My ongoing quest... Decent HTPC...

[whoey629]

My first attempt at an HTPC was basically a bunch of spare parts thrown together... a leftover case from some gutted PC, an old power supply with a noisy fan (which I replaced with a new quiet one) a P4 Mainboard with a 1.7Ghz Celeron that had been rescued when replaced with much newer PC guts, 1x256mb dimm and 1x512Mb dimm from some older PCs, a TV card I bought when I first moved here(we didn't have a TV, so we ran everything through my PC with a 19inch CRT monitor), my old video card NVIDIA FX5900XT with entirely passive cooling, the original fan started making huge noise after about a year... add a PCI 100mb network card, an old DVD-RW drive and a 40Gb harddrive. I dug around and found the best heatsink fan combo I had lying around, and put a new 90mm adjustable fan on the CPU running as quiet as I could get it, without the CPU running hot. I installed XP Media Center, and got a Media Center Remote to go with it.

While this accomplished a lot, it served the primary purpose of this box, to play downloaded videos (I live in Spain, I'm Canadian, and want to watch stuff in the original version, as does my wife...) The main problem I had was that while the TV card (some generic obscure brand) was installed correctly, and ran with it's own software (started manually by mouse) but did not work from within MCE... rather irritating I have to say... but since I could watch all those channels on the TV by itself, it didn't bother us too much. Plus we had the added access to our Videos, Photos & MP3 collection via shared folders on the LAN.

A few weeks ago there was a sale at a large chain store, and I spotted a "HTPC" machine in the back of the Computer section... at a bargain price, and over double the spec of the current machine... so I grabbed it. Also the same day I had just picked up a dual tuner Digital TV tuner card.

The new PC: 3.2Ghz HT P4, 512mb, 160gb harddrive, DVD-RW drive, Avermedia m150 TV tuner, Wireless LAN & Wired LAN, Wireless Keyboard & Mouse, and Remote, some lowprofile ATI PCI-E video card(don't know what model, personally I hate ATI but have nothing else low profile to replace it with), WinXP Home (Spanish), all housed in a rather smart low profile desktop case (the main reason I opted this was a great opportunity to get rid of the unsightly beige tower we had)

It came with some mediacenter ish software (from cyberlink?) that seemed to do everything, but I didn't really like after using MCE for a year... I opened it up, pulled out the 56k PCI modem (why do they bother lol) replaced it with the Hauppauge dual DVB tuner, and added 512Mb DDR2 ram, spent a few hours updating all the windows Home core. I decided this time to see what options I had for the default loaded XP Home before I wiped the box. (and before I installed anything besides updates and drivers I made a nice new ghost image of the whole boot drive...) also migrated the MCE remote... I rather like it vs the cheap non-ergo remotes that came with the box/tuner cards.

I had discovered Media Portal some time before, but didn't really need it, until now!

I tried V0.2.2.0 quickly, and after setting it up, decided to giveV0.2.3.0 RC2 a go... I have to say in general it works great, does everything MCE did before, and a lot more. I have no idea if the analog tuner card would work in MCE, but it does in MP. It's always bugged me that there was little control over MCE. It was a royal pain to get Joost setup in MCE, and buggy as hell to run through MCE. I've yet to try in MP, but it shouldn't be as bad (plus newer version of Joost these days...)

Any ways the plan is to update as I get things more streamlined with the new setup. The case has a blue front LCD display which I'm trying to find more info about. Ideally I'd like to build some sort of interface to it, maybe have it display channel info/time/now playing... whatever. At the moment, it says WELCOME when you power-on, sometimes (randomly) shows the brand (SPECTRA) while powered on, other times it's blank, and says GOODBYE when you power off. There is a driver installed for it in windows, but I don't see any config or other utilities related to it... as I said... researching still.

Phew, that's a lot. More soon...

[cheezey]

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/su...hlight=SPECTRA

[whoey629]

wow... thanks I hadn't had time to dig around yet! (I'll have to read that whole thread later) but first, more shopping with the wife! >;D