Work in progress

[noonereallycares]

After picking up a few spare HP desktops from a client, I set about making myself a HTPC. No loner would I be limited to having to connect my laptop to my TV / HIFI for music and video playback.

And so began my voyage into the world of Media Center and Media Portal.

The desktops were HP Vectra VL800 with 800mhz PIIIs and came with an initial spec of 64meg RAM and a 10gig HDD.

The onboard video was never going to help me, so I threw in a spare nVidia gForce MX 4000 card that I had left over from my old desktop and set about getting it working. The advantages of the MX4000 were that by using the "cheaper" internal TVout chipset, nVidia never bothers with any of the Macrovision / Underscanning BS. It also supported TVout from boot up, rather then earlier card which needed to have the TVout enabled via the drivers.

The onboard ound was almost good enough to suit my needs. I have used up all the optical inputs on my current amp, so I was only ever going to use RCA cables to link the HTPC into the system. However, since I had one lying around, I threw a SB Live DE card in.

Since the standard HDD was only 3600RPM, I was happy to leave it in. Most of my media is stored on my server, so I would mainly be accessing it via the network.

Initially, I was willing to live with the use of a standard keyboard for controlling the system. I soon decided to get myself an M$ remote.

So I installed WinMCE 2005 and started to play with the settings. Media Center seemed to be pretty useful. That was until I tried to remote control the system via RDP. Who decided the the software that most people use on their MC rig would not work via RDP??? Goodbye RDP, hello VNC. WinVNC works a treat. No problems with any of the software, M$ stuff included.

It was at this point that I discovered Media Pertal. And the fun begins. I thought about throwing a Leadtek TV2000 card in, but soon found it just wasn't able to play nice with any of the MCE software.

MP3s, AVIs, DVDs... No problems. What's next? TV.

Since the specs of my machine were so low, I knew I would have to be careful with which tuner I purchased. I obtained as much info about various options and eventaully decided on the Hauppage 250 MCE. I went and spoke to the guy at my local PC store and explined what I wanted. He gave me some BS about how the unit is not being made any more and I should look at getting a DViCO card. Both were about the same price, but I still wan't convinced it would work.

After a week of weighing up my options, I bit the bullet and ordered the DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Lite. I didn't really need the external inputs, so it would be enough for my HTPC.

After another week of fiddling with the software, I finally cracked. This was never going to be good enough. The lockups and CPU freezes were going to drive me nuts.

A few more weeks of thinking about my options, I even attempted to put the DViCO card into my server. I figured I could schedule the recordings on the server and only use the HTPC for playback. Not even the Athlon 2200 with 1gig of RAM was able to handle to task of recording a TV show.

That was it. I'd had enough of this. I was going to throw my hand in the air and surrender. With the cost of a PVR STB coming down, I may aswell just buy myself one of those.

In a last ditch effort, I made some calls and found someone who still stocked the Hauppage 250 MCE card. I order it and it arrived two days later.

Bottom line, with the right mix of codecs and quality settings, I now have TV recording perfectly. The fact that it is analogue doesn't phase me.

Why is it still a WIP? There is just once feature I lack. The abilty to record a radio program. It may seem like a small feature, but it is one I would really love to have.

I may stick the TV2000 card back in and use it just for recording FM stations.

[Taipan]

Originally Posted by noonereallycares

I bit the bullet and ordered the DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Lite.

Not even the Athlon 2200 with 1gig of RAM was able to handle to task of recording a TV show.

Sounds like something is wrong here? It takes very little CPU to record a DVB channel - since there is no encoding/decoding involved - the digital data from the FusionHDTV DVB-T Lite should be simply recorded straight to disk.

[noonereallycares]

Originally Posted by Taipan

Sounds like something is wrong here? It takes very little CPU to record a DVB channel - since there is no encoding/decoding involved - the digital data from the FusionHDTV DVB-T Lite should be simply recorded straight to disk.

I thought it needed to use the CPU to decode the TS stream to extract the individual MPEG stream. Some of this also depends on the card, and I only have the mx4000 to try it with. My server originally had an older TNT2 card in it.