right on bro!

I just upgraded over the weekend from Windows Media Center 2005 to Windows Vista. The reason for upgrading is that this guy wrote a plugin for Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature, so now I have an on-demand library of 7,000 movies in near-DVD quality.

By now you’ve all heard the stories and rumors about how Vista sucks. It actually doesn’t suck. The upgrade was a pain in the ass, no doubt. But overall it was definitely worth it.

Some notes and advice, hopefully this will save you some time if you’re doing the same.

1. I installed right on top of MCE2005 (not a clean install). All recorded TV shows were kept as well as my recording schedules and music collection. Install took about 1.5 hours. You don’t need to attend to the install for the first 3/4 of it, unlike how you had to do it in XP to enter keyboard and date and stuff. Once you install and you have Internet connectivity, before you do anything else, run Windows Update a few times. Downloading from WU is *extremely* slow (at least it was on Sunday). The first round took 1hr to download/install 44 patches, and then there are a few minor ones after that. Just keep updating ’til you can’t no more.

2. I had to re-install my Radeon video card drivers. In fact, you might try scanning for Vista-specific versions of your hardware first and stick them on a USB key or something. I also reinstalled the Avermedia A180 driver - they have a separate Vista version, but I am not sure what impact this had.

3. Upon install, the hard drive was *constantly* thrashing and Vista was frustratingly slow as hell. I freaked out for a little bit. After about 36 hours it went away.

4. If you don’t want to use the Microsoft decoder, get this utility to switch codecs:

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

I bought Cyberlink Power DVD 7 Deluxe (downloadable version from Newegg is cheaper than buying it retail) and it seems to be better than the MS decoder.

5. Vista defaults its CPU management to 50%. Go to Power Options in the Control panel and set it for “Best Performance.”

6. Power management works just the same as in MCE2005 - my system goes to sleep and wakes up just fine.

7. If you want to customize the MCE menu, download this tool:

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

8. Vista Home Premium does NOT have Remote Desktop, which I miss. You need Ultimate to use Remote Desktop. This is totally sucky on Microsoft’s part.

9. Video was very, very jerky and stuttery at first and I had to tweak the hell out of it: disable “all enhancements” under my soundcard, check some option on the hard drive to improve performance, switch my output to 720p.

10. If you have a Netflix account, get the My Netflix plugin from www.anpark.com that allows you to use the “watch instantly” feature.

11. Music navigation is much, much faster now. I wish Microsoft had fixed this in MCE2005.

Overall, this was worth it. The new Media Center user interface is nice. More complicated, but nice. I won’t be switching my laptop to Vista anytime soon though, unless I absolutely have to.

Last week, I went to a corporate retreat for the company I work at. One of the speakers (a C-level executive at one of the biggest traditional media entertainment companies in the United States) was talking about his Web strategy and said that the future of convergence wasn’t going to be figured out by him - it was going to be “22 year olds with no social relationships with the opposite sex.” I could feel eyes on me, and somebody said, “No offense to anyone in this room,” and there was a small round of nervous laughter.

You are who you are, I guess.

Back to figuring out the whole convergence thing…

Over the past few years I’ve built several renditions of a Home Theater PC (HTPC) on various software platforms, including GB-PVR (I contributed to the design of the Web interface at one point), BeyondTV, and MythTV. Since about a year ago, I’ve been running Windows Media Center Edition 2005, which I bought out of sheer frustration with re-installing MythTV and my wireless hardware on Fedora Core 4 (and FC5, and FC4 64-bit, and Ubuntu….ouch).

Although it’s been running nonstop, I never really paid much attention to the HTPC beyond a Digital Video Recorder (DVR) that served as a backup to the Comcast DVR we had in the place I used to live in. In my new pad, the HTPC is now front/center, and MCE 2005 is rad. It’s buggy here and there and a pain to set up, but it is probably the best indicator of what the digital entertainment home could be (all your media in one place, video on-demand and delivered via the Internet).

Here are are some observations and advice for people who are interested in doing an MCE setup. Today’s part is a brag-fest about stuff you can do. The next part deals with the reality of hardware and software - this can be a tricky thing to get right, and I’ll provide some advice and pitfalls, at least in the context of how I have things working.

Content

Try over-the-air HDTV first before getting cable TV. High-definition programming on public channels (CBS, Fox, NBC, ABC, CW, PBS) is available in metropolitan areas with just an antenna, with some caveats (see the next post). Also, here in Los Angeles, there is a really cool over-the-air station called The Tube that plays music videos nonstop. It’s like MTV was when they first started.

So why do this? If you don’t watch a lot of TV (like me), it doesn’t make sense to spend $50-75 a month for 300 cable/satellite channels when you only watch 6 shows on 5 channels. If one of your shows is on a cable network, download the series from iTunes or Xbox Live, or wait until the end of the season and spend $50 on the DVD box set, or get it from Netflix. You’ll still end up saving money on an annual basis.

Get TVTonic. I just installed TVTonic yesterday and I am astounded by its potential. This is a free application that integrates with MCE that plays video “channels” (including any videocast delivered by RSS). I have it set to automatically download CNN’s daily news recap, G4’s X-Play and Attack of the Show video podcasts, GameTrailers’s HD game footage, Rocketboom, and some others. Be advised though that it will download all of the archives of any program you subscribe to at first (I am sure my ISP is going to love me even more), but you can also restrict downloads to certain hours and also limit the download speed so it doesn’t jack up your regular connection usage.

On-demand music videos with MTV Overdrive or any of the other MTV-created applications in the “Online Spotlight” section. They do lots of of news/entertainment programming, but the coolest thing here is the on-demand music video section - a big database full of on-demand videos, and you can save your favorites into a playlist for later viewing. This is also free as well and currently there are no interstitial advertisements (they are monetizing by selling related CDs while the video is playing).

Configure your pictures as the screensaver. You should probably have a screensaver installed to protect your PC, so why not serve up your digital pictures?

Install MCEweather. This is also a free application that gives you the weather report (surprise!).

iTunes album art does not play well with MCE. In particular, when you use iTunes to get album artwork on your songs, MCE (and Vista as well) has a bug where it displays a black box instead of the album. The only workaround for this is to lose the album artwork on the iTunes side (right click on the song in iTunes and click “Clear Downloaded Artwork.”) It is annoying as hell and I wish Microsoft would fix this.

Use last.fm to track your music play. Last.fm is a plugin that “scrobbles” what songs you are playing and reports them back out to the Web, so you can show the world how much of a Britney Spears fan you really are. If you install the last.fm player, which integrates into Windows Media Player, it also scrobbles when you are playing it in the MCE interface and shows it like this.

That’s it for this part. One thing I wish existed: A MCE application with a “10-foot” user interface that let you find local businesses, event listings, and movie times. There are some Google links for one app that seems to do this, but it looks like development was discontinued.

Next post, I’ll post some advice on hardware if you aren’t buying a pre-built MCE machine and want to DIY.

Labor Day may have come and gone but I’m still feeling a bit of the summer doldrums. Things are relatively okay overall though, buoyed by various weekend gatherings and a long drive through the desert a couple of weeks ago. Life could be a lot worse.

Supercomputer (the HTPC) has been upgraded to an Athlon 64 3500+. I had real problems getting Linux to work on the new hardware (tried FC4, FC5, and Kubuntu, all had various issues), so I switched to Windows MCE and am currently running the trial version of BeyondTV. I also wanted to try streaming shows to the Xbox 360 downstairs, but the wireless connection ain’t so great. It’s kind of working, but not really. BeyondTV needs some Windows services disabled in order to work on MCE, but MCE needs those services to stream to the Xbox, so it’s kind of an irreconcilable standoff. (This goes for other third-party PVR softwares as well, such as MediaPortal or GBPVR, by the way.) I really don’t want to get an Ethernet jack installed just for this, and I don’t want to drop any more money on this to get 802.11a equipment, so I may switch back to MythTV at some point.

Off to Chicago tomorrow for the Touch & Go 25th Anniversary Celebration. Time to get my indie rock on. Hope all is well with everyone.

Random Stuff:

I managed to pull this off yesterday, taking a show I had recorded in MPEG2 transport stream format and burning a DVD of it. Notes for when I need to do it next time:

• Copy the MythTV .NUV to my Windows machine (5.7GB file took 1 1/2 hours through the wireless network)
• Rename the .NUV file extension to .TS (the program I used will not recognize the file with the NUV extension)
• Ran it through the free program HDTV2DVD, which I downloaded from http://www.svcd2dvd.com/ (2 hours of processing time
• Output was your standard AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS folders, tossed those jams into Nero and burnt

The original file was 1280×720, HDTV2DVD downscaled it to 720×480. The final output looked a little washed out on the 50″ HDTV we have here (compared to just watching regular cable, which is weird), and it looks like the edges got cut off a little, but it looked pretty decent overall, and when played back on a standard definition TV, it looked fantastic. DVD-R was playable in my Xbox 360 and my hamshack DVD player.

The washed out part is a little weird, since everything’s supposed to be digital, but I guess it’s the conversion the smaller size that did it. Investigate at a later time. Also investigate conversion and burning in Linux.

Supercomputer is now able to record over-the-air HDTV thanks to the pchdtv HD-3000 card and the Zenith Silver Sensor antenna. It was a total pain in the butt trying to get it to work, but thanks to somebody on the mythtv-users mailing list, and my Linux-head co-worker, it’s rolling.

Observations:

• All of the digital TV transmitters in Los Angeles are located on Mt. Wilson (which is, I think, near Arcadia). So, apparently the best thing to get is a highly directional antenna (such as the Silver Sensor).
• Antenna placement is crucial. I had the antenna on top of my TV and wasn’t getting much signal. Finally, I bought a longer cable and stuck it on top of the bookshelf next to my window. Much better.
• HDTV streams are huge - an hour is 7.4 GB of space.
• I’m still getting stuttering for the first 3-4 seconds in xine when playing recordings, but it’s probably fixable through configuration or minor hardware upgrade. It eventually smooths itself out.
• A couple of people have asked how I’m outputting HDTV to a standard-definition TV. Well, MythTV captures in HD, but I use xine (which is like Windows Media Player for Linux) to play back the media file, and it downscales it to fit my TV. Have you ever downloaded a DVD rip from BitTorrent and played it on your standard definition TV? It looks like that. I’ll take this downscaled HDTV over plain old analog TV any day - it looks much, much better.

So, mission accomplished. The next steps are to try to solve some of the stuttering/load issues, fix some occasional crashes when watching the live HDTV stream, put the components in some kind of HTPC case. Unfortunately the case I want isn’t available yet, so I’ll have to wait for another month or so.

Supercomputer (aka the MythTV box) has been running for two weeks now, and everything’s groovy. I hooked up dynamic DNS so that I can access the Web interface from wherever there’s Internet access, and I’ve been taping lots of stuff with no problems. Also, I haven’t had to reboot the machine at all, so I guess Linux is indeed as solid as they say. Supercomputer is feeling more like an appliance than a PC that needs to be constantly nurtured.

It’s time to move on to the next stage: trying to capture over-the-air (OTA) HDTV. I ordered a pcHDTV HD-3000 card - it should be here next week. The requirement for the antenna is that it has to be an indoor one, and it has to sit on top of my TV - I’m not going to bother installing an external antenna, and I’m not going to bother trying to run cable all over the place to get the antenna closer to the window. From what I read, the Zenith Silver Sensor is the one to get, since apparently all of the HDTV towers in Los Angeles are located in one place. Went to Fry’s today but the only ones they had were in beat up boxes. If I can’t find it anywhere else locally, I guess I’ll just bust one of those.

Montez asked for a photo of the setup:

The case is an Apex SQ-328 that I got from PC Club because it was the cheapest thing available and I wanted a case immediately. The included Allied power supply is kinda quiet, but not really. The case itself is not very quiet, but it’s a nice case for the money, and Apex gets points because I called them when I couldn’t figure out how to pop the front bezel off, and somebody at Apex walked me through it.

Case will be replaced with an HTPC case as soon Antec puts out the new NSK2400 or Fusion, and it’ll go into the rack under the TV. (Side rant: Can’t somebody make an HTPC case that fits a microATX board, has a quiet PSU, fits normal height PCI cards, and is less than 6″ tall?)

The wireless keyboard/joystick is an ione Scorpius that I got from Newegg and it works quite nicely with Linux.

The computer is hooked up between the cable box and the TV. Channel changing is done via a serial cable hooked up between the computer and the cable box.

Rest of the specs:

• Athlon XP 2200+ (Thoroughbred core) with Nexus AXP-3200 heatsink
• MSI K7N2GM2-LSR nForce 2 microATX motherboard
• 512MB of Kingston DDR RAM
• Generic cheapo NVIDIA GeForce MX440 64MB fanless AGP video card (output to TV via S-Video)
• Seagate 7200.8 300GB ATA/100 hard disk
• Hauppauge PVR-250 tuner/capture card
• NEC DVD burner (forget what model)

I already had some of this stuff so all I had to do was buy the motherboard, case, memory, keyboard, video card, and serial cable. I think the total expenditure was a little over $240.

Yes, I am a nerd.

So, I have been up and running with my MythTV box (nee Supercomputer) for almost a week now. It’s pretty rad. Supercomputer records TV, has about 120 hours of best-quality recording time, rips DVDs, and can schedule recordings via the Web. It also shows me the weather forecast.

However, Linux (Fedora Core 4) and Myth were a total pain in the ass to install. It was just so…complicated. Everything from Fedora refusing to install the first time, to setting up all the the config files, to downloading 600MB of crap with yum upgrade, to weird error messages, to eventually figuring out that Linux doesn’t have support for wireless networking out of the box, to keep having to su to switch users just to create directories that mythtv could read and write to.

As much as Windows sucks, it does a lot of this a billion times easier. I really want to like Linux (free software, community development, stickin’ it to the man, etc.) but they have a long way to go if they ever hope to gain acceptance on the desktop for the average end user.

But now that it’s done, I guess it’s okay. I wanted to learn Linux, and I did, for the most part.

Next steps:

1. I’m debating whether to go ahead and order the HDTV capture card and try to snag OTA signals.
2. Wait for the Antec NSK2400 case to come out so I can stick Supercomputer in my TV rack.
3. A couple of people have asked me to write up a step-by-step guide for doing this. There are already a few out there, but I might write my own anyway.

Yup.

In a fit of sheer boredom, I decided I’m going to resurrect the PC-based PVR. Except I’m gonna do it a little different this time - I’m going to set up a MythTV box and run Linux.

Goals for the Courtleigh Super Cool Home Theater PC:

• It has to be super quiet, as it’ll be in my bedroom running 24/7.
• It has to be cheap (no dual-core Athlons).
• It has to be small enough to fit in my TV rack. (Oddly enough, this rules out most of the HTPC cases out there - they’re well over 6″ tall. It also means I have to go micro ATX instead of recycling my old motherboard, which makes this project not cheap anymore, but, well, it’ll be cool if this actually works.)
• Recording analog television from my cable box.
• Automatic transcoding of all recorded shows to an iPod-compatible format. Also, set up an RSS feed of these transcoded shows and have them automatically sent to my iPod.)
• Eventually, I’d like to get a 2nd tuner and record over-the-air HD shows.
• DVD ripping/movie storage.
• Internal Web server so anybody in the house can stream video to their PC.
• I want to see what Linux is all about. (Also, I’m too cheap to buy another Windows license.)
• Private development Web server.

So, I just ordered a bunch of parts, which should be here in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’m gonna start downloading the Fedora Core 4 ISOs, which is what my co-worker recommended. (If any of you other Linux guys recommend a different distro, please drop me a line.) Judging by their size, it’s gonna take a couple of weeks to download them anyway.

The reaction I got from a couple of people at work was, “Yeah, good luck. It’s gonnna be tough to get everything to work properly. But let me know if you get it working so I can build one.” Well, we’ll see.