What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?
That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month. He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room. All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of redundant storage and accessed over the network. Be it full VOB rips of DVDs to Xvid or x264 encodes of movies and TV it can all now be played back by the new HTPC. Of course with as much digital content as we have, we need a decent system to manage and search it. Read on for the best solutions I’ve found…
Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Movie and TV management’
Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre - something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think! Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need to “trick” Vista into believing that the satellite card is actually just a standard DVB-T (Freeview) card, albeit with many more channels. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Freesat with Vista’
When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards. Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card. By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.
Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI is only capable of setting up 2 tuners at any one time. This is odd since the underlying tuner architecture is actually quite capable of using as many tuners as you can fit in the machine. Your limiting factor, really, is the speed you can push the data to your hard drive. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners’
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m running the Media Center (yes, that’s how they spell it) interface from Vista Ultimate to drive my HTPC. Out of the box Vista Media Center (VMC) is capable of playing DVDs and MPEG2 broadcast content - such as the output of a Hauppauge DVB-T or DVB-S TV card. What it can’t do is play the more esoteric formats such as DivX, XVid and hidef containers such as the Matroska (MKV) files. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: The Software’
Part one of a series of posts where I record how I built my 1080p capable Home Theatre PC.
Having ditched the increasingly expensive and irrelevant SkyHD last year, we’ve been watching what little broadcast TV we see via a Windows Media Centre machine upstairs connected to an Xbox 360 front end. This was fine for the odd episode of Doctor Who or the Apprentice, but we wanted an interface that gave us access to all our music, archived TV, ripped DVDs along with live TV. Since the old XBMC can do neither live TV nor HD content and since the Xbox 360 in Media Centre Extender mode can not play back the more esoteric formats (such as MKV or XVid) it was necessary to build a true Home Theatre PC. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC’
A little while after turning my TV on today it displayed a nag screen. Just like a bit of Microsoft software reminding you that there’s a registration card in the box and you ought to send it back to the manufacturer, or some shareware demanding to be paid for. You can see the message in the image (left). I’m not annoyed by it, I actually found it rather amusing.
I’ve been messing around with the TV and my media device today, trying to get the best possible picture out of it. Behind the TV’s nag message you can see the media device is now running in all its 720p HDTV glory. The picture is unbelievably crisp - especially in the menus - and the picture from HDTV episodes of Lost or Stargate Atlantis is fantastic. The xvid compression means some detail is lost (Lost, hah!) so they don’t look quite as good as the HD Apple trailers, but it’s still mightily impressive.
The HD trailers on the other hand are nothing short of awe inspiring. I have never seen definition like it, on any screen anywhere. Animated films created entirely digitally do best, so Ice Age 2 and Cars both look outstanding, whereas trailers for films like Aeon Flux - HD media sourced from film - look slightly grainy - an artifact of the analogue to digital scan process. I’ve been trying a lot of the Windows Media HD files and there’s some beautiful stuff; Apple Quicktime also have some fantastic clips including a montage of the BBC’s nature/world footage with a great soundtrack.
Next step: build another media device (linked to the first) and stick it somewhere else in the house (probably the kitchen). Not so much because I need media in the kitchen, but because I want to prove it’s possible to do it!
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