Pintmaster

I’ve been working on my Ultimate (cheap) HDTV PVR for a few weeks now. See the previous articles (1, 2, 3) that detail my problems. I’ve purchased a ton of hardware and returned a ton of hardware. Here’s what I am left with and approximate prices:

• Case: Antec Sonata $80
• PSU: Seasonics S12 500w Power Supply $90
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Processor $120
• Motherboard: MSI K8N NEO4-F nForce4 $70
• Memory: 1GB DDR400 PC3200 CAS2.5 - Corsair Value Select $82
• Video Card: Radeon X1300 PRO PCI Express 256MB (MSI) $70
• Harddrive: Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300GB $100
• SDTV Tuner: Hauppage WINTV-PVR-150 MCE $50
• HDTV Tuner: DVICO FusionHDTV5 RT Lite $99
• Sound Card: AuzenTech HDA X-PLOSION 7.1 DTS Connect $125
• DVD-RW: NEC 16X DVD¬±R DVD Burner Black IDE/ATAPI $25
• Software: Windows XP Media Center 2005 $110, uTorrent -$FREE

Total Cost: $1021

Not so cheap anymore!

Other gear in my setup

• Monitor: Panasonic TH42PX50U 42 Inch Plasma TV
• Receiver: Onkyo TX-SR601U

Mistakes Made

I’ve made a bunch of mistakes building my HTPC. When the computer kept rebooting / stalling, I wrongly attributed it to hardware / driver problems. My assumption was compounded when I read that people were having problems with the turtle beach montego (my original HTPC sound card). I ended up spending a lot more when I had to keep returning hardware. I now think that the problem was with the original PSU in the Antec Sonata failing. It was rated at 380w and when I ran through the Power calculator, it seemed that it would be enough for my hardware, but apparently that is not the case. Either the PSU is failing or the hardware is much more power hungry than the calculator thought.

What can you do with it?

Now that I’ve just dropped a grand on this box, what can I do with it?

Recording TV - You’ll now be able to set media center to record your favorite shows for you in High Definition. Some pitfalls here are: you need a really strong signal. I purchased a Terk indoor antenna, but the signal is weak. I am within 15 miles of all the broadcast towers in Houston, but my directional antenna only picks up 2 stations well from inside my house. The rest of them are pretty choppy. Im going to try buying a $100 antenna and put it in my attic run a cable down to my living room.

Downloading Torrents - While my TV channels dont fully work, I’ve got to use uTorrent to subscribe to shows on tvRSS.net in order to get my fill. I’ve also got my Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD on Time Warner cable as a backup

Music - Im not using it for music. This is when it sucks to have all your music in iTunes. It would be nice if someone (Apple ?) wrote an iTunes interface for Windows Media Center (but I cant see why they would)
Gaming - I dont use it for big screen gaming, but I can see myself getting a wireless controller and maybe installing MAME or an NES / SNES emulator.

Is it ready for primetime?

If you are an inexperienced user thinking about building a HTPC, no, it’s not. Even if you are an experienced user, it may be more pain than its worth. Especially the quirks with OTA broadcasts. In fact - right now I would prefer to download a torrent of the show rather than record it over the air.

This quirkiness / lack of seamless integration is where apple really has an “in” into the living room. Steve jobs recently stated “we hear you load and clear” when asked about a potential Apple media center. The Mac Mini is a great little platform. It will be fantastic if they can integrate a dual HD and SD tuner into that package, or even have a little add on. Im a little disappointed with the inflexibility of the Windows Media Center software. It’s missing a lot - such as the ability to automatically compress a recorded show to Divx. This is a relatively young product, but unfortunately, it still acts like a computer and not enough like an appliance. This is where the failing is. Things dont “just work”.

Conclusion
Im not happy with Windows MCE 2005. Frankly, recording on my $12/month Scientific Atlanta 5300hd box is better than my $1000 Windows MCE 2005 box. I’d like to try and make this work by installing MythTV on Ubuntu which seems to offer more flexibility, but I am waiting for Dapper Drake to come out around the beginning of June to do it right. Im very conflicted about this right now. I want to watch TV how and when I want to watch it. I want to do it legally and in High Definition when possible. I dont want to have to pay 60 bucks a month to Time Warner Cable to watch my 5 or so shows that I can get free over the air. The kicker right now is that with my current setup, it is more inconvenient to try and record in HD over the air than it is to download the torrent. I will make this work! Keep your eyes on this space.

There have been quite a few posts around the net already on how to fix the heat issues on the first few revisions of the MacBook pro. I tried it, and it appears to work!

I followed the: iFixit guide to disassemble my MacBook. The only thing I didnt have to do was remove the harddrive. I then cleaned with Arcticlean 1 and Arcticlean 2 and then applied my Arctic Silver 5 to just the die - like apple should have done. It was really time consuming and you have to be careful… but I think it might be worth it.

First 24 Hours

My MacBook Pro still gets damn hot. I’ve read that the Arctic Silver takes some time to cure. I am booted into windows right now where the MacBook pro gets the hottest. I ran a very repetetive macro in excel that turned the fans on pretty high speed. That made me realize that I’ve never really heard the fans before.

The system has continued to stall even after replacing the video card and sound card. I thought it was the HDTV tuner card and removed that. This fixed the problem for a while, but then I experienced the system freezing again. So now the question is - what is causing the system to freeze?

The things that popped into my head were:

• Processor is dying
• My motherboard is incompatible with c-media sound processors (like the ones found in the turtle beach montego and Auzentech X-plosion)
• The 380w powersupply is either underpowered or failing

Well, I decided to try a few things today to figure out what was wrong. I removed both TV tuners and watched a DVD. The system worked fine. I added in the Analog tv tuner - the system worked fine. I added in the Digital Tuner - the system crashed while playing a DVD.

Then, I removed the analog tuner and booted with the Digital Tuner. The system booted fine and was stable. I loaded the ATI TV software and played an HD stream. The ATI card fixed the problem of choppy playback, however it seems that the HD signal is stronger directly on my TV, but that is another issue.

So, prior to realizing it could be a PSU issue, I ordered a new motherboard, processor, ram and video card.

Those are coming on Tuesday or Wednesday and I am debating buying a PSU just in case the system still crashes. I also decided to purchase a DVICO FusionHDTV5 RT Lite to replace the ATI HDTV Wonder that I thought was giving me a bunch of problems.

Building a HTPC is not quite as easy as I thought it would be, even with the extensive experience I have in building PCs.

I wish apple had come out with their HTPC a few weeks ago when I decided to do this project. According to reports from the shareholders meeting, Steve Jobs’ comments “We hear you loud and clear” may indicate that apple is working on something. It certainly wouldnt take much to take the Mac Mini to the next level.

This is just a minor update to Part 1. I ran into some problems and wanted to document them.

First, let me give you my relevant system specs as these may be partially responsible for some of the problems Im having.

Case: Antec Sonata
Motherboard: Asus A7V8X
Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2600+
Video Card: EVGA e-GeForce FX 5500 (256mb Ram)
HDTV Tuner: ATI HDTV Wonder
TV Tuner: Hauppage DVR150 MCE
Sound Card: Turtle Beach Montego DDL
Problems

• HDTV decoding is choppy, both when transcoding and recording
• Changing channels on the HDTV tuner is very slow (approximately 20 seconds before a new picture comes up)
• Turtle Beach Montego DDL crashes the system - freezes the cursor on screen requiring reboot

• Tried to use the drivers for c-media 8768 as recommended elsewhere on the net

Possible Remedies

• Purchased Auzentech HDA X-Plosion to replace the Turtle Beach Montego

• Provides Dolby Digital Live
• Provides DTS Connect
• Much more expensive than the Montego

• Claims to provide Hardware decoding of HDTV signals when combined with ATI HDTV Wonder - so it could solve the issues of choppiness and slow channel changing.

Stay tuned! I should have my final system by the end of this weekend.

I want to cancel cable.

My girlfriend and I watch very few shows that dont air on the regular over the air (OTA) broadcasts. Luckily, we are pretty central in houston and have pretty good HDTV reception for all the major networks. So, why do we pay > $50 a month to Time Warner Cable for our TV? Ah, thats right - the DVR - our Scientific Atlanta 8300HD. The functionality of being able to record our shows and watch them whenever keeps us hooked. So, why not build my own PVR! If I try and keep the cost down, it will pay for itself in the money we save not paying Time Warner Cable.

Minimum Requirements

• Old PC - I would recommend something in the past couple of years. The processor I am using is an Athlon XP 2600+ with 1 gb of ram and a 300 gb Harddrive
• ATI HDTV Wonder (comes with an antenna and remote)
• Other TV tuner card (Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 requires you have a regular tuner to use an HDTV tuner)
• Video Card - Im going to recommend a Radeon 9600 or newer. These have a built in hardware decoder for HDTV (h.264) which will reduce the strain on the processor and will probably give you a better HDTV experience (especially if your computer is old). Make sure you buy the right kind though - older systems likely have an AGP slot and not PCIe. Check on this before buying.
• Windows XP Media Center Edition - if you can find it, buy the one that includes the Microsoft Remote

Optional Extras
This is where you can get carried away and really raise the price. Find a few things that you want and stick with them. Unless of course you want to go all out!

• ATI All in Wonder (combine the regular tv tuner and the video card into one)
• Outdoor HDTV antenna (get a better signal)
• Microsoft’s Media Center Remote (has better buttons for working with Media Center than ATI’s remote)
• Wireless Keyboard
• Big harddrive - check whether you have SATA (small cable) or Parallel ATA (usually a wide, thin grey cable)
• Home Theater Case
• ¬µTorrent
• Sound card with Optical Out (to connect to your home theater receiver). This one, Turtle Beach TBS-3300 has Dolby Digital Live which can convert any stream into Dolby Digital. Nice bonus.
• DVI to HDMI cable (to connect to your HDTV)
• HDTV

So, while you’re busy buying all of that stuff, I am going to wait for my packages to arrive so I can put it all together and give you the next article about getting it all set up!

I decided to return the Mac Mini. It’s a cool device and really nice and small, but unfortunately there are a few things holding it back being the “killer media box” that I envisioned it to be:

In OS X (intel)

1. AC3 only supports stereo - AC3 5.1 crashes front row
2. Azureus is a resource hog and not as easy to configure as uTorrent - no other alternative
3. Bluetooth range is very poor (not sure if it was my Microsoft Keyboard & Mouse, or the mini

In Windows

1. Everything was fantastic except it doesnt do DVI to HDMI. This killed the deal. The screen goes black when I try and boot Win XP on my TV and the OS doesnt find a screen and fails to boot.
2. Internal speaker is always on - this is not a big deal, just a minor annoyance
3. IR receiver doesnt work in Windows - no drivers

I just received my Remote Control and Receiver for Media Center today, but it looks like I have to return my Mac Mini and go another route to my Media Center Bliss. It’s a shame because the Mini has such a small form factor. If only the DVI to HDMI worked!! Damn video drivers.

I am really frustrated that my Mac Mini Core Duo running Windows wont display an image on my HDTV using a DVI to HDMI connector. It works perfectly in OS X but someone forgot to add that functionality into the windows driver. Thanks ATI! I would love to see an update to the driver that fixes this. What an annoyance. Almost as annoying as the problems I am having with the Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse.

I got my Optical Desktop Elite for Bluetooth® today and hooked it up to my Mac Mini. The bluetooth doesnt even reach to my couch! What gives! The total distance from the mac mini to my couch is about 8 feet. The advertisement says the bluetooth mouse and keyboard stretches 30 ft. If I use the mouse any further than 4 feet, it gets jerky. If I use the keyboard further than 5 feet, it drops strokes. This is a terrible product - something is wrong - either the bluetooth in the Mac Mini has no range, or the Optical Desktop Elite has no range. Either way I am really disappointed. I will be trying the apple mouse and keyboard for comparison.

Im trying to build a media center for my HDTV based around a Mac Mini and RSS feeds for downloadable content. I’ve tried two methods and I am stuck somewhere in between.

Windows
I installed Windows XP Media Center Edition as well as uTorrent to connect up to my TV feeds. I purchased a remote and IR receiver since there is no driver for the mac mini yet as well as a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. When trying to connect it up to my Panasonic TH42PX50U, it showed a blank screen. I fiddled around with the configuration settings but couldnt get it to display. I then did some research and found that it doesnt work yet - driver issues

So, I tried OS X

OS X
Contrary to what I had read, OS X will play all of my content. I made a symbolic link from my movies folder to my external harddrive where all my content is and it showed up in Front Row. The playback is really good, and I have no complaints. It seems like one of the few pieces of software to download content from RSS feeds on the mac is Democracy Player. However, it isnt in Universal Binary yet and hogs bandwidth like no tomorrow. So, I cant leave it running all the time.

Neither of these solutions is great right now.

Some of the things I will try:

Windows
If I can get alternate drivers that support DVI to HDMI, then I am set.

OS X
Maybe I can install Windows XP in Parallels and use uTorrent like that. Seems kinda convoluted but it might just work! Alternatively, I can give a lot of money to Democracy Player and ask them nicely for a universal binary.

Wish me luck! Your solutions are always welcome.

I am trying to find a VOIP phone system to replace our current PBX. This is really confusing. There are so many options and not a good rundown of what the top 10 are. I havent even seen a concise breakdown of what the differences are between cisco and the other big boys and all these small voip companies. Im going to try and set this straight. Hope I can do it. I would love to see any resources that do a good job of this.

Like many on-the-go businesspeople, I am addicted to my blackberry. I wouldnt say im addicted to the blackberry, as much as I am addicted to push email on my mobile phone.

I am in the unique situation where I have an influential decision in what technology the rest of my office use for this task also, and we recently purchased Blackberry Enterprise Server for the office. We did this about 6 months before Microsoft released their Service Pack 2 for Exchange 2003, which among other things added a free push-email implementation. In order to use this, you need to have a phone running Windows Mobile 5.0 as its operating system. At this stage there are only a couple on that market with this technology so it will be a little time before this is more widely adopted.

At the same time as Microsoft is rolling out their free Push-email, RIM, the maker of the blackberry devices is fighting a legal battle. This is distracting RIM from competing in the market place that they dominate and giving M$ an advantage. It is predicted that by the end of the year, Microsoft will replace RIM as the number one player. That’s not such a bad thing. Microsoft’s software is free per user, whereas RIM is charging $1499.99 for their Small business edition with 5 licenses and $2999.99 for the Enterprise level with 1 license. The only difference between the two is the cost of each additional license.

So, it looks that without drastic changes, RIM is on the way out. Microsoft is going to change the model for push email and bundle it as a standard for their email server. They will seek to make money licensing their Windows Mobile 5.0 OS to cell phone makers.

Exit Blackberry, Enter Funambol

At the time we were purchasing Blackberry Enterprise Server, I was also looking at open source alternatives. I couldnt find any. Today, I learned about Funambol. Funambol is an open source alternative Push Email server, that appears to be able to connect to anything and everything under the sun. It can use exchange, MAPI, pop3 as its data source, and push the email to Blackberry, Windows Mobile 5.0 as well as SyncML enabled phones (which is apparently a bunch of em). It’s free to use at the moment and is still in beta. It is anticipated that the paid version will be more feature rich when it comes out, but the free version will still be functional.

This is a great step forward and I am curious to know how people are finding Funambol. Does it work? How well? How does it compare to Blackberry Enterprise Server / Exchange 2003 w/ Push

I had a really interesting conversation with a guy from founder of XenSource, Moshe Bar last weekend. He sent me an instant message and since these guys will may at some point be able to provide an alternative to dual booting the Intel Mac, I was interested to learn some more.

What I found out from him was pretty interesting stuff. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Xen and what it does, I will try to explain in a very high level way (which is the extent of my understanding). Xen loads right after the computer boots up, and loads into memory. Xen sits as an interface between the operating system and the hardware. This gives Xen the ability to allocate resources when running multiple operating systems; i.e. virtualization. You are able to run more than one OS, not running one on top of another, but side by side, simultaneously.

I bet some of you are thinking: What is the cost to my resources to run Xen? Xen costs you approximately 1% of your system resources to run it. Not too bad.

At the moment, the Xen guy told me that using Xen, he is able to run Windows XP Linux and Freebsd on the Intel Mac, (his iMac) but not Mac OS X. What??? Well, that’s what he said. I would really like to see that. The time frame for Mac OS X running on Xen is likely 4Q ‘06. This, however, is his pet project and not an official XenSource project.
The other interesting thing we talked about is how Mac OS X currently interfaces with the hardware. I am really unfamiliar with much more than the buzzwords, so I will do my best to explain. Currently, Apple uses the Mach Kernel to interface with the hardware. However, “Mach” is essentially outdated and causes a lot of the bottlenecks with programs having to create a lot more processes than necessary to get the job done. The guy from Xen told me they have been talking a great deal with the Apple guys about replacing Mach with Xen. This is a really big deal! This would be consistent with reports that Apple has filed patents related to Virtualization.

The reason Apple has not switched OS X to use Xen instead of Mach yet according to the guy at Xen Moshe is because XenSource has not yet implemented the system to support the intensive graphics requirements of Mac OS X.

My prediction is that in OS X 10.6, we will see some sort of fast-user switching between operating systems. Is that realistic, or am I just dreaming?

EDIT: I have corrected this - apparrently he has not been able to run Windows yet since he says this requires Intel’s VT CPUs.

Update: I referred a reporter from Computer World to Moshe Bar, the guy with whom I spoke. In this article, Moshe clarifies some of the things I was confused on. I got a few very key details wrong.

..

I ordered my MacBook pro on Friday as a replacement for both my IBM desktop at work and for my Powerbook G4 1.25 Ghz as my backup / presentation computer. Im really excited for it to arrive, and I am taking a little bit of a gamble that someone will figure out how to make it run windows pretty quickly so that I can switch between the two operating systems. Should be pretty great. The main thing I am worried about now is when I will get natively compiled updates to previous software programs - like adobe photoshop etc… Anyway, I like being on the cutting edge.

Lets face it. Apple hit limitations with the architecture on their old Powerbooks. Sure, they could upgrade the screen, they could put bluetooth on, put every bell and whistle you can think of. Did that give the user more Power? Not really. It gave the user a portable swiss army knife. Sure, it’s nice to have all of these things on my 1.25 ghz powerbook that I bought a couple of years ago when it came out. What did I really want? More power. The linked article at unsanity serves as an excellent disclaimer. Buyer beware!!!! The MacBook does not include “XYZ”! Apple did a good job covering up the “missing” features by really hyping up the good things about it. Keep in mind though that this is a new platform for Apple. It is a big feat to switch to the x86 platform and this is their first try. I would bet that this new laptop is A.) better than 90% of the intel based laptops out there, and probably the best first attempt by a laptop producer to make a laptop around an intel chip. There are going to be problems with it… sure. Even on my Powerbook, my magnetic latch doesnt always close properly (or stay closed) and sometimes I get electric shocks from the Aluminum shell. There are many nice features that are missing, but if you dont like the laptop, dont buy it. Register your complaints with apple and if enough consumers want it they will build the features in.

I am looking forward to getting one of these babys and honestly, the only thing holding me back that the article had mentioned was the potential problem loading Windows XP. I am pretty confident someone will find a workaround, and until then my 2500 will stay firmly in my pocket.

If Gearlive’s prediction that the new HD tivo will be approx. 800 - 1200 dollars upon its release, then the company is a goner. I pay $12 per month (with free upgrades when a new box comes out) from Time-Warner Cable for their Tivo knock-off. At the low end, $800 bucks, it would take 66 months to make the Tivo worth owning. By that time, I would already be on about 3 or 4 upgrades to my current $12 a month box. I imagine that by that time, the knockoff will be at Tivo standards. No sell!

At the Keynote earlier today, Steve Jobs announced the February availability of the Macbook, Apple’s new version of the Powerbook based on the Intel dual core mobile chips. As soon as I get verification that you can dual boot the suckers and load windows on them, I am getting one. I have been waiting for a reason to get a laptop instead of desktop at work. This, I believe is it.

Was Expedia hacked? I only have about 6 datapoints for reference. I use multiple email addresses to sign up for websites. I generally have a single use email address for a website. Well, I found it pretty strange when I received the following email (Images removed). What was fishy about this is it was sent to my single use expedia address. My dad also received the same email at his address signed up with expedia. My mom - who is not signed up with expedia did not receive it. I also did not receive this email at 100 other possible email addresses they could send it to! Very strange. Has anyone else seen this email that is either NOT an expedia subscriber, or even is one?

Update: I found this page at expedia which indicates that at one point there was a similar legitimate offer:

Update: Upon checking my Expedia account, the offer is legitimate. Is expedia deliberately trying to make it look like a phishing expedition to dissuade people from taking the offer? All of the links go to expediamail but purport to be from expedia. VERRRRY SKETCHY! The deal isnt even that good - you have to book a hotel + car or hotel + flight or car+ hotel or car + hotel + flight for 4 or more nights.

From: Expedia Travel Deals
Date: Dec 27, 2005 3:50 PM
Subject: Your $150 travel coupon is ready
To: @Colin

Our gift to you…

Thank you for your recent purchase during our 2005 Holiday and
Getaway promotion. We hope you enjoyed your trip.

The $150 flight+hotel vacation coupon you earned for booking your
trip with Expedia is now in your account.

To view or use the coupon now, simply sign in to your account. Or if
you’d like to shop for your flight+hotel vacation first, your coupon
can be found on the Billing and Delivery page under saved coupons.
Just click on “$150 Winter Getaway” and the amount will be
automatically deducted.

Deals and more
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with Expedia travel deals email.
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Flight deals to your favorite destination
Tell us your favorite routes, we’ll keep you updated with the latest
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Tell us your favorite routes.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW AND USE YOUR COUPON NOW:
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Learn how to use your coupon:
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Dear santa,

Please get me this remote control so I can get rid of the 3 remotes I currently have to watch TV. It is too much effort at the moment and I need life on the couch to be easier. Thank you,
Colin

Buy it for me here!

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