anyonecandoit

Learning a new thing in every build.

2011-04-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

Currently working on a dual build for a friend. Here are the requirements.

1. Have similar interface in both the family room and basement media room.
2. Ability to rip legally owned Bluray's and DVD in full quality to hard drive and have the ability to play with full menu, subtitle etc
3. Have cover art, back drop images and meta data for all media
4. System should be scalable
5. Ability to route HD audio from HTPC to two Onkyo HD audio capable receivers
6. Ability to play 3D Bluray
7. Ability to play music with least hassle using a combination of itunes running on the server and other apps and finally
8. Ability to record programs in HD from Dish network and share the recorded video in multiple rooms.

Considering all these requirements, I decided on doing a Windows Media Center based build for both the rooms. After consultation with Damian (http://www.adigitalhomeblog.com/) - an amazing HTPC enthusiast and knowledgeable person, I decided on the following parts. I would also like to thank Assasin over at the avsforum.com website for his list of good parts for a bluray/3d bluray capable system based on the new Intel processors. The new I3/I5/I7 Sandybridge processors can do HD Audio, Bluray and 3d Bluray with ease and thus avoid the need for an internal Video card.

Just finished the second build for the basement with the following parts. This will just act as a client and play all the media stored in the main machine at the ground level and also from a HP EX495 10TB server.

1.Core i3 2100 - http://www.newegg.com/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115078
2.4GB DDR3 1066 RAM - http://www.newegg.com/Productaspx?Item=N82E16820231396"
3.2TB HItachi 6GBPS hard drive
4.Silverstone LC10B case
5.Antec 400watch 80plus certified power supply
6.Samsung dual layer DVD burner
7.Windows 7 home premium 64 bit.

Here are some pictures from the build. Will be doing the main build this week and the installation is scheduled for this saturday (April 30th). Will post installation pictures over the weekend.

The build..

2011-02-23T03:45:00.000-08:00

All the parts were in place and the actual build putting everything together took less than one hour. To my surprise, I got the power and restart LED connections right the first time. Hooked up to my 23inch Dell 1080 P monitor using the onboard DVI connection, started the machine and popped in the Windows 7 Home premium 32bit disk. Windows started loading and everything got loaded in an hour's time. I activated the 4 cores from the initial start up menu and the machine was humming. I was pretty happy about the whole thing.

Here are the parts list I used for the build.
1. Silverstone LC 17B black case
2. 1 TB Hitachi 7200 RPM drive, partitioned for O/S and TV recordings
3. 2 2TB hard drives for media (one Hitachi and one Samsung 5400RPM green drive)
4. 4GB Gskill DDR3 1066 RAM
5. OCG 500W modular power supply
6. AMD Athlon quad core 3.1 ghz 65w processor
7. Asus AMD3 Motherboard with onboard video, DVI port, 8 USB ports, SPDIF output (very important for me), one PCI express, two PCI, 4RAM slots, 6 SATA slots and Gigabit LAN.
8. LG 4MB cache Bluray drive
9. Hauppage 2250 dual tuner
10. Galaxy 1GB 256 bit GT430 (ferni) video card with HDMI output

Other software that I used
1. Microsoft Essentials anti virus (free)
2. Media Center master - free metadata and poster grabber only for English movies. The metadata grabbing for Indian movies was way off. I like this tool because it puts a folder.jpg and background.jpg in each of the respective movie folders, unlike mediabrowser
3. Makemkv for converting from bluray to mkv
4. DVDfab for ripping DVD and bluray to ISO (only trial version)
5. Ultra VNC viewer and server

Here are some pics from the build.

First Sage TV experience

2011-02-14T17:04:00.000-08:00

Got a request from a friend to setup a media server for his home and wanted to try out something different other then windows media center. I love Windows media center, but its inability to give live tv to client machines is a big negative....I am not really sure why Microsoft is not able to extend the windows media center experience to other PC's in the house which can act as a client.

Here are the requirements I came up with.
1.Build a server to host all movies and play DVD/MKV/AVI and Bluray seamlessly
2.Dual tuner to record OTA and also stuff from Direct TV STB
3.Enough storage to host movies, pictures, music and home video
4.Same user interface experience in the basement with ability to watch live TV. Also pause and resume in the second room or vice versa was a functionality that I desired to give.

With this in mind, I experimented on a few solutions.
1. Tried the Patriot Box Office (PBO). Even though it played most of the videos, bluray playback was very bad with lot of hiccups even on my 1GB home network. Added to that the User interface was terrible.
2. Tried Western Digital....experience was much better.

But both these solutions coupled with the server PC does not give me live TV. So finally arrived at experimenting Sage TV V7.

Installed Sage V7 on my server and things went pretty well. Sage was able to play pretty much every video including dvr-ms. It cannot however play WTV files. Also it could not play bluray menus, but played blurays without any issues. As a second step, installed Sage client on my laptop and then used the client to watch live tv and other videos and the experience was just amazing.

So finally decided on the solution for my new setup for Karthik.
1.Server running windows 7 with 5 Tb storage. 1 Tb partitioned to hold O/S and Tv recordings. The rest 4TB to hold all the other media.
2.Sage V7 will run on this box and will record TV shows from a Hauppage 2250 dual tuner.
3. For the other room, ordered the Sage HD300 which will act as an extender, giving the same experience in the other room.

Details and photos on the build to follow in the next few days.

Complete!!

2010-08-15T15:10:00.000-07:00

All software is installed and everything is working great. Need to order a new bluray drive and then install it. Here are some pics.

Mediacenter in action with Mediabrowser Plugin.

Mediabrowser Media Folders.

The only complete actor in India Cinema.

Music collection.

Last Free HTPC build continued....

2010-08-07T05:54:00.000-07:00

Got windows 7 on thursday and put it in the drive and started the machine...showed the devices correctly, asked me to select AHCI mode and was jumping that it was booting up correctly.....turned out I celebrated too early...within a second....boom.."DISK BOOT ERROR. PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK" and I was like WTF. Rebooted the machine a few more times after changing BIOS and BOOT settings and same result.

Started googling and there were so many possibilities...motherboard could be bad, RAM could be bad, power supply could be bad...hard drive could be bad...but no where was it mentioned or it did strike me that this one part could be bad...more on that a little later.

After wasting more than 2 hours, I decided to get one of my HTPC and open it up and did the following
1.Swapped the RAM from my machine...same result
2.Hooked up the new 1TB HD to my machine and it was recognized and good
3.Hooked up the new 2TB HD to my machine and it was good too
3.Pulled out the new video card and connected directly to DVI on the MB
4.Pulled out the wireless N card from the new machine

AT this point it was past 10p.m in the night and i was really frustrated. After dinner...i thought maybe this was the issue and pulled the new BD Drive out of the machine and hooked up my dvd writer. To get it out of my machine took a while...adding to the frustration. Who knew.......I hooked up my DVD drive, put in windows 7 and you guessed it right....windows started loading.

After windows finished loading, I put together back all the pieces i pulled, put everything in place and finished installing all the drivers. Here is some of the software I typically use in my builds. The only software I pay for is Windows 7 in the list.

1.Windows 7 O/s - 32 bit home premium typically.
2.Microsoft Security Essentials - Virus and Spam protection.
3.LM Remote Kepmap. I have profiles created for PowerDVD.
4.Virtual clone drive to load ISO's.
5.PowerDVD for bluray playback. Have not used total media theater till day.
6.Shark 7 codecs.
7.MPC home cinema latest build which uses DXVA.
8.Registry mod for MKV,MP$ playback.
9.DVD Fab Platinum hd Decrypter.
10.ultra Vnc server and viewer for remote connection.
11.Firefox.
12.Mediabrowser.
13.Macrotube.
14.Musicbrowser.

My last free HTPC Build

2010-07-25T16:52:00.000-07:00

This is my sixth HTPC build in the last 2 years and my last free build for a friend. I am planning to start a home business building HTPC's and also do home theater installs for friends and anyone who is interested in my work. I will be revamping this blog shortly giving more detailed information on my builds till now and also on what we can offer our future customers.

The following components are used in this build.

Case - nMediapc 500B
An excellent case with lot of space to operate. The bottom front panel has inputs for I394 (Firewire), couple of usb 2.0 ports, an eSata port and a Card reader (CF,SD,microSD and all other types of cards). It also has a HD audio out in the front and a microphone jack.

Motherboard - Gigabyte MA785GM-US2H Micro ATX
The motherboard is called so for a reason. For the last four builds, I have chosen this board primarily for all the options that the board offers. It has a HD Radeon 4200 on board video with DVI and HDMI output. The audio and video on the HDMI work flawlessly. It also as Optical audio output and plenty of onboard connectors for extra usb 2.0 ports, I394 and everything else. It comes with 4 SATA ports.

RAM - 4GB Patriot Viper DDR2 1066 Mhz
Had lot of good reviews in newegg.

CPU - AMD Athlon X2 3.0Ghz Regor
This cpu is a 65w CPU. Pretty powerful, very inexpensive and does all the chores of a HTPC without any issues. AMD is the way to go for HTPC builds.

Powersupply - OCZ 550W Modular Power supply
This PS had 5 star reviews on newegg and also came at a good price. This is the first modular power supply that I have used in my builds and I should say I am very impressed. This one has a clear fan and looks like it might emit a red light when powered on. Have to check on that.

Hard Drive - Westerdigital 1TB Black and 2TB Green
Choose the 1TB black for O/s and also for DVR purposes. The 2TB Green drive will be used for media storage - DVD's, Photos, home videos and Photos.

LG Bluray Drive
Primarily to Play bluray movies using PowerDVD integrated with Windows media center. This is also a dual layer DVD burner.

The above picture was taken after all the parts were put in place. The video and wireless cards are on their way by USPS. I am yet to get hold of Windows 7 and will be updating the blog after the O/S install with more pictures.

To Be Continued.....

Windows 7 Installs

2009-11-16T08:41:00.000-08:00

What a weekend......great foot ball. Finally got Windows 7 installed and humming on all three of my machines. Let's go to the details straight away.

Basement PC
Upgraded to Win 7 Professional. Was real easy....took little less than one hour and 30 minutes. this i the one that is connected to my projector and the images are stunning. Watched two movies over the weekend....and WAF was very very high. I am using the Nvidia video settings on both my media PC's and it is very rich in colors and pictures look stunning.

Wife's old Laptop - Dell D600
Upgraded to Win 7 Professional again from XP. Upgrade went real easy. The laptop has 1Gb or Ram. Win 7 is definitely faster even on this old laptop. Had an issue with the ATI Radean 9000 driver. Was able to load the driver in XP mode and all is well.. I am only having occasional sound issues with the Sigmatel audio driver. But it has improved after couple of different installs with 2-3 different drivers.

Main Media Pc in the living room
Upgraded from Vista Home Premium to Win 7 Ultimate. This update was the most painful. It took more than 7 hours for me to figure out. Here are the issues I faced.

1.SATA drives are showing up as IDE during boot. I had to look at the internet and install a ton of things to get AHCI mode. I am stil not sure if everything is accomplised...but the drives show up as SCSI in device manager and I guess it is okay. But the sad part is there is lot of noise during shutdown and reboot compared to vista and I am not happy about it. Planning to open the machine and follow the sound during a reboot...maybe sometime this week.

2.Second issue was with the install itself. It will hang everytime on "Completing Installation". It took a long time for me to figure out. I was trying to do the install with USB keyboard and mouse. that was the first issue. Secondly PC was connected to LCD tv. that was the main issue....how the hell am I supposed to know that? I connected a CRT monitor and regular keyboard/mouse and install went well after that....this is after 7 hours of breaking my back and mind to figure out what the hell was the issue. What If I did not have a CRT monitor? that really sucks.

3.Got all software installed. Media center was alright...but OTA HD had lot of stutter and even the TV programs recorded in vista had occasional stutters. I was googling all day saturday to fix this and nothing worked. I updated all drivers - Hauppage, nvidia etc etc. nothing worked.

4.Mediabrowser was also giving issues. It would not either show some of my folders or would not show all the DVD's inside the folders and was driving me crazy...

finally on sunday evening ...fixed both the issues. Unchecked the "Movie Playlist" in mediabrowser and voila...it fixed all my issues....WTF....could not make sense of this one. Secondly...changed the resolution from 1920*1080 50hz to 1920*1080 60hz and the stutter was gone. Double checked my vizio TV manual to make sure this wont fry my TV.

Win 7 is just awesome from a HTPC media center stand point. All the easy shorts cuts and tricks you can do to move and resize windows and stuff...they are all great.

Here is what I use from software stand point.
Win 7 ultimate - main media PC to do Tv recordings.
Media browser to manage mymovies
Heatwave plugin for weather info
donated 3$ and got the channellogo plugin. Worth the money. It looks real nice in the guide.
Shark codecs for mkv, xvid etc etc.
DVDFAB and DVD Shrink
Coretemp to monitor my CPU temperatures
VCD clone drive for loading ISO images
Power DVD 7.2 for my bluray

Will post pictures soon.

New build for a friend - my first Customer!!!!

2009-10-27T17:49:00.001-07:00

<<< click on the pictures for large Image>>

Off to a good start for my first custom build for a friend...he is my first customer...yahoooooo:-)...........and I already have got a request from another friend.

Ordered the parts from newegg last week and they arrived promptly today. They were well packed as usual and I just love shopping for computer stuff at newegg. This is the fourth build I am doing in two years.

Decided to go with nmediapc 5000B HTPC case. Had some good reviews and more importantly had lot of connections in the front side - eSata, 3 USB, 1 HD audio, Firewire and various card slots (SD/MMC/CF/MiniSD blah blah blah).

Selected the AMD Atlon X4 dual core 2.9ghx 65w processor. Was cheap for 60$(half the price of Intel) and is a good choice as it emits less heat and also consumes less power. Bought the microATX Gigabyte board as a combo....great board with lots of built in stuff....to match the media case.

Other parts include Patriot 4GB DDR2 6400 memory, 500w power supply by coolermaster and the 1TB spinpoint drive from Samsung. I have two of them on my rig and they have been performing well for the last 8 months. I was real happy and proud that I did the build in 90mts from start to finish. Was very impressed with myself.

To be continued.........

Family Room HTPC

2009-03-31T11:14:00.000-07:00

Equipment

Vizio 1080p 47inch LCD TV
Yamaha 5.1 Dolby digital/DTS receiver with Yamaha speakers and a powered sub-woofer
Direct TV H23-600 HD receiver box (HDMI) Straight to the TV
Wii – primarily for my 3.5 year old son to play – connected to the Vizio (composite)
My main HTPC (Intel Based) which is the backbone of my home entertainment.
Harmony 880 (what a great device -J)

HTPC Specs

Silver Stone LC17B case
Intel E6550 2.33 ghz processor / 4GB RAM on a MSI board with inbuilt HD audio – SPDIF out directly to my Yamaha receiver
Vista home premium & Mediaportal
EVGA 9600GT DDR3 512mb super clocked graphics card – DVI to HDMI to my Vizio
Hauppage 1800 Tuner – with OTA $10 antenna to get OTA HD and also connected via S-video to my Direct TV box.
Microsoft IR receiver and the IR transmitter stuck to the front of the Direct TV box.
LG Bluray Drive with Power DVD 7.3
Seagate 500gb drive with OS. WD 1TB green drive with movies, music and photos

Software

I use both Vista media center and Mediaportal for my needs. After tinkering around with Mediaportal to get my DVR working and wasting a ton of time, I decided to stick with Vista MCE for my DVR needs as it is so easy. Microsoft has made such a wonderful product…it is just amazing. All you need to do it hookup the cables, put in your zip code, select your provider and voila….EPG is downloaded automatically and everything is taken care within like 30mts. Nothing to beat Vista MCE in terms of DVR functionality, ease of setup and ease of use.

As far as my other media (DVD, movies in AVI, DIVX and XVID) – I primarily use Mediaportal for couple of reasons - the ability to remember a ton of movies at their last watched points and the ability to easily switch between codecs to watch any kind of video. All my DVD’s are direct rips from DVD’s that I own and they are all in VOB format at 100% quality. I still cannot believe that mediaportal is a free software. For people like me who use want to organize their movies, music photos and have a nice interface with customizable screens etc….mediaportal is the way to go.

For my bluray needs I use Power DVD 7.3 and the LG bluray drive. I have media browser installed in Vista MCE and it takes care of auto loading the Bluray ISO and firing up PowerDVD. I have a Quit PDVD button programmed in my Harmony which closes Power DVD and restores Vista MCE. We watch all our recorded TV through Vista MCE.

Codecs
CCCP Codec pack with FFD Show and Haali Splitter
AC3 filter

Basement Home Theater

2009-03-31T11:10:00.001-07:00

Equipment

Panasonic AE7000U projector
92 inch widescreen Elite Screen (retractable with remote)
Pioneer VSX815 Dolby digital/DTS receiver
Definitive 5.1 speakers with powered sub-woofer
Dish 811 HD receiver (bought on ebay and just used as a HD unscrambling box for OTA channels) – connected through component to projector (40ft)
Microsoft MCE remote. I have the Harmony also programmed to be used in the basement

HTPC Specs

Silver Stone LC10B case
AMD 64 X2 4000 2.1ghz processor on ASUS board with 2GB RAM
Windows XP & Mediaportal
EVGA 8600GT DDR3 512mb graphics card – DVI to HDMI to my Panny (40ft cable)
HP IR receiver
Lite-on DVD burner
SPDIF audio out to my receiver
Two IDE drives with all my personal data
1 Samsung spin point 1TB drive that has a backup from my WD 1 TB in the main PC
I also have a WD 160Gb external drive that backs up my personal data

Software

I use Mediaportal primarily in my basement. All the movies that I have in my family room HTPC are mapped through network folders in mediaportal and I get the same interface in both places. I also have a copy of PowerDVD running on this machine to watch Bluray movies. I am a big NFL fan and watch all the games in my basement on the big screen. I use the Dish HD box primarily during the NFL season to unscramble the OTA signals. I bought this box in ebay for around 100$ in 2005 and preferred that rather than getting it from dish and giving a 2 year commitment.

If there is a need to watch any of the Recorded TV from Vista Mce, I just use windows media player because of all the dvr-ms issues.

Codecs

CCCP Codec pack with FFD Show and Haali Splitter and AC3 Filter

Basement construction pictures

2009-03-31T10:46:00.001-07:00

We finished our basement over a period of four months from July'05 to Nov'05. Without the help of my friend Kitchy and my wife, it would not have been possible for this place to turn out the way it is today.

Mediaportal, Vizio TV

2008-09-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

Mediaportal(www.team-mediaportal.com ) is an amazing piece of free mediacenter software. After setting up my Homeserver, I initially used the Windows Mediacenter available in Vista Home Premium. It has great interface and is an awesome product from microsoft. But it has its disadvantages, a few important ones like

Cannot play all kinds of video files (.avi,.mkv,.xvid,.divx, ISO Images etc.. etc..) without lot of setup
Importantly - can remember only one movie that you last watched

After doing some internet search, I stumbled upon mediaportal and boy...what a great product and that too free. It has all the features of Windows media center and much more. After downloading and installing the K-Lite Mega Codec pack, it plays any kind of crap file that you ask it to. Also more importantly, if it remembers every video that you have watched. So you can start and stop any time and continue it whenever..........that is really great. AFter setting up mediaportal and the other utilities needed to control it with remote, it is just a great experience.

Additionally, you have to download and setup the clone drive product to load ISO images automatically and play them from media portal.

My homeserver and my mediapc upstairs both run mediaportal and gives a consistent user interface. Also everything is controlled through the Harmony 880 or the Microsoft remote.

I also want to mention the amazing picture and colors on the Vizio 1080P TV. OTA HD programming looks stunning and for hundreds of dollars less than a sony/samsung, Vizio is the way to go. They make great TV's and in prices that we can afford. Blacklevels are not great, but what the heck. How many movies are you going to watch that need such high black levels.

Pictures of entire setup in the next post.