Finally....

I think the HTPC is ready to go! Finally. It's been a long road, largely because I like fiddling and want everything just right. I've worked my way through Vista, XP and onto Windows 7. Now it all works. It is not perfect (for instance, Media Browser is rather slow to start, I could fix that with a ramdisk but that just adds complexity to the solution hence more things to fail) but it is usable by normal people.

Finally have all my move information up to date, Mediabrowser is a great product and when coupled with Media Center Master to get movie information works well. Incidentally, I installed the latter on a different machine so I can control updates and avoid extra software on the media centre machine.

Happy? No, now I want to put it into a smaller box (disappointingly the dual core atoms are still a little lacking and I would already need to have two 640Gb laptop drives so getting costly and limiting on hardware). I also want a mini wireless keyboard with built in mouse / trackball but don't want to pay £30 for one - I'll test the remote more and see how we get on without.

HTPC

Finally, after, shall we say an extended period, I got around to attaching my home theatre pc to the television downstairs. The TV is an old CRT so I didn't hold out much hope but to my amazement I have a picture where the Windows 7 Media Center text is readable (I've connected up using a VGA to RGB / s-video converter off of ebay).

The sound works fine through the TV although a little quiet via the stereo, however, time to try the toslink optical cable. Er, yes, a little louder, I could see the cones moving through the mesh on the speakrs, certainly the loudest they've ever handled. Ouch.

So all in all a resounding success.

Just one more job, putting the HTPC into the TV cabinet.

Oh dear, when I measured the cabinet it was big enough for the HTPC case (a silverstone gd01). I forgot hinges! Doh.

One of those days

We went to see Alex at Stagecoach today - every term there is a session where the children how off the things they have learned & how he grinned. I filmed almost all of it on my Panasonic DMC-TZ5 in HD format. The camera did give me a warning that it had to stop recording because the Sd card couldn't keep up. So imagine my disappointment in discovering that the whole card is corrupt!

But some good news. I purchased Photo Rescue (v 2.1) just over 4 years ago & still had a copy on hand. It works perfectly, churned away at the SD card for about 30 minutes, fully automatic, spot on.

More Woes

There is plenty on the net talking about how insomniac Windows 7 is - it wakes up for everything. That's generally pretty easy to resolve, open up task scheduler and edit all the tasks (30 mins if you can keep focus on the excitement).

However, one task is missing from the scheduled jobs & that is Windows update. I've had it confirmed by a Microsoft person that automatic updates will wake the PC if it is asleep to download updates. Personally, I find that really annoying & it should be a setting on the automatic updates page, however, we are where we are. I searched high & low throught scheduled tasks to discover, unless it is hiding under a cunningly disguised name, Windows update is not a scheduled task.

But clearly it is scheduled. Aha, it's hiding, right here : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\Auto Update

I am still trying to find out if it is possible to only do updates if already awake (automatically, I don't need the hassle of having to press a button for myself) but a more important issue raises itself - what other Microsoft (& other less dodgy stuff like trojans & viruses) makes use of "hidden" scheduled tasks?

Big brother probably is watching  incidentally did you hear the news that the UK government is going to store all of our web activity soon?. Sitting comfortably?

Windows 7, less impressed

Well my Windows 7 installation is completed. Just a bit more tinkering required - primarily I wanted to get My Movies installed but I seem to have fallen foul of some issues & I'm not the only one it seems.

Firstly, it seems at random that the live tv fails - well, that is where I first noticed it but on further testing it seems that live tv, recorded tv and movies all have an occasional problem where they just spend forever trying to load or do load and then stutter or just show a black screen. A reboot seems to clear the problem but I had to start fiddling when the problem happened immediately after boot up for the firs time.

The behaviour is reminiscent of codec problems but I'm using the new Media Foundation, Divx (to handle MKV & DIVX) and PowerDVD. The oddity is that if this really were a codec issue surely it would be everytime? A check with filmerit reveals problems with quicktime files but that clearly isn't the problem because they play fine. A longer check with gspot reveals a problem with PowerDVD (version 8 something) but uninstall only makes more of a mess of the codecs - they are still registered but clearly not accessible. Testing some files reveals that the missing codecs have made no difference whatsoever & gspot confirms the problem exists even with mpeg 1 files created when recording tv. Not sure how to progress this one but there are other problems which this has revealed......

It seems that after a movie has finished playing the system keeps the file locked & hence never allows sleep mode to happen automatically - you can press sleep (menu or remote) and that works and sorts the issue out, it is just the automation dies. While on the sleep subject, I changed the scheduled tasks to stop Windows waking up for every event microsoft could think of (goto scheduled tasks & check / edit each one - you will find most are running far more frequently than you need and if they are set to be stopped if they run for too long, too long is considered to be 3 days so you might want to change that too).

Not sure if this behaviour happens for music because it is at that point that I broke my install and have had to start the reinstall - that's pretty disappointing because I had also found that no matter what I did I could not get windows to acknowledge the 2nd partition with a duplicate copy of the first on it - my XP install had this arrangement so if the first got corrupted I could just copy the second  back, as opposed to mirroring where the corruption gets copied too, but Windows 7 just ignores it's own settings. So, I broke the install by flagging both partitions as active - you don't want to do that! At least I now get to rethink my install sequence and make backups as I go along.

I've found a new problem during the reinstall. Windows has some nasty files it hides (bootmgr being the one in my mind now as it caused the reinstall) during install, so when I installed on my 2nd drive and removed the first on reboot, sure enough it seems that nasty files are stored on the first disk.

While the install works itself through, I will mention My Movies, this is a smart product to include decent pictures & movie information into WMC. It works nicely but the user interface is hardly intuitive (the "let's find what movies you've got" isn't the first option or even presented in a Wizard) and it has 3 other huge problems. Ffirstly, it constantly reindexes the files it already has recorded which meant I kept getting messages like "5 new files added" which you have to manually ok. Secondly, series are very messy (they are in Movies too). FInally, the worst issue is that the movies I found information from the online service where I had an ISO file (.ISO image of the original - ie the ones I own) would insist on loading the file exactly as labelled on the original disk - so if you didn't have precisely the same version as the person who uploaded the information in the first place it became worthless & would ask you to put the CD in. I can see why this is but I would have thought the sensible code would allow you to run whatever file it finds in the given directory then users can choose (and rename files to something meaningful in some cases).

Better finish fixing Windows 7 now. Wish me luck and the memory to avoid that Realtek 8139 driver update on Windows update that kills the device.....