I started thinking of using Intel’s Atom processor on a Mini ITX motherboard, but I couldn’t find a combination that had all the features I wanted.

My Specs were pretty strict:

·         MiniITX

·         Ceton InfiniTV6 CableCard Tuner - Recording on all 6 tuners (Not available yet, but it must be able to do it.)

·         Playing and Ripping BluRay disks

·         Bluetooth

·         Full HD 1080 play

·         Digital Audio S/PDIF

·         HDMI output

·         Multiple Sata

·         eSATA 6Gb/s

·         1 – PCIe 1x

·         Gb  Ethernet

·         Wireless N

·         Low power consumption. 65 – 150w max!

That 65-100w max pretty much ruled out the Atom. So, I started looking at the AMD Fusion Processors, specifically the Zacate E-350, which not only uses much less power than the Atom (18w!!) it has better performance and has the Graphics Processing Unit as part of the processor core.

The AMD Fusion E350 (Code named  Zacate) is a Dual Core 1.6Ghz processor with 1Mb of L2 cache. The GPU part of the die is an AMD Radeon HD 6310 GPU with 80 cores running at 492Mhz and DirectX-11 built in. 

Now I had to find a Motherboard with the E-350 and all the other features that I wanted. After comparing a bunch of MoBo’s I settled on the Asus E35M1-I Deluxe. Yes, almost the whole motherboard is covered by one massive heat sink!

ASUS E35M1-I DELUXE Fusion AMD E-350 APU Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo

 I also picked up:

G.Skill Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Desktop Memory Model F3-8500CL7D-8GBRL More on this RAM later.

Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

LG Super-Multi Slim Blu-ray Combo Drive CT21N - Bulk

Antec ISK 300-65 Black Computer Case

And a Ceton InfiniTV4 Digital CableCard tuner (I eventually hope to be selling Ceton products direct from NEDMUG.com. That ought to tell you how I feel about the quality of their products. Since I never sell any products directly)

The installation of the motherboard into the case was dead simple the hard drive/optical drive trays come out with a thumb screw and 3 Phillips screws, giving you easy access to motherboard mountings.

After mounting the BD drive I installed the hard drive into the HDD tray, slid the tray into place and secured it to the optical tray with the thumb screw.

 Next, I installed the Ceton InfiniTV4 tuner card into the PCIe slot. This was made a little more difficult because all the front panel, SATA and audio connectors are VERY close to the PCIe slot. I had to make some awkward bends in the SATA cables to route them around the tuner card. But I got the card installed and the drives still appear to be working. ;-)

That completed the box build. Or, so I thought. I put the case cover on and screwed it down using 3 thumb screws. I then hooked up all the cables to the back. The brick power supply, Gb Ethernet, optical S/PDIF audio, HDMI and Digital CableTV cable.

I grabbed my Fios M-Card and was about to install it when I realized that the hinge piece that holds down the PCIe card was in front of the CableCard slot. It’s only by about 1/8”, but that’s enough to make the card not fit. I took a pair of needle nose pliers and bent the hinge up enough that it should have been out of the way, and then realized that the hinged cover itself is in the way now.

 I popped the case cover off and unscrewed the hinge and removed it. I used just a plain screw to hold down the tuner card. I put the cover back on and took a look at the back to see what removing the hinge did. Not much, there was a small ¼” gap at the top of the tuner card, not enough to worry about. It’s barely noticeable unless you look for it, and it shouldn’t affect air flow at all.

The size difference between this unit and the original is amazing! My old Media Center was a Full-Tower Thermaltake Armour that was originally built to house 4 tuner cards and 8 hard drives. When I built my Windows Home Server with 6 internal drive bays and the Rosewill RSV-S8 external drive bay, I took all but 2 of the drives out of the Media Center and moved them to the WHS. When I installed the Ceton InfiniTV4, I got rid of all the ATSC tuner cards that were in the Thermaltake case. Having that giant tower next to my TV was a complete waste of space and electricity.

I hooked the system up to my TV and Audio Receiver and started the Install. I’m moving the Xbox to the other side of the receiver.

I created a Windows 7 install thumb drive following my own procedure here and then installed windows and configured Media Center following this guide.

Once the Windows install is complete, you will need to install the drivers from the Asus Utilities DVD. Windows 7 will recognize most of the hardware, but the Fusion Processor is too new, you'll need to install the Video and Chipset drivers at a minimum.

After Windows was installed and Media Center configured I installed the Ceton Tuner software and drivers. I also did a firmware update on the tuner hardware, I had one of the first tuners released and had never updated the firmware. The new Ceton software makes this a simple process, just go to the update tab and hit Update Now. Once the software is installed and the firmware was updated, I started up Media Center and went into the Extras menu item and selected Digital Cable Advisor. Follow the step by step instructions.  You must do this step or Media Center will not use the cable tuner!

After the Digital Cable Advisor completes, you then go to the Tasks/Settings/Set up TV Signal menu and re-run the configuration. It should now detect 4 new Digital Cable Tuners, install the tuners and download the new guide.

 

The only additional software I installed was AnyDVD, ArcSoft Total Media Theater and MyMovies, to connect to my movie database on my home server. You can see that process here.

That’s all there is to the build.

But, I’ve been having a lot of Blue Screens and lockups with this unit. After doing a bit of research, I’ve come to find out that this motherboard is extremely picky about the type of RAM used and the speed settings of the RAM. The RAM that I used was listed on the G.Skill site as compatible, but not on the Asus HCL. The motherboard has a MemOK! button on it. If you hold the button while booting, it will go into a RAM testing mode. The system will try different speed setting to attempt to find a setting that will make the RAM compatible. I ran the tests and it did find setting that made the system more stable, but it’s still not quite there. I downloaded an updated Asus Qualified Vendor List (QVL) and ordered RAM that was on that list.

 This is the RAM I ordered. It is on the QVL:

G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory

When it shows up, I’ll install it and update this post with the results.

UPDATE:

The new RAM arrived and I swapped out with the original RAM. 24hrs later and no BSOD! The system has been stable.

There's still a couple little bugs I have to work out.

When the TV monitor is turned off for several hours, the Media Center seems to sleep the video even though I have it set to "Never". To get the picture to display I hit the guide button on the remote and play a random LiveTV show, the video will wake up and be fine until the next time I turn off the TV for more than a few hours.

So, I think it’s time to go back to the basics for a new post.

Media Center is a Program.

Or rather it’s a collection of programs that are Media related. It’s a windows interface that makes watching TV, recording TV, Watching DVDs or BluRays, streaming movies direct from Netflix, playing photo slideshows or playing music from your TV or any computer or room in your home.

It’s a DVR (Digital Video Recorder) on steroids! It can do anything that the DVR you rent from your cable company can do, but it can do it faster, better, easier and CHEAPER. I’ve gotten rid of all the cable boxes in my house and replaced them with a single Media Center Computer and a couple Extenders.

Media Center has been available since 2002, where it came as a special edition called WindowsXP MediaCenter Edition. (referred to as MCE by users) MCE was available only as a complete operating system. It was usually available only on PCs built by Hewlett-Packard or Sony as an entertainment system. There were 2 major upgrades to MCE that added functionality, versions 2004 and 2005.

The next version was publicly available in Windows Vista. It came in Windows Home Premium and Windows Ultimate editions of Vista. (It was referred to as VMC by the community) Yes, it was there all along, and I bet you never even clicked on the icon, right? There was 1 major upgrade to VMC, it was called the TVPack. TVPack added a few new functions, like Internet TV and a new file format that supported HDTV.

The current version of Windows, Windows 7 also has Windows Media Center (Now called WMC) included in more editions, Ultimate, Home Premium, Professional and Enterprise. If you have one of these editions, then you HAVE Media Center.

Watching/Recording TV

The main and most popular function of Windows Media Center is its use as a DVR. You can get your live TV signal into the PC in a number of ways.

If you live close to your local TV stations, you can purchase an OTA(Over The Air) tuner and an antenna. You’ll be able to get all your local channels, that are in range, IN HIGH DEFINITION and FREE! Yes, I said FREE. There is no charge for OTA programming. OTA tuners come in 3 basic types, Internal card, Express Card or external USB. There are also 2 types of TV signal, NTSC which is no longer available in the U.S., and ATSC which is the current Digital signal type. If you are going to purchase an OTA tuner for the U.S., make sure it is ATSC. OTA tuners can receive/record 1 or 2 channels per tuner, depending on the tuner. If you want more channels, you can add more tuners. You can have up to 4 of any one type of tuner. So, you can have 4 OTA tuners AND 4 CableTV tuners, giving you a total of 8 channels you can watch/record AT THE SAME TIME! Can your Cable Company’s DVR DO THAT?

Here are a couple of tuners from Hauppauge available from Newegg.com:

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q TV Tuner Stick/Hybrid Video Recorder with Remote Control 1191

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner / Encoder 1229

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1500 Notebook Express Card 1195

 Once you install one of these tuners, you’ll need to run the Media Center Setup in order to use it. When the setup is complete and the guide data is downloaded, you’ll be able to watch TV or schedule it to record. Remember that the computer needs to be ON in order for the program to record.

The next most common way of getting a TV signal is CableTV and there are a couple ways of getting cableTV into the PC. If you have an OTA tuner that supports Clear QAM, you can plug your cableTV cable right into the OTA tuner and get some of the unencrypted cable channels through that tuner. But most cable companies are now encrypting almost all of the channels, so this may or may not work for you.

 Another way is to connect the Video Out from your cable box, to the Analog IN of the OTA tuner, you will also need an IR Blaster(That little red plastic piece you stick on the front) for the cable box, so that WMC will be able to change the channel. This works OK, but you can’t get HDTV this way, any programs that are HDTV from the cable box will be downscaled to standard definition.

The BEST way to get a TV signal from cableTV is to buy a PC CableCard tuner. The most popular CableCard tuner out right now is the Ceton InfinTV4, which lets you receive 4 cable channels at the same time, in HD, with full Digital Audio. The only downside to CableCard is that there is no OnDemand available for it. You’ll need to rent a CableCard from your cable company, they charge anywhere from $3-5 for the card, but since the Ceton Tuner can receive 4 channels with 1 card, that saves you the rental of 3 other cable boxes!

Did I say no OnDemand? Not entirely true. It is true that you can’t get the OnDemand from your cable company, but if you have a Netflix account, you can stream movies directly to your MediaCenter. The quality is very good too.

Playing Music

MediaCenter makes an excellent music player too. If you have MP3s, WMAs or other non-protected types of music, MediaCenter will let you play them, right from your TV with a WMC remote.

Playing Movies

MediaCenter contains a pretty good DVD player. You can just stick a DVD into your DVD drive and WMC will ask if you want to play it. If you want to create a movie library of ripped movies, you’re in luck! MediaCenter can play a ripped DVD directly from the hard drive and has a decent management application in the MovieLibrary.

If you want to play or rip BluRay movies, it’ll take a little more work, but it’s not very hard to get it to work.

See my post on Ripping, Storing and Playing BluRays here.

Pictures and slideshows

So you have hundreds of digital pictures? Put them all in the MyPictures folder on the hard drive and guess what? They show up in the Photos menu in MediaCenter. It’s that simple. If you put them in folders in MyPictures, they’ll be in separate folders in the Photos menu, so it’s easy to sort and find the right pictures.

Another cool feature in the Photos, is that you can create a playlist of music from the Music Library and use it as a soundtrack to a slideshow. How cool is that?

Using MediaCenter and TV from other locations in the house

I did say that I got rid of ALL the cable boxes in my house, didn’t I? Yep, MediaCenter can be “Extended” to other rooms by the use of devices called Extenders. There used to be single purpose Extenders available from a couple companies, but they’ve all stopped producing them. Why? Because the xBox360 has MC Extender built in, it’s cheaper and a better quality than any of the other extenders.

So, instead of putting a cable box in a room where you want to watch TV, you can put an xBox, connect it to the MediaCenter either wired or wireless and Voila! You can watch TV, Play Music, Play Slideshows and oh yeah, you can play xBox games on it! You can’t play any ripped DVDs or BluRays from the xBox without some work, but xBox also has the ability to play streaming movies direct from Netflix.

What about another computer? Can you watch TV from another PC? Well that’s been a bit of a sticking point with Microsoft, they have been avoiding making another PC an extender. But there are some things you CAN do. If you share the RecordedTV, Music, Photos and Movies folders, you can set them as search folders on another computer that has MediaCenter. So you can watch RecordedTV, play music, watch movies . . . but you can’t watch LiveTV from another PC unless you install a tuner in it. Personally, I only watch recorded TV so this wasn’t an issue for me.

So, now that you know what MediaCenter is and that you probably already HAVE IT, what’s stopping you from using it?

I will probably keep adding stuff to this post even after it's "Finished". If you want to see some topic added, leave me a note. e-mail: pstagman (at) nedmug.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/tyrstag

Table of Contents

Installing Windows

Prepping Windows for Media Center

Enabling AutoLogon

Disabling User Account Control

Creating a stripe set

Changing RecordedTV location

Install Windows Home Server Connector Client

Configuring Media Center

Checking ATSC Signal and Removing Channels

Windows Home Server / Media Center Integration

Increasing the LiveTV buffer Length

Increasing Analog Recording Quality

Enabling Concurrent Connections

Future Topics

Installing Windows

The first thing you need to do is install Windows. I installed it from a USB Thumb drive. If you don’t know how to make a USB Windows installation drive, check here.

Essentially the Windows 7 install is pretty straight forward. The only thing you may want to change is which drive you want to install to.

In my Media Center PC I have 2 – 250GB drives in a RAID1 that will be for Windows. The RAID1 is to protect the Operating System from a Hard Drive failure.

I then have 2 – 500GB drives that I’ll stripe with RAID0 to help bring up the drive speed for recording multiple HD streams.  

After Windows has installed, you will be presented with a couple configuration screens.

The first screen asks for a username. Since this is going to be a dedicated Media Center PC I just use the Username MCE (It’s from the old WindowsXP Media Center Edition name, it’s how the account was setup originally on my network, so I keep it.) That automatically creates a machine name of MCE-PC, which is how my Windows Home Server will recognize it.

The next screen is the Password Screen. Again, since this is a dedicated Media Center, so I just give it the password “password”. You need to have a password if you are going to connect to a Windows Home Server. Later I’ll show you how to use the Windows7 AutoLogon so that you won’t have to enter a password every time you start the PC.

The next screen asks you for the Installation Key. You can enter your key now. I prefer NOT to enter the key now. If I do something that I didn’t like while configuring the PC, I can rebuild it again without having to call Microsoft to enable the key again. I wait until the PC is configured the way I want and then enter the key. To bypass the key, just leave the entry blank and Un-Check the “Register automatically” check box.

The next screen asks you how you want to Protect your computer and handle Updates. I just hit “Use recommended setting”.

The next screen is the “Time and Date” Here you enter you correct Time and Date, also enter your timezone and whether you want the PC to automatically change for Daylight Savings.

If you had a network cable attached while installing, the next screen will ask you what type of network you are on. I use “Home”.

That should be all. Windows is now installed!

After install: Prepping for Media Center

The first thing I do after the install is to get the latest video driver for my video card. In my case I went to the Nvidia website and downloaded the latest driver.

If you’re using Media Center on a TV, you may need to resize the desktop so you can see the entire desktop on your TV screen. With Nvidia, you Right-Click anywhere on the desktop and select “Nvidia Control Panel” then click on the “Resize Desktop” option in the left hand pane.

This will bring up the Resize Desktop Tool. You move the sliders around to get the 4 arrows in the corners as close to the corners of the TV as you can.  

Then make sure that Windows is totally up to date. You can get to Windows Updates by clicking on the Start Marble, hover the mouse over All Programs and Windows Updates will appear in the list.

In my case there were 20 important updates and 37 optional updates.

Check the “Optional Updates” to see if there are any drivers for your hardware that you may need. Most of the Optional Updates were language packs that I don’t need. But I selected the Hauppauge drivers for my ATSC tuner cards. I didn’t select the Network Driver because I never have good luck with the network drivers from Windows Updates. I also didn’t select the Nvidia Driver because the one I manually went and downloaded is newer than the one on Windows Updates.

After the updates install, you should restart your PC. I’d recommend restarting even if the install didn’t tell you that you need to restart. Installing updates can leave some stuff in memory that can play havoc with a Media Center PC.

Now that I rebooted, Windows wanted me to enter my password. Let’s get rid of that now.

Enabling AutoLogon

To enable AutoLogin in Windows7 you click on the Start Marble and type netplwiz in the search.

That will bring up the “Advanced User Accounts” control. Un-check the “User must enter a user name and password to use this computer” check box and click apply.

A pop-up will appear asking for the current password for the user. Enter the password you use to log in to windows and hit OK. Then hit OK in the User accounts window.

You’re done! No more password prompts to log in to windows!

Disabling User Account Control 

Another thing I like to shut off on my Media Center is User Account Control (UAC). That’s the annoying Pop-Up that shows up every time you try to install something or make a change to the system. Again, I’m ONLY doing this on my dedicated Media Center PC, I keep UAC running on my other computers. (Disabling UAC makes you PC less safe! Only turn it off if you understand the risks.)

You get to UAC by clicking on the Start Marble and then selecting Control Panel.

Click on “User accounts and Family Safety”, “User Accounts”, then “User Account Control Settings”.

I move the slider to the “Never Notify” setting. You should decide how much you want Windows to notify you of changes.

Click OK, Windows will pop-up the UAC notice for the last time! X out of Control Panel.

Creating a stripe set

I said earlier that I had 2 – 500GB drives that were going to be in a stripe set for recording HD streams.

Why would you want a stripe set? Because of the performance increase that being able to write to several drives at once gives you. If you only have one Hard Drive, then all the data that you are writing to disk has to go through 1 controller and be written to 1 Hard Drive. If you are recording several High Definition TV streams at one time, that's an awful lot of data to try to cram to a single Hard Drive. You may end up with a "Bottleneck", where all your tuners are trying to send TV to the Hard Drive but the drive can't keep up, your video or audio may start to skip or freeze because the drive couldn't keep up.

With a stripe set, you have 2 or more Hard Drives acting as if they are a single drive. In the example below, I have 2 - 500GB Hard Drives acting like a single 1TB Hard Drive. When the tuners are recording the TV streams, the controllers will write the data to each drive in "Stripes". It will write a small amount to drive 1, then a small amount to drive 2, alternating back and forth between the drives. Data can be written to the drives almost twice as fast as a single drive. If you have more than 2 drives, the same striping occurs, the drives will be written to in sequence as fast as the tuners can send the data. The dis-advantage to a stripe set is that if ANY 1 drive fails, ALL the data on the stripe set is lost.

To create a stripe set, you have to add the drive to a set in Disk Management. To get to Disk Management you Right-Click on MyComputer and select “Manage”, in the Left hand Pane click on Disk Management under the Storage heading. Here you will see all the drives you have on your computer, including CD/DVD/BD and USB.

But first, I want to move around some Drive Letters. I want the new volume I’m creating to be “D”, so first I have to move the DVD an BluRay drive to different letters. Right-click on a drive you want to reassign a drive letter and select “Change Drive letter and path” Select the new drive letter. Say OK to the pop-up that asks if you’re sure about changing the drive letter.

Now we can create the stripe set

Scroll you drive list down to your first Unallocated drive, Right-Click on it and select “New Striped Volume”, that will bring up the “New Striped Volume Wizard”

Click Next, the Select Disks windows will pop-up showing you any unallocated drives that you have installed.

This screen can be a little confusing. When you add more disks, the Volume size changes, but not the “Amount of Space”. The Amount of space refers to how much OF EACH DISK should be used in creating the stripe, not of the entire volume. This is useful if you have different size disks. Say you have a 1TB disk and a 500GB disk. You want to create a strip set with these 2 drives, the MAXIMUM amount of space that can be allocated is 500GB which is the size of the smallest drive. So, the stripe will use 500GB from the 500GB drive, and 500GB from the 1TB drive. Hope that clears up that . . .

Once you have added all the drives for your stripe and set the drive space allocation, click next, here you can name the volume click next, select format options and drive letter.

Once the format is complete, you can close the disk management window.

You will probably want to create a folder on the new drive to store your RecordedTV in. Double-Click MyComputer, Double-Click the “D” drive you created. Right-Click in the Right Hand Window and select New -> Folder, Name your folder “Recorded TV”.

Done.

Changing RecordedTV location

Now that we created a stripe set, we want Media Center to actually use it. To do this you need to do a little bit of registry editing. (Be careful what you do in the registry, changing something you are not sure about can lead to VERY BAD THINGS!! And you could end up reinstalling windows again.)

To edit the registry, click on the Start Marble and type “Regedit”, hit enter. This will start up the registry editor. Now, if you’ve never been in the registry before, this gets tricky.

You will often see registry locations shorthanded as something like this:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording

What that means is to navigate through the registry like this:

Click on the + next to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE then SOFTWARE, then Microsoft, then Windows, then CurrentVersion, then  Media Center, then Service, then Recording.

Navigate to that Registry key using the left hand pane.

When you get there, Double-Click on “RecordPath” in the right hand pane. Enter the path to your “Recorded TV” folder. “D:\Recorded TV” and click OK.

Close out of the registry editor.

Install Windows Home Server Connector Client

If you have a Windows Home Server, now is a good time to install the connector. You can install it from a web browser, but I prefer to just install it from the “Software” folder on the server. Clcik on the Start Marble and in the search box type \\”name of your server”\software. My server is named “WHS” (original huh?) so I would type \\whs\software then double click on the “Home Server Connector Software” folder. Double-Click “Setup”. Follow the prompts for the wizard. It’s pretty easy, no screenshots here.

The Windows Home Server Connector also installs new Media Center Integration, when we start media center, we’ll be prompted to install it then.

Configuring Media Center

OK, so now we have all the preliminary stuff done. Let’s go ahead and fire up Media Center and do the basic configuration. What I have installed in the PC at the moment are 2 – Hauppauge HVR-1600s and 1 –  Hauppauge HVR-1850. I also have the Media Center IR receiver/blaster and a Harmony One remote. For a keyboard I have a Microsoft Wireless Bluetooth Entertainment Keyboard and Mouse model 7000.

The Media Center Configuration Wizard will fire up the first time you start Media Center.

I clicked on “Express”. Now I’ll click on the “Live TV Setup”

The first Screen asks for your Region. I’m going to pick United States.

Next it asks for your Postal Code. I entered mine.

Next is the Program Guide Terms of service.

Next is the Microsoft PlayReady End User license Agreement. PlayReady is the DRM engine that determines whether a program you watch has the NoCopy, CopyOnce or CopyFreely flag.

After you accept the EULA Media Center will do a few things on it’s own, like installing PlayReady, checking your tuners, finding your TV signals. This will take a while. When it’s done, it will show you the Results window. In my case it was correct, I have 3 Digital ATSC tuners enabled. So I hit Next and then Next again to confirm.

Media Center then does some magic on it’s own again, Updating PlayRead, Downloading Guide Data. When it’s done, you’re all set! Media Center is configured to use your tuners!

At this point I only have an antenna connected to the tuners, later I'll add 2 DirectTV Set Top Boxes.

That matches what I have in my system. So I'm going to check Yes and hit Next.

Checking ATSC Signal and Removing Channels

BUT! Media Center configured your tuners based on the guide, it setup all the channels that are in your area, whether or not you can actually receive them (or want that channel). So, we are going to go into the setting and see what we have for signal strength and remove any channels that are not strong enough or we don’t want.

From the main Media Center menu, go to Tasks, Settings

Then scroll down to TV

Then TV signal

Then “Digital TV Antenna Signal Strength”

Here you will see all your tuners listed. Select your first tuner and hit Next.

On this screen you will see all you guide channels and their signal strength. (Be aware that signal strength changes during the day due to weather and even the position of the Sun and Moon. No really, it does!) Try the signal test at different times of day to see for yourself. Your best signal will probably be early evening just after the Sun goes down.

Uncheck any channels that show a weak (Yellow or Red) signal. You can try to keep the channels in Yellow, the signal may get better at different times of day. Also uncheck any channels that you don’t want in your guide. Shopping channels!!! Eesh . . .

I also uncheck the “Apply changes to the remaining tuners in this group” Check box. I find that different tuner models get a different enough signal that some will receive a channel that another won’t and vice versa. So if you have a tuner that shows a weak signal on a channel you want, check your other tuners, they may have a better signal!!

Your Off-Air ATSC tuner setup is now complete!

Media Center Only Mode

If you’d like your Media Center to act more like a Set-Top-Box, there’s a couple settings you can make.

Go into Tasks, then Settings, then General, then “Startup and Windows Behavior”.

If you check the Always keep Windows Media Center on Top, then users won’t be able to get out of Media center to get to the desktop. If you need to get to the desktop, go back in and uncheck the box, then you will be able to use window like normal.

The other setting is “Start Windows Media Center when Windows starts”, which means that as soon as windows boots to the desktop, Media Center will start. If you check both of these options then Media Center will behave like a Set-Top-Box and will start up on windows boot and will not be able to get to the desktop. I usually check the start Media Center with windows option, but not the keep Media Center on top.

Windows Home Server / Media Center Integration

I missed grabbing a screenshot of the pop-up in Media Center, But it just tells you to go to Start, All Programs and find the installer. Click on the connector and it will bring up the installer wizard.

The first screen asks for your Home Server Administrator Password. Type it in and click Next. The install will take a little while to find your server and install the connector.

When the install is complete, you will be asked to restart the computer. The install makes several registry changes and also some Media Paths. Click Done to reboot or check the “Do not restart now” box to keep the installer from rebooting your PC. I let it reboot.

To see what the Media Center Connector does and how to use it, see this post.

 Increasing the LiveTV buffer Length

If you're like me, you're a busy person. You may get caught up on the phone doing family tech support or have to go run an errand for a period of time, you come back to watch tv, only to find that you can't rewind the TV back to where you first got sidetracked. The LiveTV buffer in Windows 7 Media Center is only around 30 minutes. If you're gone longer than that . . . oh well, guess you miss whatever ever happened on Lost!

But, you can do a little registry hacking to increase the LiveTV buffer!

Open the Registry Editor by clicking on the Start Marble and typing "regedit".

Navigate to the registry key:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners

 You're going to add 3 new Values

"BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds" - Defines how many seconds of TV each buffer stores. Default is 300
"BackingStoreMaxExistingBackingFiles" - Defines how many files to create. Default is 8
"BackingStoreMaxNumBackingFiles" - Defines the max number of files. Default is 8

Add each of the values to the Registry key by Right-Clicking in an empty spot in the Right Hand pane, Select "New" -> Dword. Either type in the Value Name exactly as it appears above, or Copy/Paste it directly from here.

 To increase the Buffer time, you can change either the seconds for each buffer file, or the number of files. personally I like to keep the number of files down so I keep it at 8 and increase the time to 900 seconds per file. Giving me  2 hours of buffer. 900seconds * 8=7200 seconds / 60=120min

Double-Click "BackingStoreEachFileDurationSeconds", Change the "Base" to Decimal and enter 900 in the "Value Data"

Double-Click on each of the other values you created and change them to "Decimal" 8.

You need to reboot for the changes to take effect.

You're done! You now have 2 hours of LiveTV Buffer!

Increasing Analog Recording Quality

In order to make Media Center compatible with as many systems as possible, Microsoft sets the default recording bitrates a little lower than the optimum. If you want to get better quality out of your Analog recordings (S-video, Composite, Coax), you can change the default bitrates.

Open up the Registry Editor by clicking on the Start Marble and type "regedit"

Navigate to the registry key:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recording

That's the same key that you set the RecordedTV location. Instead of modifying the location we're going to modify the BitRates by changing the value: EncodingQuality

 The 4 values that are listed here equate to the 4 "Recording Quality" settings - "Fair", "Good", "Better", "Best". The numbers are in BPS or Bits per Second. So, when set for Best quality, you are getting a bitrate of 7.5 Megabits per Second, that's not bad, but most high quality analog streams are more in the range of 9 - 10 Megabits per Second. I like to increase the Best quality to around 9.5 Megabits per Second.

The easiest way to make this change is to Double-Click on the "EncodingQuality" value in the registry, adding 9500000 to the bottom of the list, and deleting the top value. That increases all the values by 1-2Mb a Second!

The new settings should look like this:

Close out of the registry and reboot!

 Enabling Concurrent Connections:

Enabling Concurrent Sessions allows you to Remote Desktop into a system that someone else is on, under a different user account, and access the system without kicking the user off.

This is really useful if you have Media Center running on a TV. You can use remote desktop from a laptop or another PC to remote manage your Media Center without interupting someone watching TV. Unless you do something that requires a reboot.

MissingRemote has been the leader in getting this to work and updating it whenever there's been a windows change that breaks it. So, rather than writing a whole new post, I'll link to their post.

Enabling Concurrent Connections in Media Center

Future Topics:

Adding a Set Top Box

Fake HD - Getting a 16x9 picture from an HD Set Top Box using S-Video

Adding a Media Center Extender

Install AnyDVD

Install Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater

Install MyMovies

Install HD-PVR

What's so cool about the connector? 3 words - "Automatic RecordedTV Archiving"! I used to have lots of very large hard drives in my Media Center, I would record many TV shows and watch them when I had time. Sometimes there would be Terabytes of TV on my Media Center. If I wanted to keep the shows, I would manually move the show to my Windows Home Server. Since installing Power Pack 3, I have moved all the large drives to the Windows Home Server and only have a few 500GB drives in the Media Center. I let the TV Archive function handle the moving of the files.

 In this post I'll go through all the new menus that are added to Media Center, what they mean and what the settings are for.

Installation

If you're familiar with Windows Home Server, you know about installing the Windows Connector software. What the connector software does is configure your PC for use with Windows Home Server. It configures Backups, Security, Library and Shared Folders. After the installation of the new Power Pack 3 connector, if you start up Media Center you will be notified by a PopUp that there is also a new Media Center Connector and you have the option to Install it or Cancel.

What happens when you install it is not obvious at first. The first thing that happens is that the following folders are added to the Media Center Search folders.

• Music Library --> \\HomeServer\Music
• Pictures & Video --> \\HomeServer\Photos
• Recorded TV --> \\HomeServer\RecordedTV

Whatever is placed into those folders on the Windows Home Server will now show up in the Media Center Menus. One of the things that may not be obvious at first is that ANY Media Center that is connected to the Home Server has access to the RecordedTV folder. That means that you can have one Media Center with multiple tuners recording shows and play them from other Media Centers on the network. Other PCs, Laptops, Extenders . . .

The next thing you may or may not notice is that there is a new "Home Server" menu strip. With 2 items, "TV Archive" and "Console View"

Console View

 I'll cover the "Console View" first. There is nothing you can "DO" in any of the Console View menus. It's informational only.

The first screen is the "Storage" screen. It shows you a pie chart of your storage usage on you Windows Home Server.

The next screen is "Drives", it shows you a list of the drives that are included in the drive pool and their Health Status.

Next is "Backup Status". here you can see a list of all the PC's on your network that are configured to be backed up. Whether the last backup was successful or a warning about machines that have no recent backups. (You can see here that I have a few PC's that have no recent backups. One is my daughter, who's away in college. The other is my wife's PC that she hasn't turned on since I bought her a laptop. I keep the backups Just in case)

Next is "Shared Folders". This screeen shows you the folders that are shared on the Home Server, if they have duplication enabled and the status of the duplication if you have it enabled.

Next is "Media Counts", this screen tells you how many media files of each type you have on the server and an estimate of how many more will fit based on an average of file sizes and remaining drive pool space.

The next screen is "Health", it will show you any warnings from the Home Server. Here you see that my Dell laptop hasn't been backed up in a while.

The last screen in "Console View" is the "Windows Home Server" view. It shows you the make/model of the Motherboard of your Home Server and a serial number if supported by you MoBo.

TV Archive

This is the real brilliance of the Home Server Connector! In these menus, you can define what programs are archived to the Home Server, manually or automatically, if they will be compressed and in what format they'll be saved.

The first screen is the "Series" screen. Here you can see the various series that you have selected to be recorded from the Guide. If you check the checkmark, any shows that were previously recorded and any recorded from now on, will automatically be moved to the RecordedTV folder on the Home Server.

The next screen is the "Programs" screeen. This menu shows you TV that you have recorded, but are not part of a Series. Here you can select an individual show to be archived manually.

The last screen off the main menu is "Settings". In this screen you define how the archives are treated.

If "Archive all recordings automatically" is checked. The "Series" and "Programs" setting won't matter. All recorded shows will be moved to the Home Server.

The "Move recordings to my home server" turns the archive function off. If neither of the first 2 options are checked, no recordings will be moved.

The "Create a compressed copy for:" option creates an additional Compressed copy of the program for use on the TV, Windows Mobile or Zune. The "Save compressed copy to:" option allows you to tell the connector where to save the new compressed file. The options are "Home Server Videos" Folder or the "Local Videos" folder.

The "Activity" screeen is available from any of the other menus. This screen shows you the activity of the Connector, any shows that are currently being transferred/compressed, files that are queued and any files that failed to transfer.

That's it for the settings and menus.

 Conclusion.

These may seem like very simple enhancements, but these are things that the Media Center community has been asking for and some of them were available previously with hacks. Windows Home Server Power Pack 3 shows what can be done with integrating Home Server and Media Center. I hope this is just the start of things to come!

clubhouse, media center-windows 7, settings

I don't rip EVERY movie I own, only movies that I like to watch a lot. I rip the movies that I do because I like to be able to play them at a moments notice, without having to search through hundreds of disks on shelves and in boxes. And it's pretty cool to have friends over, talk about some movie and be able to pull it up and play it within a minute.

Also, this is not the ONLY way to rip and play Blu-Ray, it's just MY way. If you know another way and it works for you, that's great!

A little about my system:

This is probably the first in a series of posts about my system. I'm planning on doing posts on building each piece seperately. Since this article is on ripping Blu-Rays, I won't be talking about Tuners or recording TV.

My Media Center is next to my HDTV, it's connected to the TV with an HDMI Cable, audio is connected to my Onkyo TX-SR703 with a TOSLink cable. Inside the Media Center:

• Core2 Quad 2.4Ghz processor
• ASUS GeForce 9600 GT EN9600GT/DI/512MD3 Video Card
• 1 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 250GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive for the OS
• 3 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive Striped RAID 0 for RecordedTV
• LG Black BD-Combo SATA Model CH08LS10 LightScribe Support BD drive for Ripping and Playing Blu-Rays

Windows Home Server

• 1 - DANE-ELEC DA-SDM25-80G-N-T-MK 1.8" with 2.5" adapter SSD Migration Kit Solid State is the way to go for a WHS OS drive! Boots in 15 seconds.
• 6 - Seagate Barracuda LP 1.5TB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• Rosewill RSV-S8 SATA 3G 3.5" HDD 8-Bay RAID 0/1/10/5/JBOD Storage Enclosure System 
• 4 - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB 3.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• FYI: Ripping Blu-Ray uses LOTS of drive space!!!

 Laptop - Asus G Series ASUS G Series G51Vx-X3A Intel Core 2 Duo 15.6" NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M NoteBook 

 My Network is wired and wireless. I have a GB switch in the backroom, Cat6 running around the house. I also have a Wireless N Access Point for Laptops and guests. I rip DVDs wirelessly, it works fine. There's no BD drive in the laptop so I don't know if ripping BD disks will work well over the wireless network.

What you'll need:

• SlySoft AnyDVD-HD (Pay)
• SlySoft VirtualCloneDrive (FREE)
• CyberLink PowerDVD 9 Ultra(Download) (Pay)
• MyMovies for Windows Home Server (FREE)
• MyMovies for MediaCenter (FREE)
• MyMovies Collection Management (FREE)

Install the various software on your computers, server and/or laptop as needed. I'm not going into the installation of each software. I'll do seperate posts for those.

Windows Home Server setup:

• MyMovies for Windows Home Server
• Created a share called "Movies"

Media Center Setup:

• MyMovies for Media Center installed as "Client Only"
• AnyDVD-HD
• VirtualClone-Drive
• PowerDVD 9 Ultra

Laptop Setup:

• MyMovies "Collection Management" Only
• AnyDVD-HD

Ripping and Managing the Movies

Ok, so once you have the Software installed as shown above. You can place the BD disk you want to rip into you BD-Drive. (Sometimes PowerDVD will start and try to play the disk, even if you have gone into options and disabled autoplay. I don't know why. It just does. Just close out of it.)

If you have AnyDVD installed correctly, you should see a balloon help saying "AnyDVD is scanning the inserted disk) Once it completes, you can Right Click on the Foxhead icon on the taskbar and select "Rip to image. . ."

Select the Blu-Ray drive you want to rip from and the destination of folder to place the ISO file.

Once you have selected the drive and folders click "Copy DVD". Depending on the speed of the drive, it could take an hour or more for the image ISO to be created.

 Once the image is created, you can click the "Close" button in AnyDVD. You're done with it.

Open MyMovies Collection Management and click on "Title"/"Add Titles"

Choose the search method, you can search by Barcode, Disc ID, Title or Type in all the information yourself. I usually search by Title.

 Select the correct Movie from the search results. (Here you see that there are 2 results that look the same, I think that's because 2 different people added the same movie to the MyMovies service with slightly different data. Barcode, format, edition or something else. You might have to preview the results to decide which one.) Click the "Add Online" button to add the movie to your collection. Choose the folder that you saved the ISO file to.

After the movie has been added to your collection, you need to change the disc location from "Online Folder" to "Online File" and choose the location of the ISO.

 Once you've changed the File location click OK, and "Save Title" at te bottom of the main "Collection" screen.

There are some other settings that you can change that affect the way Media Center will display your added titles. I'll go into all those settings in an upcoming post on MyMovies.

Once you've made any changes you want to make. You can start up Media Center and navigate to the MyMovies menu strip. It can sometimes take a while to load up the MyMovies database. The more titles you have the longer it will take.

Once you've found the title that you want to play. You can either hit the "Play" button on your remote, or you can click on the title to see the Metadata.

When you hit Play, MyMovies will automatically mount the ISO file using VirtualClone-Drive. (As long as it's detected. If you haven't installed it, you'll get an error message.) After the ISO is mounted, PowerDVD will automatically start playing the movie.

When the movie is over (or you hit Stop) you'll be be back at the PowerDVD PlayMovie screen. Hit the Eject button on the left side of the screen. (If you don't eject the ISO, and you keep playing movies, MyMovies will keep mounting the ISO's using new drive letters. E:, F:, G:, H: . . .)

That's all there is to it!

I hope this post helped!

Seeya in the next post.

clubhouse, media center-windows 7, settings

clubhouse, media center, windows media center, how-to, Tip

This is Blain Barton and his Tiki mask. Blain's a very shy guy, it took us a lot to get him out of his shell.

Yeah, I'm being sarcastic.

The Tiki Hut Boston Crew:

L-R Me (Pete Stagman), Jack Daniel (Yes, his real name), Blain Barton, Dan Stolts

Good crowd, roughly 100 attendee's.

Pete Stagman, Dan Ouellette, Dan Stolts. Can you tell the two Ex-Military?

Pete Stagman, presenting Windows 7. Talking about DirectAccess here.

Pete Stagman again.

Pete Stagman, "Who me?"

The Tiki Hut Boston Crew with the winners of the prizes. Yep, that's a full RockBand setup.

Tiki Hut Boston Crew. What a great night and event. Hope you made it.

Hang Loose!

Grab this badge here!

But, I'm not running Windows 7 on my laptop.

I had it running in a VirtualPC, which is pretty cool all on its own, but you can't attach tuners to a VirtualPC.

So, I asked Blain Barton if I could use his laptop to do the MC demo. He said "Oh, we don't have the time to get MC set up and working."

I said, "I can have it up and running in less than 5 minutes”. He looked at me like "No way". But he said, "Ok, give it a shot"

I took out my handy dandy little AverMedia Volar Max USB ATSC tuner (that’s always with me in case of emergency TV withdrawal), a Yagi antenna that I had brought with me and a 10' piece of RG6 cable (regular coax antenna cable). I ran the cable out the door behind the Podium and setup the antenna pointing out the window. Unfortunately, the MS office in Waltham is on the wrong side of the buildings for a direct line of site to the TV towers that are only about 10 miles from there. So, signal is good only for the strongest stations in the area.

I inserted the USB tuner into a slot and Win7 immediately recognized it and installed the driver. I went into Media Center and did an express setup, then into Settings / TV / Tuner Setup and went through the steps of getting guide data (setting Zip Code). The guide data downloaded and I then went into Settings / TV / Digital TV Signal Strength and removed any channels with weak signals. I still had about a dozen channels after removing the weakest ones.

I opened the guide and started flipping through the channels looking for something in HD. At this time of day the only thing in HD was Oprah . . . Oh well. I flipped the switch on the podium and Oprah in HD was being projected onto the 2 large screens (I think they’re about 7’ screens) in the theater and the audio was coming through the sound system. Various MS employees who happened to be walking by at the time came in and were looking at the screen kinda confused. One said, “I didn’t know you could get TV on these projectors?” I said, “You can’t. It’s coming from this laptop.”

About this time Blain came back and looking at the screen said “Wow, you got it working cool!” He came around behind the podium (the other ms employees following) and was looking at the setup. He asked how I was getting the signal and how everything was hooked up. I showed them the tuner, the cable and the antenna, explained how easy it was to set up and how little it really cost to get FREE HD!

Now mind you, this was an hour before the start of the event and I was just testing the setup. But I already had 6 people walking out of there saying. “That’s too cool, I have to do that!”

Wish I had time to show them the REALLY COOL STUFF.

Later.

Grab this badge here!

I'll be speaking on Session 3.

Session 3:  Windows 7 Beta Sneak Peek

This week we also take time to talk about Ian Dixon’s Media Center Health Monitor and how you can make use of this great tool not only for yourself but for other Media Center installations.

As always, we welcome your comments and questions.  You can reach Josh through Cheap Geek and you can find me here!  Also, leave your pictures, comments and voicemail on the Entertainment 2.0 drop. 

Click here to download Episode 22

I’ve been running Windows 7 as my main Media Center system since the beta first released.  As is the case with most enthusiasts, I like to play, even though my wife hates it.  This playing can cause issues.  I’m lucky because now I have a laptop to test software on and know that it works before putting on my main system.

The laptop thing happened just recently though and now I have to reinstall.  While it isn’t that difficult of a task, it can be problematic due to the fact that no one in the house has access to media while I do it.  When you centralize your media, this is one of the things that comes with it.

Here I’m going to walk through the install and Media Center setup process as it applies to me and will to most people.  Again, this doesn’t have to be a complicated procedure, but I’ll do my best to spell everything out.

The first thing we’re going to do is install Windows itself.  I again, am running Windows 7 and this installs like most other Windows OSs.  I won’t spend much time here since most people can handle this part of it.  One thing I like about Windows 7 though is the fact that it really works well at finding drivers for your hardware and installing them through Windows Update.  With Vista, I’d spend 30 minutes swapping disks or running executables to install drivers.  Now, Windows 7 finds all but 2 of mine and those I keep on the thumb drive for quick installation.  Any that your install doesn’t find, get those loaded after running

Once you’re drivers are installed (including for any installed TV Tuners) it’s time to start setting up to run as a media center and for me, a server.  The first step I take in doing this is setting up my libraries.  This can be done in Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, or right from the desktop.  I do it from the desktop just because it’s fast and easy.  If you bring up the “computer” window you can see the various libraries listed in the left-hand pane.  Click each one, move to the right side of the screen and click where it shows the number of locations in the library.  Here you can add folders.  These can either be local or shared network folders.

Once you have your libraries setup the next place to head is right into Media Center.  This is where you’ll probably have to do the most work to get things working the way you want, but again, it’s a relatively fast, easy process that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Media Center is first going to want you to run through the required setup.  This is extremely fast and is really just setting up your internet connection and a few other tidbits.  Afterward is when the “real” work begins.  At this point it’s time to start turning this into a real Media Center by configuring our TV signal and recorded TV settings.  Media Center walks you right through the process.  If your tuner is installed correctly, Media Center should give you the option to setup TV on the TV strip on the main menu.  Clicking this takes you through the process of setting up your region, installing PlayReady, and scanning your tuners for signals.  Once it locates the type of tuner and the signal connected, the system will provide you the available tuner options that you can setup.  In my case I have a hybrid analog and digital tuner.  Even so, I only set up the analog side as I still have it connected to cable.  By selecting my tuners manually, I’m able to skip setting up the digital tuner.  After selecting the tuners you want used, you’ll choose your TV provider and Media Center will get your guide data and you should be all set.  Optionally you can head to the setup and change where the system saves your recorded TV.  Personally, I keep recordings on a separate hard drive so I go in and make the change. 

The hard part is out of the way.  From this point on, much of what you can do is optional.  It can take some time for libraries to populate which is one of the reasons I set them up first.  You can of course add plugins to Media Center which will help you expand the functionality, but for basic DVR, music and picture playback you should be all set.

If you read posts on The Green Button, here, or on other blogs, you might think that Media Center is something that takes a genius to run.  This simply isn’t the case.  Those of us who write blogs are more than likely on the geeky side and therefore tend to play with our systems.  If you’re looking for something relatively simple and quick to setup which will provide you with TV (proper hardware of course), video, music and picture viewing capabilities, you can have Media Center up and running in less than 20 minutes depending on your setup.  Don’t be intimidated.  Even if you’ve never looked at Media Center before, go in and do a quick setup.  Even without a TV tuner, you may find that you like using it for other things.