD, we started seeing artifacts all over the place! It was terrible! Immediately, I went into reaction mode and searched all over the place until I found this on ATI's website under the knowledge base articles for the X1600:

737-25515: Display corruption may be noticed when watching TV under the Windows Vista operating system when using an ATI Radeon X1600 series product
The information in this article applies to the following configuration(s):
Radeon® X1600 series
Windows Vista
Symptoms:Display corruption may be noticed when watching TV under the Windows Vista operating system when using an ATI Radeon X1600 series product
Solution:Currently there is no solution.ATI Engineering has been advised of this issue and is investigating. Any updates will be published when they become available

You're joking, right? On top of that, I notied that the blacks began to degrade over time as we watched something last night. Hmmm...again, a quick search on ATI's knowledge base uncovered another article saying that the blacks will degrade over time with the X1600 ni Vista Media Center! Friggin' wonderful! This explains why no one on TGB is using this card. NVidia cards are the card of choice by a long shot, and now I'm truly understanding why. I've been an NVidia fan for a long time, and my loyalty waivered earlier in this project. However, after reading this and going through all of this, I'm back to being an NVidia guy. At least the problem with my NVidia card was defective hardware, not an unrecoverable bug!

So, New Egg has received my RMA'ed card as of Friday according to UPS. Of course, New Egg has not acknowledged the receipt of this card yet. No big deal, they say it takes 2-3 days for them to process it. It just can't happen soon enough for me at this point. I'm not happy with this X1600 now. Sure, it's stable, however, because of the hardware issues I ran into initially, my standards dropped a bit and I was accepting "Well, at least it's running!" Upon eflecting, I'm no longer accepting this. I need perfection. I might have to go back to MCE 2k5 to get it as the drivers are far more mature, but I will if that's what it takes.

The Ytilities are NOT Cooperating

OK, som last night..after my post, I sat down and relaxed for a while, did a few other things around the house and then decided to sit down and get Orb up and running. Well, someone somewhere is completely against this project. Within 2 minutes of beginning work, BAM, the power went out! I have noi clue what happened, but it was out till close to 1AM! So, no progress last night!

Corsair RAM is in

Well, even though I think I stabilized the G.Skill RAM as I had no crashes in the past 2 days, I've decided to go with my better judgement and use the Corsair. Sorry G.Skill, but after the initial headaches, I'm not going to risk it. All it's going to take is one blue screen while Jen is watching House Hunters International, and the entire project gets scrapped. Besides, with the $40 rebate with the Corsairs, it's nearly the same price.

So, after last night's TWC fiasco, I had to resetup my QAM channels and HD guide. Just finished that and all is running smoothly. I ripped 10 movies onto the hard drive last night and decided to go with Vista's DVD library. My Movies was just too slow. Everything else on this machine responds instantly, but going into My Movies was taking a good 15 seconds. Hopefully, Brian will get off the .net 1.1 platform and go to something a little faster with the next release. The Vista DVD library, however, is pretty sweet. Responds just as quick as everything else in the UI, is simple to use and has some cool features. Basically, I just ripped the entire DVD onto the HD, leaving the VIDEO_TS structure in place, and bam...you've got the movie. I left the extras on some of them, but mostly just went with the raw movies. Nero does a pretty good job of compressing with little to no quality degradation. I suppose I could just rip everything in mpeg4 format and save a bit more space, but I like having full surround sound and the menus add to the WAF. We'll see how quickly I fill this HDD up and then make the call from there.

For tomorrow, I'm going to install Orb. If all goes right, I'll be able to stream the Masters to my desk at work when the broadcast starts!

Last night I got remte desktop working, enabling multiple sessions. This allows me to drop this machine headless next to the TV and work on it remotely whenever needed. Another step in the right direction. At this point, the only thing missing is the RMAed NVidia 7600GT. I'm going to give that card another shot. This ATI is nice, but its Windows Video Performance numbers are 4.6. Initially I thought that was pretty sweet, until I saw people posting about mid to high 5's with their 7600GT cards on The Green Button. If I can gte a 5.5 out of that, this would mean that the bottlenext on this machine would be the AMD 64 Dual Core 4600+ processor! How sweet is that!!

DAMN this machine is quiet!

Time Wanrer Issues

OK, so I did some nmore tinkering last night and everytyhing appeared to be working OK. However, things got weird on me. All of the recordings made on analog channels (those < 100) that afternoon had no audio! Huh!??? However, the ones made after 7:00 PM seemed to be OK. OK...at first I chalked this up to some Media Center weirdness that I would have to get to the bottom of. So, just for grins, I replaced one of my TV tuner cards with a different one (I love having a spare) and went to see what was happening. Well, then it got really weird on me! I could get the STB's channel changing banner appearing on the screen, but the channels were blank. There was no picture. The fact that the banner was coming up in MCE should have told me that my MCE setup was just fine and that Time Warner was screwing things up again, however, it was late (around 12:30 AM) and I was not thinking properly. So, I dove back in to re set up my TV tuner config...again, same result! WTF! Then, when I changed to a 3 digit channel (a digital one) the picture came in just fine! Oh crap! You've GOT to be kidding me! So, I went over to the Time Warner DVR to see how that was acting, and sure enough, exact same symptom! No channels < 100 were coming in on that one either! Friggin wonderful! I spent a few hours troubleshooting what I incorrectly perceived as a media center problem, when it ws those morons at TWC the whole time.

Week 2 Begins

I just made the mistake of re-reading my postings over the past weel. Don't ever do that to yourself! Man, talk about all over the board! "It's working!"..."It's broken"..."I fixed it"..."It blew up!" Sheesh, it's amazing how one project can be across the entire board like that, so I figured a weekly review might be in order.
Components:

• The case, motherboard, processor and PSU remain the same.
• The video card is in limbo. The initial plan was to go with the NVidia 7600GT from eVGA. After wrestling with that guy for nearly the entire first 24 hours trying different drivers and stuff, it became incredibly ovious that this was 100% a hardware issue. From what I've discovered, eVGA had a bit of a bad batch that came with bad video RAM. So, I sent it back. While I'm waiting for it to go there and back, I went down to Circuit City to get something to put in my box. My initial plan was another 7600GT, however, in the end I decided that I would test out ATI. So, I bought the X1600 Pro with every intention of this just being a rental until my 7600GT comes back. Well, I'm not so sure I want the 7600 back. This is like renting a Viper while your Corvette is in the shop! I'm most certainly going to do some hardcore comparisons when the 7600GT comes back and take it from there.
• The RAM is going back. While I did finally get it working and apparently stable, I'm just a little nervous about it. I've decided that it's just too picky for this implementation, so I've ordered 2GB of Corsair RAM instead. It'll be here tomorrow.

So, the project. The current status of the project is stage 2. It's been moved off the kitchen table, the PC is closed up and running on its own. After what I would conservatively estimate at 30 hours of tinkering this weekend, I've got this baby to the point where I'm comfortable with it's performance, and it's been up and running for nearly a full day. So far I've:

• Updated the OS (Windows patches, etc.)
• Configured both cable boxes with my TV tuner cards.
• Configured the HD Homerun High Definition tuner and populated the guide with the QAM HD channel data.
• Installed and configured DVRMSToolBox. Now, anytime we watch recorded TV, it automatically skips the commercials. This alone is worth all the headaches as it adds HUGE bonus points to the Wife Acceptance Factor score.
• Installed AnyDVD. This is an essential, yet often overlooked piece of the puzzle. Especially if you are planning on ripping DVDs to your hard drive.
• Installed and configured My Movies. Again, a great app for a home theater solution.
• Installed Nero 7 Platinum. I can't say enough about Nero. Great suite for burning DVDs, ripping DVDs, manipulating video, and anything else in the A/V world. Well worth the license price!
• Connected the XBOX 360 as an extender.

I think that's it for now. I've also added an additional 320GB hard drive. I've got another 200 in there as well, bringing me up over 1/2 a TB. Need it for HD recording!

Possible Sweetspot?

Things got very interesting over the past 2 hours or so. I went into my RAM timing and dropped my voltage down to 1.90 (it was 1.95.) I bumped the speed back up to 800Mhz, and locked the timings in at 5,5,5,15, 2T. The 2T was set to auto before, but after reading some postings, I decided to try it. After that, it ws back to working on the software side of things.

It was relatively stable with the default windows WDDM X1600 driver, but the performance was suffering a bit. I went to ATI's site and grabbed the 7.2 Catalyst package. The latest (7.3) has several reported issues in only the first 5 days of release! Rather than install it, I just extracted it and then pointed the control panel driver update to the extraction directory and just did a driver install. None of the other crap they like to include. I'm not in the mood to overclock this vid card, so just the drivers, thank you! After a reboot, it was incredibly stable. I reinstalled the HD Homerun drivers, no lockup. Wow! I went into Media Center and flipped on a HD, and WOW was it smooth! Now, the past few times I used that damn Windows Update, it's resulted in ugliness on this box. After creating a restore point, I let it do its thing...Windows update ran, rebooted and the box is still up, stable and flying. Interesting.

So, as a test, I dragged it over to the TV, hooked it up via component, went into Media Center, set the display to 1080i and holy crap...live HD TV! Whew! So, for grins, I had it recording something on PBSHD while I watched Jeopardy in HD, and there ws no performance hit at all. I thnk that the combination of the new RAM timings and the Catalyst 7.2 drivers has done somethng to calm this thing down. It's only been about 2 hours, but I've been beating on it pretty bad for that period. Right now DVRMSToolbox is installed and I've just installed AnyDVD. As soon as the current recording is done, I've got to reboot and then we'll see how we're doing. I was able to get my 360 Extender connected to it last night and it worked just fine. So, I don't know. I think I'm still going to gove the 7600GT a shot when the RMA comes back and I'll try the Corsair RAM as well, but for right now, this is in much better shape than it was.

Changing RAM

OK...well, this is a work in progress, obviously. The 7600GT is being RMAed for a replacement. I'm going to give it another shot when I get the replacement card. Additionally, I've decided to return the RAM and get some Corsair RAM instaead. Corsair is listed as a supported brand by MSI for this board, so I'm going to stick to their specs. I've just had too many strange things happening to this rig in the past 48 hours. So, it's back to basics.

OS and Hardward are stable

Whew! After nearly 24 straight hours the hardware and the OS are finally stable. I had to make some hardware changes though. I spent the majority of the day fiddling with RAM timing and voltage thinking that was where my problem was. When the machine booted, it would come up with a corrupted screen 3 out of 5 times. I was a little concerned about the RAM basically because, well, honestly, who the hell ever heard of G.Skill!? So, obviously, that was the thing I blamed. Eventually, after trying all of the timing that others had gotten to work, and then matching my settings against what G.Skill techs recommend for my I decided to look in another direction. It did not take me long. I saw am item in eVGA's forum saying that if you were getting this behavior, then RMA your card, you probably have defective video RAM! Yeesh! During my travels, I also saw several complaints about errors within windows, manifesting in the display driver crashing and total machine instability. That, combined with other notorious NVidia driver issues, and the dreaded HD Stutter forced me to reevaluate my NVidia loyalty. After some reserch I decided to try ATI, with the condition that if I run into a single problem with my new X1600 Pro, back in the box it goes and I go back to NVidia. Well, the X1600 pro slapped right in, installed beautifully, the drivers upgraded without so much as a burp and my new computer video rating is a whopping 4.6 in the Vista Performance report! Oh, and that G.Skill RAM I was worried about checked in at a flyin' 5.9!

So, the OS is installed and upgraded, the hardware is functional, now for the fun part.
1 - Configure multiple remote logins.
2 - Customize the OS (disable UAC, kill all the useless crap Windows likes to toss on there, etc.)
3 - Connect the STBs.
4 - Configure the guide, recordings defaults, other MC stuff.
5 - Install the HD Homerun and configure QAM tuning
6 - Install DVRMSToolbx with Comskip
7 - Install My Movies
8 - Organize our music and ripped DVD library
9 - Connect to the TV and confirm HD functions
10 - Get clearance on all WAF items

Back at it!

Nothing is Easy

So, everything showed up yesterday. I had just enough time to slap the mobo in the case drop the RAM and hte processor in, then it was off to the Canes' game. I wish I would have stayed home! Jesus-tap-dancing-Christ they are horrible! Oh well, the Stanley Cup belongs to them for another 2 months or so, I guess I can live with that.
Anyway, after the game, I got home and resumed the build. In went the video card, DVD burner and hard drive. Booted up with the MCE CD and it started looking good. However, then it all went to pieces. The hard drive was recognized, and it even said it formatted it, but it won't boot from it at all! I don't understand this! After screwing with it till 4:30 AM this morning (yes, literally!) I got some sleep. This morning, made the trip to Best Buy to snag a new SATA hard drive as the old one was IDE. I'm thinking that there is some kind of problem with the IDE controller, having the DVD drive and the HD on the same controller. It's the only option I have though, as there is only one IDE controller on this guy.
So, after plunking down a few more bucks for a 320GB SATA drive, I got home and slapped it in the box. It's formatting right now, so we'll see how it goes.
On anothr note, it's not even close to looking like rain out there! At some point, I'm going to have to drop this project for a few hours today and get outside and do some yardwork. Damn!

The OS Debate

Well, it looks like everything is on track for getting here this afternoon, according to UPS.com. Additionally, things are looking up on the weather side as there is now a 30% chance of rain tomorrow! Woohooo! Come on baby, rain!

Initially, it was a no brainer for me regarding the OS. I was going to go with Vista Premium, and that's that. However, we all know that when one has time to ponder a decision, one tends to think of variables that were not readily apparent initially. I've weighing out the pros/cons of Vista Premium vs. XP Media Center Edition 2005, update rollup 2 and am very much on the fence at this point.

Vista MCE:
Pros

1. It's the current OS. MS is only doing maintenence on XP from now on, so any new feature/functions are Vista only.
2. Cooler interface plugins. If you've seen Fox Sports Plugin for Vista, you know what I'm talking about. A single screen, displaying the current scores to all sporting events on at that moment. You see a close game, you just select that game and you're brought right to it. It sounds small, but it's huge once you get used to it.
3. HD-DVD support. We're porobably going to buy a 360 HD-DVD drive soon. I love the facvt that I can just connect that puppy to Vista and bam, I'm in business.
4. Cooler UI. The wife really likes the Vista UI. WAF is critical. She liked MCE, but thinks Vista is better.
5. Improved 360 extender performance. MCE 2k5 was a bit sluggish when it came to 360 extender support. This has been greatly improved.
6. Better multi-tuner support with fewer manual hacks required.

Cons

1. No XBox V1 Extender support. This is enormous for me. I have 2 TVs ustairs with XBoxes on them, and if I go 100% Vista, those are toast! I read somewhere that someone was working on a hack for this, but I don't know anything about it.
2. Shakey NVidia video driver support. NVidia has been working on the Vista drivers for a while now. They're OK...not quite perfected yet, though. Of course, video is the critical part of any HTPC implementation.
3. Resource pig. It's no secret that Vista is a hog when it comes to system resources. Fortunately, there are options to speed things up a bit, such as disabling Aero and such. However, XP is still a bit more efficient.
4. See numer 1 again.

XP MCE 2005

Pros

1. Stable drivers. Let's face it, a solid, established platform generally results in greater stability.
2. XBox V1 extender support. Critical in my world. Of course, I could just take my current computer, drop MCE2k5 on it and slap it in the attic to drive the XBox V1s. I could easily access all the recorded TV and everything else on the Vista box, giving access to everything from every TV...but man, maintaining 2 setups sounds like a bit of a headache.
3. Less resources required. Granted, with the beast I'm building, I'm not certain how much of an issue that's going to be, but it's still a consideration.

Cons

1. No HD-DVD support. Oh, I'm sure someone's going to come up with a way, but I'd rather not have to rely on a hack.
2. Application sunsetting. Most developers are sunsetting XP apps in favor of new Vista versions. So basically, what we have is all we'll get.
3. UI issues. Granted, the 10' interface in MCE2k5 is pretty sweet, however, now that the LW (little woman) has had exposure to Vista, I'm not sure MCE will stack up.
4. It's old. OK, that's relative...I mean it is only 2 years old, but from a technology standpoint, that's OLD! I mean can I really hold my head up high around my friends when I know that they know that I'm running a 2 year old OS! Oh the shame!

Any input is appreciated!

There's a box in Edison NJ

OK, looks like New Egg is on the ball, as always. There's a 10 pound box in Edison NJ that's ggoing to find its way to me on Friday, 3/30. This is an issue, however. On Friday, I have my usual watering hole stop for a quick beer, then I'm heading to the Hurricanes' game. although, given how shitty they played tonight, I doubt that Friday is going to be anything memorable.

So, I'll be sitting at the game gettin gpissed off while this box, containing:
My CPU
My Motherboard
My Video Card
And my RAM
Is sitting here in the living room, with my wife putting her feet up on it.

This is going to make me NUTS! Now I know how Cartman felt when he froze himself so that he would not have to wait for the Wii to be released.

History and plan

In early 2004, I was first exposed to Windows XP Media Center Edition, such as it was. It was an interesting concept. Take the power of a PC and integrate common home media applications such as television viewing/recording, picture storage and viewing, videos and music all within a nice, simple interface that could be easily controlled via a remote control from the couch. This became known as the Ten Foot Interface. From my first experience with MCE, I knew I was onto something special. Even though this iteration of MCE was far from stable, not very feature rich and very limited in its capabilities, the potential was obvious. Three years later, 3 personal MCE builds later and 4 different flavors of Windows MCE later, I'm hooked. Not just on using this, but on "tinkering" with it. Each and every day, I've found myself surfing The Green Button looking for either new ideas, new posts from people looking for help, or just news about this incredibly addictive hobby. As I've recently explained to a friend of mine who is just now getting into a different home media computing solution, it's not a destination, it's a journey. The initial trail blazing is already complete on ths hobby and right now we're moving slowly into the mainstream, particularly with the advent of Windows Vista Premium, which includes Media Center as a part of the native OS. This mass marketization of this emerging technology does not come without a price. Once Hollywood caught wind of this, it immediately stepped in a slapped some ridulous restrictions regarding Digital Rights Managament upon us, pretty much making all MCE computers capable of receiving, decoding and recording premium content locked down to the point where they are not much more than a Tivo Series 3, that can also play your music. If you want the details behind this, just Google for DRM and CableCARD. I don't have the inclination nor energy to go into a soap box tirade, suffice to say, it really sucks. However, not everyone who wants to record 24 in high definition is a YouTube sharing pirate. Some of us are just looking to exercise the "Fair Use" resctrictions placed upon media recording back in the VCR era. Again, look it up yourself if you're interested. I digress. My box. Having built a couple frankenstein MCE creations to drive my home media, as well as completely taxing this poor Sony PC currently under my desk to the point where it not only regularly emits smoke, but I can actually hear audible sighs and grunts as it tries to record a HD program, while we're watching a hockey game on the Extender, and writing on web forums all at the same time. 512 MB of RAM has never been so unappreciated. Due to circumstances that are far beyond the scope of this writing, and frankly, are none of your damn business, I've had to endure the past 4 months in Media Center Geek hell. Running a full Vista Mecia Center implementation on an under powered machine, tying to make due while reading about my forum buddies' super computing masterpieces that could calculate Pi to the 10^235th digit before my computer could grunt "Pi? Oh THAT...yeah, gimme a minute.."... ..."Uhhh....How about if we just spell check something in Word instead?" I'm not complaining, mind you. I consider this machine to be the 12 year old family labrador. It won't go fetch as far, fast or often as the yappy little thing nipping at its heels, but it's reliable, loyal and part of the family. However, I'm about toi relieve this faithful sidekick of its burden and let it just be a regular computer again. I'm beginning a full blown, bad-ass Media Center computer, beginning right now.

It all began today with the arrival of The Case. I was thinking about ordering a different case that looks more like a piece of media equipment, such as a receiver or DVD player, but in the end, I want this to look like a computer. It's what it is. However, I love the sleek lines, understated appearance of this guy. Don't let the demure appearance fool you, though, This thing is serious. The two biggest enemies of any computer, especially a MCE box, are heat and noise. Heat is the enemy of any computer, and media intensive computing generate quit4e a bit of it, as the entire subsystem of the computer is taxed to its fullest. The Antec P180 addresses this enemy with a vicious cruelty. Two chambers within the housing separate the "surface-of-the-sun-hot" power supply from the motherboard which contains some serious heat generating components, such as video cards and TV tuners. By putting these items in different chambers, with each chamber cooled by some pretty hefty 120mm fans, heat is dissapated rather efficiently, keeping all the parts happy and running smoothly.
Noise is the next enemy. This case is constructed with a triple layer something-or-other (again, look it up yourself) that dampens all sound within it. Additiannly, each drive housing is padded with rubber grommets that deaden any vibration noise. It sounds just engineerish enough to actually work!
Additionally, no good computer is worth anything without a power supply. 400 watts of power should do the trick nicely, so in comes the Coolmax 400W ATX power supply.
Both of these guys showed up today. I've mounted the power supply in the case for now. It's sitting on the floor, all assembled, chuckling at my struggling Sony with a youthful arrogance, but without a motherboard or any components. Hmmm, sounds just like a teenager...all the potential to do somethng amazing, but none of the parts or smarts to figure out exactly what! Again, I digress.
The motherboard, video card, processor, RAM and everything else has been ordered this afternoon. If all goes right, I'll be able to write up the entire assembly and installation process as I go. But for now, the Sonly needs a nap.