This morning, I flicked on the media centre to listen to some music, browsing to music library and the music is jumping all over the shop. What appeared to be happening, was media centre re scanning my library. This was very annoying particularly as I hadn’t added anything in a couple of months.
So whats the solution, seeing as the wife has gone Christmas shopping, I decided to format the system and install OSx 10.4.9 an uphuck release. bit ott?
- Will it work?
- Will I still be able to use the Imon IR receiver in my case ?
I didnt think this through very well 
Its just occured to me if this doesn’t work I’ll have to go back to vista, as my legal XP is installed on my MacBook Pro for playing BF2142 and TF2. hmmm
OK tried twice, first time hung at restart, second Kernel panic’d
DAMMIT!
Plan B Installed Ubuntu 7.10, see If i can use Myth TV as a media centre… Processing please wait……..
The Zalman coolers have now been fitted, and the good news is the reduction is noise is quite substantial. The bad news is its not quite where I wanted it. All of the remaining noise is coming from the 3 HD’s and the northbridge cooler.
We have been living with the Vista’s Media centre now for a couple of weeks, and I think its great. Once I had found the My Movies plugin which allows you to download all the cover art for your xvids etc. The remote thats comes with the Silverstone case ( an Imon Soundgraph one) is excellent.
The only thing that lets the system down, is sadly vista it’s self which still feels slow and clunky.
The next steps for me now are converting my 400+ DVD collection to Mpeg 4.
So my media centre is now in place in the lounge, and is looking rather fabulous, even while in black. Why the manufacturers insist on changing colours from silver to black every no and then I don’t know.
As you can see the Silverstone LC16M is quite big, slightly taller than my AV receiver and a lot deeper. What doesn’t work so well is the amount of noise the whole thing makes. The fan noise that was quite acceptable in its tower case upstairs in the back room, just wont do in the lounge. I have had to order a pair of copper coolers a Zalman CNPS7500-CU to replace the stock AMD 64 3200 stock cooler and a Zalman VF700-CU to replace the XFX Geforce 6800 GT fan and heat sink.
After a lot of poking about in side the case I’m 98% certain the heat sinks aren’t going to clash with anything.
So far the only down side from moving away from XBMC is that you have to wait for the PC to boot, but that’s not very long. The interface running at 720p is stunning, compared to XBMC. Just hope the new coolers shut the box up.
Yesterday I got Vista Ultimate installed on my media centre. Installation all very smooth, except vista not having the drivers for my SATA 150 controller (why not its about 3 years old). Apart from that the install is all pretty smooth and possibly quicker than XP? That may not be actual fact as I was watching the Discovery channel at the time, learning about hovercraft (essential pub quiz research).
Naturally the first thing I after install was install my AV then go to windows update. First Problem, “An Error of Type: 8000FFFF Has occured” brilliantly user friendly and descriptive as ever.
Solution: This problem was resolved by uninstalling update KB929777 which I can only assume was badly installed dynamically during the install. After removing reboot and windows update worked fine, finding only 33 “critical” updates.
Next problem, this isn’t a problem with Vista but my netgear ADSL router a DG834 V2. I have two V3’s (why see here) but choose to use the V2 as it supports VPN’s and my friend a fellow geek Darren has the same router. Naturally we have set up a VPN between our houses so we can stream each others music etc. Heres the problem could we get SMB / CIFS to work over the VPN, no! After disabling everything that looked or smelt like a firewall, and discovering all the ports were open any way it was getting rather frustrating.
Solution: After down grading our router from v3.01.31 of the firmware to V2.10.22 the option to enable netbios traffic reappears within the VPN policy options, turning this on both ends and resetting the connection and all is well, unless……..
You happen to be running Vista now (The VPN was initially setup when I was running XP media centre 2005) vista by default will only allow NTLMv2 authentication, Samba (whoops forgot to mention the other end is an Ubuntu Server 7.04) currently is still using NTLMv1. To get Vista to negotiate NTLMv1 open the run prompt (Windows Key+R) Type secpol.msc. This will open the security policy editor in the Management console. You may get nagged are you sure and you really really sure, I dont know as disabled the Irritate user feature at my earliest convenience. In the policy editor navigate to:
Local Policies\Security Options
Double click on Network Security: LAN Manager authentication level
and set it to LM and NTLM – use NTLMV2 session security if negotiated
All a little excessive when the ultimate goal is to be able to listen to Darrens music which seems to be mainly Amerie albums!
Reboot. Bish bosh!
FYI: disabling User Account Control or UAC (M$ name for User Annoyance feature) by running msconfig and its one of the options under the tools tab.
Yesterday my silverstone LM16 Media PC case arrived, all very exciting. So last night I after getting back from City link I immediately tor apart my desktop tower case.
In researching the case I had noted that due to the Centre mount DVD drive location, I was limited to a maximum length of 225mm for the graphics card which would sit right behind it. I measured my Geforce 6800 GTS (I cant remember the make, but its the reference board so most other 6800’s will be the same, think about it BFG rings a bell), the card was 220mm long, hoorah I though 5mm to spare.
Once the case arrived I mounted the my Motherboard and DVD writer (a dual layer Sony job) in the case and saw that though with the ATA cable in the back of the DVD drive the fit would be tight (the ATA lead using up the remaining 5mm) they would fit in hoorah again! The rejoicing was short lived once I remember the power connector on the back of the Geforce card, there would be 0mm available to fit the power connector. Arse Burgers!.
Also I spotted because the PSU is mounted at what would be the bottom of the motherboard of a normal ATX tower case, the separate ATX 12v 4 pin connector lead was going to be less than half the length it should be.
Solution: So I got the soldering Iron out and an old blown up ATX PSU to cannibalise. I soldered a spare female power connector to the back of the VGA card (cringe). Then spliced in another 100mm to the ATX 12V connector.
After then finishing the step by step instructions for the case (one of the steps was “Now connect all the wires!!!”). Everything worked first time. There is loads of room for more kit within the case with my 3 hard drves in the case there is a room for another 4 drives (a spare caddy for 3 and an adaptor can be used to mount another under the optical drive).
Also worth noting I decided not the get the lm16-MR which has the built in card reader, instead getting the standard version which has 4 usb 1 firewire and mic and head phone jacks instead. The bay where these go is a floppy bay so any cheap card reader will go in there fine, like the one I already have.
It wasn’t till about midnight last night I got the whole thing running in the lounge, and the case looks rather cool sat next to my Sony receiver being nearly the same height. I haven’t had time to investigate the VFD or Remote yet properl,y but will do in shortly. Will also be replacing Media centre 2005 with Vista Ultimate, not because I crave a rubbish user experience or appreciate a slower UI, but purely for the new version of media centre.
Tags: xbox 360, media center extender, XVID
So last night I rebuilt my PC with Media Center Edition, somthing I have been putting off for some time. Due to the epic nightmare it always turns out to be. Antics that followed :
- Discovered didn’t have the drivers around for my SATA raid controller
- Found drivers
- Realised Cant install them from USB device as Windows will only look for them on A: drive
- Spend 20 minutes looking for a floppy disk
- Find floppy disk to find my floppy drive wont format it ( probably has had a strop through lack of attension
- Think Stuff it ill use the SATA 133 controller instead of the SATA 150 ( morale you can never have enough controllers on the mother board )
- All is well windows installs in record time ( about 10 minutes, despite telling me at the start this was going to last 39 minutes).
So I have got MCE up and running and immediately install the Xbox Media Center Extender software so I can connect my Xbox 360. This install takes quite an age though I suspect the large part of it was MCE indexing the music pictures and videos etc from my NAS box.
Got the whole thing up and running and can browse most of my mp3s on 360 ( most its still indexing got to 8800 tracks about now, probably NAS’s fault its not v quick ). Couple of odd things, MCE on the PC and MCE extender appear to keep separate metabases of your media files. most annoying of all the thing appears to be written to NOT PLAY XVID’s. GRRRR
Update : It seem the people at www.runtime360.com are on the case with DIVX and are writing a program called transcode ( currently beta 4.1 )
