Two weeks ago the DVD drive in my HTPC/mediacenter bit the dusk and called it quits after almost 2 years of faithful service. It was made by NEC, and it was a noisy bugger.

So I was in the market for a DVD drive. I had two choices, buy another DVD drive or perhaps invest in a Blu-Ray one. For a while I actually considered a Blu-Ray drive, which would set me back around $100 for a playback-only unit. But then I read about all the fuss over playing Blu-Ray movies on a computer, compound that with the potential requirement for a new video card, and I aborted my short-lived pursuit for a high-def player.

I ordered a replacement DVD burner from newegg.com. The cheapest I could find was from Lite-On. Three day shipping was free, so I paid about $25 including tax. It arrived promptly via UPS on Wednesday. I swapped it in that evening and ran a quick movie test - I thought it was actually quieter than the NEC.

So there we have it, no Blu-Ray in the foreseeable future.

Got myself a second HDTV tuner for my mediacenter. $79.99 - $30 + tax + free shipping, I’d say a pretty good deal. There is also a $10 rebate that I need to mail out soon.

The package arrived today. I installed and configured the PCI card without incident. I can now record or view two HD channels at the same time. Kewl!

[Update @ 2007-01-14T21:02-8:00] Visual inspections show that the picture quality of this AVerMedia tuner is not as good as that of VBOX Cat’s Eye DTA-150 ATSC Over-the-air HDTV Tuner.

[Update @ 2007-01-14T22:03-8:00] Strike that previous comment about poor picture quality. The disparity turned out to be the source, verified using my TV’s built-in tuner.

I installed Windows Vista on my Media Center PC today and actually got it to work to the point where I can sit back and enjoy.

The Vista installation was smooth, other than the fact that I couldn’t install the x64 version because my DVD is not bootable and that I couldn’t run the x64 setup.exe from my 32-bit XP.

As with my other time installing a flavor of Windows MCE, the party-pooper were the VFD and IRTrans drivers. These software are needed to operate the VFD and the remote controls, so they MUST work.

Below is a summary of the problems I encountered and the solutions. The solutions may not be optimal, but I was content to have the whole thing up and running.

[Continue Reading]

I am pretty happy with my Media Center PC, it has made my TV viewing experience more enjoyable. But if I have to pick one thing that I am not completely satisfied with, then it would have to be the excessive noise coming from the machine.

This afternoon the rattling noise appeared again when I first “awoke” the PC from hibernation. I put my fingers on top of the machine, and to my surprise, the rattling stopped. I tightened all 5 screws securing the top lid, and all that was left were the fan whirls.

I didn’t completely tighten the screws before because I wanted easier access for future upgrades. I have learned my lesson.

I have a XP Media Center PC which I intend to upgrade to Vista Media Center when the time is right. I also want to buy a Media Center extender to stream videos and music around the house. Unfortunately all current extenders except XBox 360 are V1, meaning they won’t be compatible with Vista.

That’s what makes Linksys DP1600 so attractive. It’s a DivX/DVD player with V2 extender functionality. The price seems a bit high at £200, but it might be okay if I get a big bonus (yeah, fat chance).

[via Ian Dixon]

MCE 2005 and K-Lite Codec Pack don’t like each other. At all.

About two days ago I installed K-Lite Codec Pack on my new HTPC. What can I say, I wanted to take advantage of that fancy Conroe E6400 CPU! Little did I realize at that time that MCE 2005 doesn’t appreciate the intrusion.

Yesterday I recorded an episode of NCIS in high-def while watching House. Afterwards I played back the NCIS recording but was dismayed to find that the Dolby D EX sound was, how should I describe it, screwed up. The same video file did play fine in Windows Media Player 10 though.

Tonight the sound was again messed up while I was watching Bones, again in high-def. I did a quick Google search, only to learn that MCE 2005 is very picky about other codecs, especially codec packs such as K-Lite.

I uninstalled K-Lite and things were back to normal. Let that be a lesson to you guys running MCE 2005.

Now I just need to find that perfect combination of codecs that behave on MCE. Will Vista solve this problem?

I have been talking about HTPCs for about two years now, and I have finally done something about it: my own HTPC now sits in the AV shelf next to my HDTV.

The final parts (versus my earlier list) I used are:

The most painful parts of assembling the computer involved the cables. There are just too many of them to connect and then to tuck away afterwards. I pushed all the cables to the edges inside the case; I just hope this doesn’t come back to bite me.

The IR software caused the most pain among software configurations. The first problem was making the MCE Remote Keyboard work with the non-Microsoft IR receiver embedded in the HD160 case. It’s almost working completely (’\’ still doesn’t work), after I followed instructions from this forum thread.

The other problem is making sure the IR software starts automatically following every reboot, otherwise neither my IR keyboard or IR remote would work. ZoneAlarm turned out to be the culprit.

I figured out how to configure the IR software to allow remote power-on and shutdown the computer. The instructions are over at Zalman USA’s website under HD160’s FAQ & Notices section.

Lastly, I am a bit disappointed in my Samsung DLP’s overscan behavior. I used NVidia’s underscan feature to compensate, but it’s still not 100% satisfactory.

Here are some pictures of the HTPC:

I haven’t made any hardware changes to my HTPC since yesterday. Instead I have been installing BIOS, drivers and utilities for the motherboard, video card, etc. Let me tell you one thing: downloading drivers from web sites based in Taiwan is absurdly slow - I am getting dialup speed on broadband!