I settled on my next HTPC it shipped today

I settled on a platform for my next HTPC.  I didn't go with the Intel family processor that I expected to buy, instead I went with an AMD E350 barebones system from Foxconn.  This barebones computer, add your own memory, hard drive and dvd rom, sounds like a bargain for $109 plus tax shipped from Newegg.com.  If you prefer to order from Amazonit is available for $134.99 with free shipping.  I should get it in the next couple of days and will report back how good it is.

The Foxconn Small Form Factor (SFF) R40-A1 is a small computer case with a motherboard and power supply.  Here are the features of the computer that I am interested in:

HDMI output,

6 rear USB ports and 2 front USB ports

Two DDR 3 memory slots (maximum of 8GB)

On board Radeon HD6310 graphics for 1080p support

Dimensions 11.1" x 11.02" x 3.74"

Next report I will talk about OS install and how well this baby operates.

Whahooo, got my Tuning Adapter working this weekend

After about two months of frustration my Tuning Adapter is finally working. A Tuning Adapter is a device that is used to signal the cable company that you want to watch a SDV channel. SDV is Switched Digital Video, channels with lower viewership are broadcast on demand instead of all the time to free up bandwidth. These are channels like Speed, BBC America, G4, Fuse, Versus, and many more.

The Tuning Adapter sits between the cable company and the Cable Card device, in my case the Hauppauge 2650, to "enable" channels as I flip through them. A Tuning Adapter is needed because the Cable Card device I have is not a signalling or bi-directional device. A cable company DVR is a bi-directional signalling device and doesn't need one of these.

Time Warner, my cable company, provides the Tuning Adapter free of charge when you pick up a Cable Card.

Hauppauge came out with an update to the firmware and software for the 2650, this new update worked and activated my Motorola Tuning Adapter.

Now that I can see and record all of the channels that I am supposed to be able to I am ready to replace the Time Warner DVR with my computer.

For a list of SoCal Time Warner SDV channels read on:

Thinking of building another PC

  I'm starting to watch prices on motherboards for my next PC. This time instead of the H61 Intel chipset I want to run either the Z68 or P67. These chipsets are more robust and offer USB 3 and SATA 6GBs connections.

  These higher performance chipset will also allow for more RAM as the H61 is limited to two double sided DIMMs.
  I have parts sitting idle including a case with a decent power supply, spare hard drives and 8GB of DDR3 that was too fast to work in the H61 so I had to buy slower compatible memory. All that I will need to purchase for this next setup is a motherboard and CPU.

  I will again be looking at the "bargain" line of processors, either another Celeron or maybe one of the Pentium G600 series processors. Prices for i3s have come down recently, I may spend the extra to get the slight extra performance they offer.

  I'm also trying to figure out how I will get network to this new computer as it will be located in the family room and I don't have any Ethernet wiring running there. I have dual band wireless N in the house but am having some trouble streaming video. When the wireless works it works great but a couple of times a week I have to reboot my wireless access point to clean up stuttering.

  I'm looking in to the Netgear Powerline Network Adapter Kit to see if it will fill my needs.  At $109 I don't want to buy this unless I'm pretty sure that it will resolve my issues and be flawless in performance.

Using the My Movies WMC add on to organize my video

I organize my shows in to three different volumes, recorded tv for the shows that I record, tv series for the tv shows that I download, and videos for movies.  This allows me to separate my shows so that they can be read and utilized by the My Movies Media Center add on.

  I use a media center add on call My Movies to help organize and display my movies.  This program initially takes work to organize your shows so that they can be recognized but once the work is done the program works great. For the program to recognize shows they need to be stored in a specific way.  Each movie needs to be in it's own folder at the root of the videos storage area.  If there are sequels they each need to be in their own folder too at \video.

  Television series need to have one main folder for the entire series, within the parent you can have sub folders for seasons or not.  The file name for television series must contain the season number and episode number for the episode to be recognized.  An example is \tv series\chuggington\chuggington.s01e23.avi.  The s01e23 must be in the title somewhere and does not need to be seperated out by a period like I show here.  Sometimes when you download a series collection you will have to go through and identify / rename the episodes for them to be picked up properly by My Movies.  Identifying and renaming is probably the hardest part, I use resources like Wikipedia and Google to help find the season and episode numbers.

  My Movies adds two menu items to the media center main menu, Movies and TV series.  Here is what my tv series look like on the screen.

This is the TV Series main screen showing all of the series that I have available to watch.  The numbers indicate the number of unwatched episodes and the little eye in the lower part of the series picture indicates that I have watched some of the episodes.

This is the episode screen that you go to when you select a series.  Highlighting a show gives you details about the episode if they are available.

  The menus in My Movies can be configured to look and layout differently, some of the advanced features cost but the basic program is free.  I haven't paid for the program yet and I am getting great use out of it.  I will probably pay shortly as I like to support projects that I enjoy.

I just built a new computer to use as a Viewing Station

Two weeks ago I assembled a new PC to use as my front room viewing computer.  I assembled this out of some new parts and some parts that I had laying around.  What excites me most in this new computer is how powerful and inexpensive the processor is.  I used an Intel Celeron G530 processor for this build, this is the first Intel chip I have purchased in many years, all of my other systems run AMD processors.
  The Celeron G530 is the younger sibling to  the i3 and the Pentium G600 series processors.  It has 2MB of cache versus 3 on it's bigger siblings, it is also clocked lower at 2.4GHz.  With dual cores and on chip video this processor easily powers my video station.


Here is a list of the parts that I purchased and also the parts I reused from previous systems.  If you don't have parts laying around you would need to purchase these so I'll put a value on the used parts to give you an idea of cost.

parts purchased
~$51                    Intel G530 CPU 2.40 GHZ 2M CACHE 2.4 2 LGA 1155 Processor

~59 - $30 rebate  ECS H61H2-M2 Socket 1155/ Intel H61 Motherboard

~$50                    Patriot Memory Sector5 G Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800

~$21                    Lite-On 24X SATA DVD+/-RW Drive

sub total = $181 - 30 rebate = $151

used parts found and reused

$50                     XION ATX Mid Tower Computer Case w/500 Watt Power Supply

$60                     Western Digital 160 GB Caviar SATA Hard Drive

$120                   Microsoft WINDOWS 7


sub total of re-used parts $230

Total of $381

For around the same price you could buy an off the shelf system that is equivalent or better than this system, an example is this G620 system at Amazon, HP Pavilion Slimline s5-1110 Desktop Computer - Black for $440. The advantage to building your own is that upgrading later to different processors, motherboards, video etc is much easier than in a branded computer.

This post was not meant as a guide to how to build your own system, there are many good guides available on the web.  My main point to this post is how good and how inexpensive the new Celeron G530 processor is.  If you want to build your own system and have some questions leave me a comment and I'll do my best to answer.

What do I do with my tuners now that I no longer record shows on the computer?

  I have 2 tuner boxes and 3 tuner cards.  I have the SiliconDust HDHomeRun Dual High Definition Digital Television HDHR3-US (Black), and a Hauppauge WinTV DCR-2650 Dual Tuner Cable Card TV Tuner.  I use these tuners for watching live TV or for recording a show that I want to watch right away.
  Last night I setup a recording for The Big Bang Theory and we watched it about 15 minutes after the show started as this let us fast forward through the commercials.  So, I still need and want the tuners just not for all of my recording needs.
  If you don't watch The Big Bang Theory I recommend that you download the first season and give it a try, this is my favorite show being aired now.  You can use Google or any torrent search engine to find a torrent with all of season one in one torrent.  See my post about downloading TV episodes for more details.

I no longer record my television shows on the computer

  I still watch them on the computer I just no longer record them there.  Instead of scheduling and recording all of my shows with my tuners I download the shows as bit torrents from the web.  The shows tend to be available the day after they aired, they are high quality and the commercials have been cut out of them.
   Another advantage of downloading verses recording the shows is that the download file tends to be about a quarter the size of the recorded show.  I freed up nearly a terabyte of space on my Windows Home Server by downloading all of the back episodes and deleting my recordings for my series.
  To find bit torrents of your favorite shows you can use torrent search engines or you can use Google.   There is a great guide to setting up your Windows Media Center environment and downloading your shows called Eliminate Cable available from AssassinHTPC.  There were a couple of ideas listed in this guide that I've started using.

My Home Video System is working super well, I am thrilled

  For video playback I now use a computer at each television.  These computers connect to my Windows Home Server to pull or stream video.  The neat thing about this setup is that I can start watching a movie on one computer, stop the playback, move to the other computer and resume watching at the spot I stopped.
  I'm not doing anything special to make this room to room move work, I'm just using one source for all of my video and Windows Media Center (which is in all versions of Windows 7 except basic).  Windows Media Center (also known as WMC) writes a little file to the location where the video file is located noting where you stopped playback.
  Last night we were watching Jungle Book 2 in the front room.  Stopped the movie, moved upstairs to get ready for bed and continued playback.  The cable company wants to charge quite a bit for a DVR that can do this and Windows can do it for free.