MN Maven

It has been a long while since I have updated my blog here. With the birth of my second daughter, and my new foray into a salt water reef tank I guess I just lost track of free time and neglected my blog. Today I was going through my RSS feeds and found an article from Steve Guttenberg on Cnet so I figured this would be as good of time as any to start posting again on my blog.

Steve’s article, Sound vs Picture: What’s a better investment? hits on a pretty good topic and one that I feel very strongly about. Over the years I’ve been known as the “HDTV Nerd” or “home theater nerd” you name it, if it has to do with hdtv, home theater, or anything along those lines I delve into it. Reading Steve’s article it goes talks about the original early adopters spending $10,000.00 on their first plasma tv, and probably have upgraded several times since then. When it comes to HDTV’s I am a late bloomer, I didn’t buy my first HDTV until 2005, and even then hdtv’s were still relatively new and still slightly on the expensive side.

Along with my first HDTV purchase I upgraded my surround sound system, new speakers and new AV Receiver/Amplifier. When I purchased my first HDTV it was $2400.00, a 42” Sony Vega rear projection LCD tv. Even in 2005 that tv was still a little expensive for me.  At the same time I purchased the tv I splurged quite a bit and picked up a new 7.1 AV receiver a Yamaha RX-V1700, and Klipch Reference Series RF-35 Floor Standing tower speakers, RC-35 Center Channel, RS-35 surround sound (two pair, one for side surrounds and one for rear surrounds to get 7 channels).  Between the AV receiver/amplifier and the new speakers I nearly spent triple what I did on the tv alone.

Coming from an audio background in car audio, as that was my passion before getting into home theater and surround sound setups, I have always been a fan of good sounding audio as well as good, deep, clean bass. I knew that I wanted a good solid foundation to build my home theater on, so the money I spent on my surround sound setup I knew was going to last me years to come as well as give me the enjoyment as well as an enveloping experience only a good speaker setup can give you.

I now however, find myself in a predicament, I have an older AV receiver, that I spent a pretty penny on 4 years ago, that is no longer up with the current times. My AV receiver doesn’t support HDMI switching, doesn’t support HDMI inputs at all, so I can not get a blu ray player and use my current AV receiver and input lossless audio via hdmi into my receiver and experience the next gen audio formats (Dolby Digital True HD and DTS Master Audio).

Now going back to audio vs. video, I currently have a Panny PT AE900-U 720p projector. After I completed my basement home theater build I sold my Sony HDTV and put the funds towards the projector and screen. I went from a 42” rear projection HDTV to a 106” front projection setup. I was more frugal when it came to my video, I didn’t want to spend the money for 1080p as it was still several thousands of dollars to get 1080p and even more money to get a 1080p projector and at the time all I was watching was over the air hd, and upscaled dvd’s with my HTPC setup. I figured I would rather get “ok” to “good looking” video quality in the HD world and get the wow factor from the shear size of the screen than get a smaller screen and 1080p.

So between video and audio, I still would rather have the audio first and foremost and then video second. Granted video is the whole reason I am down in my home theater in the first place, but I enjoy the video more when I have a good sounding surround sound setup to accompany the video, and know that it’ll be that way for years to come.

How i use my HTPC

As Brent I didn’t start using my HTPC for TV, but instead for movies and music. I first got into HTPC’s for DVD upscaling, and post processing. When I bought my first HDTV and realized how crappy DVD’s looked on the tv, I started looking into what it would cost to upscale and post process dvd’s to give me a near HD video quality. I looked at what it cost for higher end upscaling dvd players, which at that time (fall of 2004) weren’t highly available. The players that were around were upwards of $500 and didn’t offer that great of an improvement. There were also high end video processors but those cost more than the tv itself, so that was also out. At that time I had hooked up one of my hold PC’s to the TV and I was using that to play back downloaded tv shows and downloaded movies but I had never thought of playing back DVD’s through the pc. I then discovered AVS Forum and saw what others were doing with PC’s and how they were using direct show filters like FFDshow and using that to upscale and post process dvd’s to drastically improve the video quality of dvd playback. I was soon hooked. Some people would say, and some times still do, say that PC’s with FFdshow and other filters were as good if not better at upscaling and de-interlacing dvd’s than what you could find in higher end video processors.

 

While playing around with FFdshow settings, I stumbled upon people also using their PC’s as DVR’s by adding tuner cards and recording cable tv and OTA ATSC HDTV. I then found myself looking for software that would allow me to turn my HTPC into a DVR. I started using BeyondTV, then SageTV, also tried GB PVR but at the time (again fall of 2004) nothing caught my eye, nothing was easy to use, or easy to setup. I soon found out about Media Center 2005 and from then on I was hooked. I ended up buying a new pc from Dell which came with a tuner card and Media Center 2005 which got me to the point where I am today. Since that PC I have built damn near 4 more HTPC’s or upgraded hardware to the point where I am today. Once I started getting really into Media Center and tuner cards I have never looked back and have never stopped. I went from having a single ATSC and a single NTSC tuner in my first HTPC to now having 6 ATSC and 4 NTSC tuners in my main HTPC and having 2 NTSC, 2 ATSC and 2 QAM tuners in my “test” HTPC that I am currently using to test out Windows 7. Right now I just re-installed my test pc with 7068 release of Windows 7 which so far has been running great for me and is slowly looking more and more like I will definitely be upgrading to windows 7 full time on my “production” HTPC once it goes RTM.

 

Most of the time my wife still refuses to use Media Center full time. The only time she’ll use it, is if I am sitting down to watch tv and she is there with me, basically if I am there to man the controls, or if I am on my computer in our room and she’s watching tv at the same time she’ll ask me to set it up and start playing a tv show. My goal once I get the home automation system up and running fully is that she’ll be able to fully use media center and control everything without me being there. That is one of the main driving forces for me looking into home automation is so that she can use it without having to worry she’ll break something. However even though she refuses to use it by her self in most cases, she’ll bitch and complain if it isn’t working correctly. If she can’t consume her media when she wants that is when the HTPC takes the brunt of it and she wants it out of the house. As of lately though, other than my guide data issues, we’ve been living a trouble free life with media center and the extenders and with Windows 7 it keeps looking like it’ll only get better.

 

My HTPC setup in my home is a Client/Server configuration. The main HTPC which is located in my comm closet which is adjacent to my Home Theater room is where the central hub of everything “connected” in my home is located. Main cable tv feed, cable modem, router, switches, patch panel, AV distribution, you name it, it is located in the comm closet. The comm closet also serves as an AV rack for my home theater, where I located my AV receiver, my xbox 360, hd dvd player, 5 disk dvd changer, cable box, monster power center and more. The closet allows me to access the AV rack from the rear so I can easily disconnect, add or change equipment with ease and not have to worry about wires all over the place. My HTPC is the same way, I have it located in this closet as I have 10 tuner cards, so that mean I have 10 RG6 coax feeds that go into this PC. Having 10 RG6 coax feeds at times can make a real mess. But having a closet of this nature allows me to have everything connected, and hidden out of plain sight, which keeps the WAF high, and keeps the system out of reach and means that it can be up and running with no potential of some one turning it off or messing with it.

 

With the HTPC located in the Home Theater and directly connected to my projector, the HTPC feeds my home theater movies, music, tv (Live and Recorded), and any other media content from pictures, and other home videos. From there I use media center extenders located in my family room which consists of a 32” plasma 720p HDTV. The second media center extender is located in my bedroom where I have it connected to a 32” LCD 720p HDTV. Also in my bedroom I have my “test” HTPC in a small form factor desktop HTPC case that I use in conjunction with the media center extender to consume movies and other content I can’t get with an extender. With Windows 7 on the test pc I have it setup to load all recorded tv from my main “production” HTPC so that I can watch recorded tv on the test pc just like I would if I were using the pc if it had tuner cards doing the DVRing. With windows 7 and the advent of home groups that were added it now makes it much easier to share recorded tv from pc to pc and have it show up in the recorded tv section of media center, it just adds that additional ease of use to the whole setup.

 

Over all the way I use my HTPC is to tie in all my digital entertainment needs into a single, easy to use, great looking interface, and without Windows Media Center I would not be able to accomplish this the way I do now. Yes I could use other solutions like SageTV but we all know what I think of SageTV, and I will just leave it at that.

 

- Josh

Recently I upgraded my HTPC case for my spare/test HTPC so that I could set it up in my bedroom and play around with windows 7 media center, and get more hands on use with it. Since there isn’t a softsled solution for media center I still require a Linksys Media Center Extender in the room as well. Since both are media center devices they share the same IR codes which caused problems trying to use one or the other.

 

Today I had remembered that VMC supported 9 IR codes, so that you could effectively run 8 (since code 0 and 1 share the same codes) different media center HTPC’s and IR blasters all at the same time, in the same room, and not interfere with each other. So while thinking about that I set off trying to find any information on how to change the control ID’s for media center. Not being able to find anything on Google, I went to the “HTPC Collective” on Twitter, and within minutes Ian Dixon, Mike Brown and Richard Miller answered the call.

 

Ian with this link. Mike with this, and Richard with this. Follow the instructions located on each page, I went into the registry, changed the “Set Remote Control ID” to 2, deleted the other remote control ID’s as instructed, then programmed my MCE remote also as instructed. These same instructions, originally set out for vista media center, also work for windows 7 media center (7MC).

 

Enable Universal Remote Control – If you have a universal remote control you may need to enable it. A reboot is required for this setting to take effect.

• Registry key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da
• Registry value – EnableDebounce
• Registry value data type – REG_DWORD
• Registry value data – 1 = enable universal remote control; 0 = disable universal remote control

Set Remote Control ID – To enable your Media Center to respond to a specific remote control ID do the following; 1. Press and hold the DVD Menu key on the remote then press a number button (1-8) for 5 seconds. Remotes with visible LED signal indicators will blink twice to confirm the change.  2. Enter that same number below. 3. Save. 4. Restart the Media Center PC.  Note: To enable Media Center to respond to all remotes use the number 0. A reboot is required for this setting to take effect.

• Registry key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da
• Registry value – CodeSetNum0
• Registry value data type – REG_DWORD

This setting also requires deleting the following registry values:

• Registry key – HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HidIr\Remotes\745a17a0-74d3-11d0-b6fe-00a0c90f57da
• Registry value – CodeSetNum1
• Registry value – CodeSetNum2
• Registry value – CodeSetNum3

 

I then took my newly configured setup, and went one step further. I programmed my Logitech Harmony 550 to control the new remote control ID, and added a new activity so that I can now use and control my Linksys Media Center Extender, my 7MC HTPC, and my TV all with one single remote. In order to program my Harmony remote with the new remote ID I had to manually configure the harmony remote, one button at a time, which with the Logitech software it actually makes it a breeze to configure.

 

So if you are like me, have more than one media center pc, extender, 360, ect… this solution will work for you.

 

- Josh

Last week I finally had a chance to order up a new HTPC case for my test HTPC. Previously I was running a a Q Pack cube case, which served its purpose while I had it, but it just wasn’t what I needed or what I wanted for a real HTPC. I had recently returned some items to newegg and couldn’t get my money returned, all I could do was get “in store credit” for the items. So with that extra money that I needed to spend I set out looking for the cheapest HTPC case, that still looked decent and got decent reviews. I eventually found this case.

 

 

 HEC 7K09

 

Some of the requirements for the HTPC that I was looking for when searching for a new case where:

• Cost – had to be cheap enough, and not break the bank
• Looks – had to look half way decent, and not stick out like a sore thumb
• Power – had to have a PSU
• Color – had to come in black
• Size – had to fit a micro ATX motherboard, and be low profile, and small form factor

 

So with that in mind I started searching AVS Forums and newegg to see what was out there, and what others where getting. The HEC case kept coming up over and over again, however with mixed reviews. Some folks loved the case for its “bang for the buck” which is what I was looking for, while others said the case was too restrictive and didn’t work out all that well. For me I was willing to forgo the down sides to the case from the reviews that I read it seemed to be what I was looking for.

 

Last week the case came in and I started to swap out the motherboard, DVD drive, and all of that into the new case. One of the first things I did notice was that this definitely is a tight fitting case. Getting the motherboard and ram to fit in was a chore in of itself.

 

 

I had to remove the PSU to access the hard drive carriage bay which wasn’t all that bad however with the limited space, trying to figure out some form of wire organization/management at the same time, was beginning to be more tasking than I had imagine. I even had to swap out the ram sticks I was using with the ram I had in my office pc. I was using Corsair XMS2 with the extra tall heat sinks which caused a fitment problem with my DVD drive bay. So I put the XMS2 ram into my office desktop pc, and took the normal height ram and installed it into the test pc here so I could mount my DVD drive.

 

 

Once I figured out the intricacies and quirks of the case, things finally started to get put together and was able to complete the install. I have this test HTPC located in my bedroom which I share duties with a linksys DMA 2100. I have the test HTPC to use for testing out the new builds of windows 7, as well as test out new third party plug-ins and applications. I also use it as a DVD juke box as currently I can’t get DVD streaming on my extenders unless I re-encode all of my ripped dvd’s, which at this point in time I am not willing to do. This also allows me to have a better upscaling dvd player in my bedroom which until now I haven’t had before. 

 

Over all I wouldn’t call this a case for beginners or noobs. You will easily get frustrated and not want to use this case if you try and use this case as your first PC build let alone a HTPC build. I would say that if you are accustom to building pc’s and understand how small form factor cases work and understand the limitations of how they work, then this might just be a choice for a good looking, budget minded HTPC case. For me the case works well. Its a solid build, looks great, and works well with the AMD 780G mobo and cpu setup I installed in this case. The PSU is a little on the weaker side, but I am running a low power 4850e 45watt cpu and a 640gig WD “green” drive so I wasn’t worried at all about the PSU.  So again after everything it still is a pretty good choice for a budget HTPC case.

 

If you have any questions or comments register and post them up.

- Josh

Part two of my multi part series which was again inspired by this post from Brent Evans of Geektonic. Today I am covering the ever changing requirements for my HTPC and home media system. The many renditions of those requirements and how significant changes can be impacted by significant others in your house hold. In other words, keeping the system you have in place as high on WAF as possible.

Home Theater PC (HTPC) requirements

As Brent, the requirements in my home, and how we consume media and how we interact with the systems in place have evolved over the years. In the beginning all I was doing is using my htpc for DVD playback, and with that the only time my wife sat down to watch a movie was when I was with her, so I was always there to put a movie in to play it. Over the years the requirements and main use for the HTPC in our house hold moved away from being a dedicated DVD jukebox to a full blown HD DVR as well. With that in mind here are some of the main requirements for the system I have put in place.

 

• Stability – In my house hold stability and ease of use are the key factors. For my family, being able to use the system and not have to call me up or pull me away from something has forced me to play the “Custom Installer” role and put forth some clearly defined rules and make sure something works 100% before I introduce it into our home.
• Ease of use - I have had to come up with solutions to make our bedroom, family room (both of which run media center extenders) and our Home Theater experience as easy to use as possible. If my wife can’t operate it without my assistance she will never use it again.
• Clean install / Custom install – WAF requires no wires. No wires absolutely anywhere in plain sight. If I can not install something and hide the wires it gets put on the chopping block instantly. So I have learned how to design my system with as little foot print as possible.
• Instant gratification - Right now in that situation it requires me to keep the media center extender running all the time from 6am to midnight. I currently am playing around with event ghost and IP controls to send power on and power off commands to the extenders so that when my family wants to use it, it is ready to go and they don’t have to wait for it to boot up and connect to the pc. Not having to turn the extender on and wait for it to turn on is one thing my wife requires. She wont use the system if she has to wait for something to boot up, which is one of the reasons I think she doesn’t like any of the blu ray or hd dvd players I have had. To solve that I keep the extender on as much as possible, and all my wife has to do it turn the power on the tv and she is using the extender right away.
• HTPC must act like a STB – Being able to have a system that turns on every single time, works like it should, and doesn’t look like a PC in any way shape or form is a must for me and my family. My wife needs to be able to just turn the tv on, and it should work, and not have to mess with a keyboard or a mouse, it should never look like a pc or work like a pc, it needs to run as much like a set top box as possible.
• Great Looking User Interface – I am a sucker for a good looking interface. To me I can’t stand using SageTV or other applications, which is why I use Vista Media Center and now Windows 7. The user interface that media center provides is like none other, which is what I love about it. It is clean, easy to use, and flows really well.
• Low Cost – If you have recently listened to the round table podcast on Entertainment 2.0, one of the discussions we had was about cost. I want to keep my inner “thrifty” side alive and kicking so going the media center route, keeps in that tradition as it comes with Vista and now Windows 7. Media Center has a large backing of other corporate hardware so media center extenders are readily available and can be had in most cases for nearly $50 per extender.
• DVR requirements – As you know my HTPC is my DVR and with that in mind I have to abide by some rules so that it stays high on WAF. In Brent’s post he goes on to list some “must haves” in his post, of Brent’s list for his HTPC/DVR requirements, the two that are really must haves for my house hold is commercial skipping and extenders.
  • Commercial skipping – My wife can live without Commercial skipping. When I was testing out windows 7 my wife had commented on why the commercials were still there and how she liked not having to use the remote to skip commercials. Eventually she got tired of having to do the 30 sec skip during the commercials, she loved having the auto commercial skip feature which surprised me when she told me she wanted it back. Vary rarely will I get a request for “technology” or a gadget from my wife, but commercial skipping what one thing my wife absolutely needed.
  • Video Resume / Follow me / Multi-room viewing – Being able to access the DVR’d content on any TV in my home. As Brent calls it, “follow me” is part of the multi-room experience and involves the HTPC/Server and extenders of sorts (see media center extenders for more info).
  • Record up to 4 shows at a single time – I currently have 10 tuner cards setup on my HTPC. 6 HD ATSC and 4 SD NTSC tuners. At any given night during the week between my wife’s DVR needs and my own, we can use up to as many as 4 HD tuners at one single time.
  • Always on / Always working
• Media Center Extenders – Video resume (or follow me as Brent calls it) We generally will sit down to dinner and watch a few shows while making dinner and getting ready to sit down. So being able to pull up a tv show on the extender start watch tv, then pause/stop playback after a while. We will then, depending on what is going on, move down into a home theater/media room in our basement and on the HTPC down there pick back up right where we left off on the extender in the family room. Being able to start watching a tv show and then move to a different tv and continue watching the same thing right where you left off is one of the biggest used features of our setup in our home, commercial skipping being a close second.
• Movies – Easy to use, easy to navigate, and great looking interface with cover art. When building my HTPC I discovered a customer installer system called kaleidescape which backed up movies to hard drive and provided a nice custom interface for cataloging movies and providing them in a nice easy to use gui. With that in Mind I found a great plugin for Media Center that gave me part of what I was looking for, and keep with my “Thirfy” side. I ended up going with My Movies plugin for media center and it gives me a great user interface for cataloging my dvd collection. Just recently the developer of My Movies has added a windows home server plug-in that allows me to offload the database and server portion of my movies to my WHS box so that I can lessen the resources on my HTPC.

 

Home Theater / Media Room requirements

Over the years one of my other passions that grew along with my HTPC fixation, was that of Home Theaters. While in college I purchased my first DVD player, as well as my first surround sound systems. My roommates and I would spend hours watching movies and playing video games with the surround sound. So when I graduated and had time and of course the income to support such a hobby I set out to build my own dedicated home theater / home media entertainment room. While I was researching and designing my space, I started seeing what others were doing with their setups, and over time I started seeing a pattern of “things I would have done differently” so with that I put forth some requirements of my own, for my space, which slowly merged into other areas of my home as well.

• One Remote to rule them all – Being the non-original person that I am, I had to “borrow” this headline from Brent. I am slowly working my way into home automation, and doing TCP/IP based controls for my media center and media center extender. I am also working on a touch screen based control system for my home theater, however for now I follow the lord of the rings motto and follow the “One Remote to Rule them all” mantra. I have several Logitech Harmony remotes in my home. In my bedroom I run a Logitech Harmony 720, in my family room I run a Harmony 550, and in my basement theater room I run a Harmony 680 which will soon get replaced my a Harmony one remote. Being able to control activities and control several devices with the basic functions on the remote makes it much easier to use however they all still have one short fall, and that is devices that don’t have discrete IR commands and those remote activities that take a while to run, my wife can’t understand that you have to hold and and continue pointing the remote while it completes all of the activity functions before you can set it back down. My goal is to eventually replace that with a one touch button on a touch screen interface for my home theater control and home automation system but right now because of cost that project is still in testing and conceptual design phase.
• One Box to play it all – My HTPC. My ultimate goal in the end is to have a single box to be able to play back any content I throw at it. Blu Ray, HD DVD, DVD, SACD, DVD Audio, mp3, flac, ogg, flash video, streaming audio, video games, streaming video sites (hulu, netflix, ect…). Be my main DVR, DVD juke box, music juke box, you name it, it can do it. Up until now, I do have that, but currently its not in an easy to use, all in one, native interface (like media center) its close but its not all there yet. Like the saying goes, “jack of all trades, but master of none” is what the HTPC is, for me I’ve learned to live with its short comings, like Brent does with SageTV and how ugly it is ;) but he has chosen to live with SageTV because its is a master at playing back lots of content, and is a great DVR app, but its not as good looking and doesn’t flow together as easy as Media Center does. So to each is their own and with HTPC’s you have to give a little to get what you want some times.
• All equipment must work at all times - That is one of the biggest rules of the roost when it comes to my family, or hell will break loose in my house hold (most of the time from me out of frustration). If something doesn’t work all the time when it is called upon, major frustration will ensue. I pride myself on keeping a system that is 100% self built, self installed, run with 99.99999999% uptime. In the last 2 years of running my most recent HTPC setup I have only had a 4 day down time which was due to a guide data issue in Vista Media Center, for those that follow me on twitter, you knew what I went through. For those that use a HTPC as a DVR you know that not having a guide data will make the setup virtual unusable.
• Music available anywhere – Between the HTPC, the media center extenders and the Squeezebox in the family room we have the ability to access our music collection anywhere in our home.
• Clean / Clutter free Install – This gets back to my “custom installer” mentality. When building my Home Theater and installing the flat panel tv’s in my home I wanted the installs to be as clean as possible and look almost professional.

 

Over all these are just the main features I look for in my HTPC requirements, every one who uses a HTPC will eventually find out their own requirements through trial and error, and will eventually come up with a great combo of software, hardware, settings and configuration to the point they can then use their HTPC day in and day out without issue, the above points are what work for me. Stay tuned for the next segment of these series of posts which next time I will re-hash my current HTPC and extender setup, how I use the setup day to day and will go over some things on what I would change or do differently if I could.

 

- Josh