Doug Welzel

Life with the new Media Center box is going well.  The only downer has been the recent news from Comcast, which I recently posted about.

Anyway, having a full PC in the family room has turned out to have some unexpected benefits, such as:

• Easy to open a web browser to check something out, such as the weather, etc.  It isn’t a good browsing experience but is good enough for quick information.
• Make it easy to consume various online video services.  Services like Hulu are only accessible through a browser.  That made it a no-go when I was using the XBox, but not anymore.  This is just one example.

All in all I’m still very happy with it..  now excuse me.. I have to get back to a very good looking blu-ray movie. :)

If you’re a cable customer you’ve protected from the big digital switch that is happening soon.  Comcast has been advertising that their customers won’t need converter boxes or even have to worry about the switch.  Well, that isn’t completely true and it sounds like some of the changes they have in store could be a mess for users of Windows Media Center, Tivo and similar systems.

According to an article on the Seattle Times, Comcast is planning on moving some of their extended basic channels to digital (they are currently analog).  With this change, essentially no existing tuners will be able to receive the new channels.  This is true even if you have a new TV with a digital tuner.  The channels are in a different “format”, if you will.

My understanding is that Comcast will provide, for free, a very simple set top box that will decode the new channels.  That is great, unless you use something like Media Center because the tuners in your MCE box will no longer be able to handle the signals. 

I’m pretty sure a possible workaround to this situation would be to use an IR blaster setup.  If you’re not familiar, an IR blaster simply mimics pressing the buttons on a remote control.  Media Center changes channels by using an IR blaster to tell to the decoder box to switch channels.  You would need a separate decoder box for each tuner in your MCE box.  It is a messy solution, but has been known to work.

Now, we’ll see how all of this plays out.  Comcast hasn’t been very specific about any of this, so I’m just passing on things I’ve heard or reasoned out.

The bigger problem is that I’m incredibly irritated at the situation.  I just spent a fair amount of money to build a brand new Media Center box, which could be rendered much less useful.

I have been starting to research the IR blasting solution, but I’m increasingly thinking about dumping Comcast completely.  Most of the shows my family watches are on major networks, meaning they are available in HD for free over the air.  The cable channels are nice, but I really don’t watch them that much. 

On top of everything, there are plenty of great options for getting content, many of which are online.  The options I have available to me right now include:

• Hulu.com
• Netflix
• Netflix streaming to XBox
• Amazon Unbox
• XBox Live Marketplace

I’m sure this is not even close to exhaustive, but I use all of these regularly and get everything I want.  So I wonder, what does Comcast have that I need?  They are potentially breaking my Media Center setup, or at least making it much more complicated, only to get content I don’t really need or want.  Yep, I think it might be time for a change.

I remember looking at helmet cameras a few years ago, but they were prohibitively expensive.  The other day, this camera caught my eye in an REI catalog.  For $120 you get a camera that can record 60 minutes of 640x480 video.  That is pretty amazing.

Forget the daredevil mountain bike videos, I want one of these to record my commutes in the event of an accident.  I’ve wanted this for years and it is actually affordable.  For about $250 you could buy two and have a forward and rear facing view.  Totally worth it, imo.

I might just grab one and try it out.  I’d be curious to see how it works at night, in the rain, etc.  What do you think?  Overkill?  Having been hit by a car myself, I tend to think not..

A while back I did a fresh install of Vista on a two drive system.  I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but due to the way the drives were connected, the core OS ended up on one drive and the system partition (containing all the boot stuff) ended up on the other.  That was fine until I wanted to remove that drive from the system.  It wasn’t being used for anything and I wanted to make use of it with Windows Home Server.

All I needed to do was move change the system partition from one drive to another.  Seemed like an easy task, but it took some digging to figure it out.  In the end it was simple, but if it helps anyone, here are the steps that worked for me:

1. Back everything up (you always do this anyway, right?)
2. Run Disk Management and set the desired partition to Active
3. Shut down the machine
4. Disconnect the drive that contains boot partition
5. Change your BIOS to boot off of the drive that will be the new system partition (this wasn’t necessary for me, but may be for some)
6. Boot using the Vista CD, select “Repair your Computer”
7. When the installations asks you if you want to repair and restart your machine, select No
8. Select Next
9. Select Command Prompt
10. At the command prompt, run: bootrec /rebuildbcd
11. Once this is complete, restart again using the Vista CD and select Repair your Computer (again)
12. Select Startup Repair (this boots the boot manager and other stuff into the right place)
13. Select Finish
14. All done

With all of the parts in hand I started working on assembling and configuring the system.  Putting all the hardware together is essentially a no brainer.  You just bolt everything into the case, wire it up and off you go.  Even though it is easy, I still find it to be great fun.  The only mistake I made was installing the CPU heatsink after the motherboard was installed in the case.  With the motherboard installed, there was very little finger room around the heat sink and securing the clips wasn't easy.

Once the hardware was installed I fired it up to take a look at the BIOS and make sure everything was reasonable.  Check.  Everything came on as expected.  No sparks or smoke and the BIOS reported everything I expected.  I was immediately impressed by the low noise level of the Antec case.  Even with the top open I could barely hear the fans.

The fun started as soon as I tried to set up the RAID array for the OS.  Through the BIOS I configured a single RAID 0 array out of the two 1.5T drives in the system.  I noticed the array wasn't marked as bootable, but ignored that.  Vista, however, seemed to find that important and wouldn't recognize the array as a valid partition.  After some trial and error and a lot of searching, I found that the primary partition can't be over 2TB.  So, I ended up creating a 50 GB array for Vista and a second array for the Media Center content.  Problem solved and only a couple hours wasted.

Once Vista was installed, I grabbed a copy of TV Pack 2008 (look around the net and you can find it), installed it and started configuring Media Center.  TV Pack makes tuner configuration a breeze.  It found my clear QAM tuner without a problem and set up the channels correctly.  The only issue I had was that it only found one of the system's 2 QAM tuners.  At this point I still haven't resolved this issue, which I think is a driver problem, but the system is good enough. 

The only other change I made to Media Center was to enable the DVD Library tweak.  This allows Media Center to show an entire library of DVDs sitting on your hard drive.  Note, this only works for standard (not high definition) DVDs.  More on this below.

So at this point, Vista was installed and Media Center was up and running.  I should have been about to wrap up my project, but oh no... I was not that lucky.  All I had to do was look at my TV to see the huge problem I had yet to address -- the image was clipped on all sides. 

A little digging lead me to understand that this is called overscan, and is totally normal.  Great, totally normal, but how do you fix it?  The answer totally depends on your system, specifically your video chipset.  It sounds like various video cards ship with tools for correcting overscan.  My system has an Intel G45 chipset, which is quite new and has no such tools. 

Over the course of the next few days I managed to find a few obscure web pages and some utilities that would solve my problem.  Ultimately I needed to create a custom resolution for my screen.  Most of the tools do this automatically, but I found myself using some crude tools and literally editing hex lines deep inside some hidden registry keys.  It was an absolute nightmare and I'm more that a little irritated that Intel didn't provide these utilities, but the tools did the trick and my overscan problem is history.

At this point, Media Center was up and running (wait, haven’t I said that already?).  Well, for all intents and purposes, it was fully functioning box and bonus, you could see the entire screen.  I let the system bake for the next few days and then got to work on setting up the blu-ray player.  Unfortunately blu-ray support isn’t built into Vista, so you have to turn to third party software.  The consensus seems to be that both PowerDVD and ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre are good products.  Even though PowerDVD doesn’t have a Media Center plug-in, I decided to go with it over ArcSoft’s product.  Why?  Well, they both seemed about the same from a software perspective, but I had a much better experience dealing with Cyberlink.  They have a great website and good customer support.  I found ArcSoft’s site to be less than inspiring and their support was a nightmare. 

As I mentioned, PowerDVD doesn’t have a Media Center plug-in, so you need to start it manually when playing blu-ray discs.  The good news is that the Media Center remote works with it, so the experience is pretty seamless once you fire it up.

The final step was to figure out how to rip my blu-ray movies so they could be played directly from the Media Center box.  It looks like AnyDVD is the way to go in this department and it works like a charm.  Unfortunately PowerDVD can’t directly play the ripped files.  To make it all work I had to rip the discs to an ISO image and then use SlySoft’s Virtual CloneDrive product (free) to mount the ISO image.  Once it was “mounted”, PowerDVD was able to play it without a problem. 

Even though the BR playing works great, it is by no means a seamless experience that the rest of the household could handle.  Hopefully once of these days I will be able to through together an MCE plug-in which automates all of this, but for now it is manual operation.

And so that’s it.  The box has been running without a problem for several weeks.  I haven’t made any changes to it aside from configuring it to back up to Windows Home Server.  The project ended up taking much longer than expected due to the various software issues I hit, but was ultimately a success.  In the final edition of this series I’ll look at some of the unexpected benefits of having a full PC hooking up to your television.