Change of plan...

Right.
Over the past few weeks, I've completely turned all my plans on their arse.

Basically, I've decided to use all the components from my current PC for my Media Box, and buy a new desktop instead!

This doesn't mean that this blog is over, as there is heaps I need to do to my PC before it's ready to begin its new life in the loungeroom.

First, I got a new case. It's called a Tsunami CP-501L. It's a small horizontal ATX case, minimalistic in design, which makes it ideal for this purpose.
It took me all day to transfer the guts of my PC from one box the another, and as the new one was quite small, it was very fiddly trying to fit everything in. I ended up having to remove the power supply at least twice because i'd forgotten to connect something or other to the motherboard.

Next, I purchased a fanless cooling solution for my Geforce FX5600 graphics card, in the form of a Zalman ZM80D-HP. This keeps the GPU very cool, while making no noise at all, which is a big step up from being the noisiest component in the box. If you'll check out the pic, you'll notice four knobs sticking out from the bars which connect the top and bottome heatsinks together.
These obviously point directly upwards when the card is installed, and as my case is quite squeezy, i couldn't put the side panel on when I first tried! I fixed this by replacing the screws with my own saw'n-off ones which reduced the height to just low enough to put the case back together. Booyah.

Then I replaced the CPU cooler with a new quieter one. It's called an "Akasa AK 786BL"
Just a generic brand form the Computer Fair, but a darn sight quieter than the bog standard AMD cooler. The heatsink has a nicer clip too... no more screwdrivers... Pity about the blue light, but what the hell.

Next loudest thing in the box is the power supply, then the chipset fan. Back to the Fair next week!

Cashed up

Aight,

I've paid off my credit card, so I'm back into looking for stuff.

I'm thinking on this mobo, as it's cheap, silent, and has good stuff. It's a mATX board with onboard graphics, but I'm gonna put a new gfx card on it anyway...

BAH!

Oh yeah...

I forgot to mention that I tested the other functions in MediaPortal : DVD, MP3, and pictures.

They all work as you'd expect. Excellent.

J

Side note

Whilst waiting to build up my cash reserves to buy the rest of the hardware for my box, I've been tinkering with some other stuff.

I've started using this little program called WEB Scheduler. Basically, it is a TV scheduled recording program.

It's got a built in EPG (whch worked first go!), and some pretty advanced scheduling options.
You can just bring up the EPG and click on a program to schedule it to record. You can also choose to record the program every day or week etc...
It can search the EPG for shows, and has saved searches, so it will automatically shedule recording for any show that matches a given search. Neat.

It will probably be a month or so before I get the cash for more parts, so I may not post much until then.

word out.

Victories

Well, over the past week or so, I've been trying out a whole heap of other HTPC frontends including GBPVR, Meedio, GotAllMedia, and maybe some others...
I've also been tweaking around with various xmltv data grabbers.
I upgraded my tunercard drivers in there somewhere too...

In the end though, I've gone back to where I started: MediaPortal (0.1.3.0), and the original XMLTV grabber.

First I sorted out my xmltv issues, which basically came down to fiddling with command line switches and stuff, and I whipped up a couple of batch files so I don't keep having to go back to the command prompt for testing.
So now I've got a nice little tvguide.xml that I know is good and working.

I ended up going back to MediaPortal as I had all kinds of issues just even trying to get my TVcard to work at all in some of the other apps, and version 0.1.3.0 seems pretty stable.

The next issue was getting the tvguide.xml to import properly into MP's Electronic Program Guide (EPG). It all seemed so simple. But theres a few little tricks I had to work out to get it going.

It's all about the channel list. This is the list of channels that MP can view

There are 2 ways of getting a channel list into MedaiPortal.
1. Autoscan
2. import from EPG

The first option scans a range of frequencies for channels, and once it has found them, puts them all in a list. The second option imports the list staight from your tvguide.xml file.
The problem with the second option is although it imports the channel names, it doesn't have any channel information with it like frequencies and stuff, which means you have a bunch of channels that you can't use unless you go in and enter all the other data manually... which isn't gonna happen.
So just stick with the autoscan.

The main issue here is that the channel names that come up after doing your autoscan in MPconfig may not match the channel names referred to in your tvguide.xml file. This is an issue as it simply won't know which info goes to which channel when importing to the EPG unless the names are exactly the same.
Now you could go through and edit your .xml and change all the channel references to their corresponding autoscanned names (which I did do a couple of times...), but you'd have to do it every time you ran your grabber as it will just re-write over your changes every time you download new data.

The sensible way to do it, is to go into your scanned channel list in the MP config app, and right click on and change the names of those channels to match your .xml instead. These changes are permanent unless you rescan for some reason, but you can save a copy of this channel list anyway, so you shouldn't need to.


I also had troubles with having too many channels in MediaPlayer. Basically, there's a bunch of HD versions of the channels which I didn't want to see as they don't seem to work properly and really suck CPU cycles, but no matter how many times I unclicked their boxes in the config, they just kept coming up in the main app. I fixed this by deleting all but one of the 'channel groups' in the config (these are used when restricting certain channels but not others with a PIN), and making sure that only the ones I wanted were in the default group.

So now I have only the channels I want, and all the EPG data works.

Now all I have to do is make sure the DVD, MP3, and picture viewing sections work...

Fiddlin'

I DL'd and tried out GB-PVR yesterday. I only fiddled with it for about half an hour, and I couldn't get the thing to find any channels. It seems to rely on a pre-existing EPG (in xml form?) to be able to find channels (I'm still struggling with the whole xml tvguide thing)... I think I need to dig a bit deeper.

I also had another go trying to get WEBepg working, but to no avail. I think I'm gonna have to dig a bit deeper on that one too.

Mobo and graphics thoughts...

Been looking around a bit for a mobo/graphics solution, and I reckon I've got it half sorted...

I'm probably gonna go for an NVidia 6200 based card, as they have lots of good features, but more importantly they can be found as a passively cooled unit, which means no noise. Along with all the 6*00 series cards, they have native component outputs (and svideo, and composite), which means I'll have no probs getting a good signal into the TV.

As far as motherboards go, I don't really know where to start. I found this post on the Anandtech forums, which seems like a good place to start.

I don't really need something with a huge amount of features... I'll probably just figure it out when it comes time to purchase.

Edit: Although I just saw this board MSI K8NGM2-FID, which has the built in NV6150, and also seems to have component out. Hmm...

Dagnabbit

I realised something on the weekend that I really should have checked a while ago...

My TV doesn't have s-video input! It does however have RGB component inputs, so I'm going to have to rethink my motherboard/graphics solution.

J