Finlen.net

I always had the one tuner in my HTPC and thought wouldn’t it be great to have two? With the arrival of Vista in my house rendering my one card useless (no drivers and old) I decided to get a dual tuner. Having played with the DVICO card I decided to never go near those again so I bought the DNTV Live! Dual Hybrid PCI-E card as my Friend Noel rated it highly.

Installed without issue and indeed had two tuners. Yeah. Of course two was not enough. I found that if two shows were on at the same time and I have a ending buffer of 15mins that both would record over fine. If I then also had a new show on straight after these recordings it would cut on the first recording shorts to start the new recording. If the show was on the same channel then I have the last bit of my show but in a different file. If someone watches this other file and deletes it then its gone and I miss the end of the show (I hate that the TV shows do not run on time!).

So I needed three tuners and the tuner I bought  was only $135 (single tuners are $100 anyway) so I bought another Dual tuner. I am glad I did as there is now no circumstance where my wife cant record a show she wants and cancel my shows. There is hardly ever 5 good shows on at once so I’m good. Most of the time there is only two good shows on at the same time and it works perfectly.

My splitter didn’t work but its an old crappy splitter so Im going to buy one from JayCar and try that instead. At present I have the cable running over the floor to the outlet across the other side of the room. I also had to play with the MCE Tuner applications I found on the XP Media Forums to allow four tuners but I followed the guide of installing two tuners normally, get those working and running with the guide setup then install the second two tuners, run the MCE config application and it was working perfectly!

My 8 inch touch screen arrived from Hong Kong yesterday and it is a thing of beauty and even has the WAF (wife approval factor).

I have a projector and HTPC setup at home that I love but one complaint (especially from Toni) was that the projector took 30 seconds to fire up when all she wanted to do was set up a quick recording or check the guide. I use VNC or remote sessions to login from the study but this is beyond the WAF. So I started looking for a little screen. May be a 10 inch screen. I also had the idea that maybe I could use the screen as a electronic photo frame as I know my wife wanted one of these as well. So I was prepared to pay up to $300 maybe even $400 as the photo frames can be up to $300 anyway. I could find anything cheaper than $600 as they are all for speciality applications. I started to think where else you would find screens like this and my attention turned to car stereo equipment. Many young car lovers now have DVD players and screens hooked up to playstations etc… so I started to look. Of course everything was automatic slide out and really expensive until I found this screen on ebay. Advertised as a GPS screen it also came with a VGA input which many other units didn’t and I needed (DVI being used by the projector and PC’s dont like VGA much). It was also a touch screen which I thought might be handy and even if the touch screen doesnt work at $159 it was the cheapest screen around anyway and cheaper then most digital photo frames.

When it turned up very quickly I was excited. It was great.  Worked immediately as I plugged it into my Vista HTPC it asked for the driver CD and installed correctly. The touch screen works pretty well. Vista MCE is better for touch screen as you have no scroll functionality with a touch screen but the screen is layed out well enough to be able to get to all the major parts easily. One touch to guide, one touch to record etc… The size is perfect as you can be up to 10 feet away with the remote and still see the guide OK (just).

As a bonus I also quickly set up the screen saver in Vista to look in a PhotoFrame directory on my Ethernet harddrive and display photos from it. I then added the directory as a short cut on the study Computer and added it to the send to menu. Now my Wife from within any application can send photos to the HTPC display and it is shown on the screen when you are not using the HTPC. Perfect WAF!

Now to build the cabinet to hold it all in and I’m all done.

Here are some photos of my Home Theatre set up. This first one is of my projector that has been roof mounted via a small 13cm drop white mount. Its very nice and has a full range of movements including swivel, tilt left & right and up & down.

The back is as covered as I could get it. The cords have to plug into the rear and the a cable wound through a wall plate in the roof that just manages to squeeze the HDMI, RCA and Power cables through. They are jammed in pretty tight as shown.

The power cable runs into a new power point installed in the roof space. The HDML and RCA cable are 10meters and run over the roof and down the wall to behind the temporary cabinet that holds my amp and htpc. They run straight through with no breaks or joiner plugs to get the best picture to the projector. Another wall plate at the cabinet brings the cables back into the room. Both are well shielded quality cables that avoid all power cables as much as possible.

The two rear and centre speakers are also cabled through the roof and down the walls to a bracket. At the speaker and wall behind the stereo I have a plate with gold plugs for the speakers so they can be removed if required without touching the cabling in the roof and walls. The speakers are wired using CAT6 network cable that has been twisted with all the colours carrying the left signal and all the broken’s carrying the right signal. Coloured and broken cables are twisted around each other and the whole lot twists through shielding and its solid coper wiring. This apparently provides very good speaker cabling at a fraction of the cost.

I also have a network cable running through a 10/100/1000 Router/Modem all in one that provides GB transfer rates between the HTPC and the PC in the study. I highly recommend this as you tend to transfer a lot of Videos between the two and the speed is great. I also have a 1TB storage device that also runs on the GB network to allow the storage of movies and backups. The HTPC has a 300GB hard drive along with the 1TB network device and its never enough!

Here is a photo from a distance with the flash on.  

This shows Toni’s new red leather lounge with the white projector on the roof. You hardly notice its there until you turn it on. Then you sort of get the idea with a 3 meter screen thrown against the wall. Heres a few shots of the shows last night without the flash on so you see the screen better.

Here is a shot with the flash on. I place a keyboard in front so you can get a perspective on size.

Now I’m not saying that the screen is a perfect image and its only casting onto a very light coloured wall (alabaster coloured)  but the image is better than I expected. Its bright even in the day and at night when the wood venetians are closed it’s perfect. Great for movies and especially sport (the AFL is great and I cant wait till September finals). I can also resize it down during the day to get a smaller image to watch the news, day time soaps and cartoons which creates a much brighter image..not that its needed. It moves from about a 1.2 meter screen (diagonal measured) to a 3.5 meter screen. This gives a maximum of 3 metres across as full capacity. I dont use this as I read an article saying you have to sit twice the distance back from the screen as the width of the screen. So from the back lounge it is 4.5 meters and therefore I use a maximum screen display that is just a tad over 2.2 meters. I found that this is about right as when you are watching movies you can watch comfortably without have to move your head.

I  have the Nintendo Wii hooked up as well and when that’s on and playing tennis in split screen mode I push it out to the full size. It’s excellent and the PGA Tiger Woods Golf 08 game is the best.

We move the Ottomans out from the wall to provide more seating when friends drop over to watch a movie and have a 3 seater and two 2 seater’s that all have recliners on the ends. I am very pleased with the whole set up which will be complete once I get another two tuners and the Blue Ray drive which I want to buy this weekend.

I purchased a new projector the other day from Dick Smiths. They had $600 off the new price and even gave me a discount as I bought some other stuff as well.

Hooked in up with a little hesitation as my wife didnt like the look of the projector in the store as she thought the picture was dull and lifeless. I read the reviews and it said the opposite but the wife test is a hard one to pass.

I was pleasantly surprised! The picture is fantastic during the day and even better at night. Its clear and bright and certainly not lifeless.

Sitting it on my coffee table I was a little disappointed with the whole set up and decided to quickly mount it on the roof. I purchased a reasonably priced mounting bracket that was white and only a 13cm ceiling drop and did that help. Its great being roof mounted and out of the way. I still have to tidy up the cords a bit as they are just hanging at the moment but all in all it looks like it belongs! When you walk in you can hardly notice it and when you fire it up you can stand with 2 meters of the screen and not cast your shadow on it. Its great! All that is left to do is to get the HTPC working correctly and program the harmony remote to co-ordinate switching it on.

I keep forgetting the specifications of my home theatre PC and so I thought if I blog it I will always have it available and maybe someone else will find it useful in building their own home theatre PC as mine is a dream and economical.

Firstly the case is an Antec P150. I looked around and saw many cases that looked 10 times better than mine. Many htpc’s (home theatre PC) cases look very much like stereo equipment with low profiles and slick black finish’s.

This case is nice and all. It has wood grain trim and looks great. These can retail from $500 to $2k for ones with touch screens embedded in them. I got really excited and then realised what I was trying to achieve in my lounge room. Minimal look and make the area look like a lounge room, not a theatre room. Im hiding the whole lot in a nice cabinet so you wont see anything. So I ditched the look and went for function (my mate Jimbo would be proud). What I bought was the Antec P150 which looks like a PC case but is all white and very clean.

But looks wasn’t why I bought it. Its dead silent and unless you are the only one in the room and sitting within 2 feet of it you cant tell its on. The inside hard drive mounts use material bands that a mounted using silicon on the side of the case so the hard drives hang in the case and don’t touch anything but the material hammocks. You can see the silicon grommets from this side shot.

This means no noise. The fan is a large 120mm TriCool speed control fan that I set on the lowest possible speed. The only thing left to create noise is the DVD drive which is old and needs replacing which I will do for a BlueRay drive now the optical medium war is over. The only complaint I had was with Antec as this case, the P150 came with a High Efficiency 430-Watt ATX12V v2.2 Neo HE power supply but many cases dont. You have to buy one separately which just means its hard to compare cases on face value.

Onto the motherboard. As luck would have it I managed to get given a Pentium 3.0 Ghtz processor but on the rare 775 chipset. Luckily I found at the markets a board that suited and it was going cheap as no-one wanted older 775’s. The board is a Gigabyte i-DNA Socket 775 Motherboard . For reference the full model details are as follows;

Gigabyte i-DNA Socket775 Motherboard GA-8N-SLI(Rev 1.1), nForce4 SLI Intel Edition, Supports LGA775 Processor, SLI Ready, Dual DDR2 667, SATA 3Gb/s RAID, Gigabit LAN

It has no graphic card but includes a kick arse Realtek audio device that supports up to 7.1 channels and includes a SPDIF and optical output. I use the optical output as my Stereo supports it using DTS (not Pro Logic which caused me issues but more on that later). The graphics card I bought is over the top for a HTPC but I have a theory which is why I bought it. Its a he NVIDIA SLI Ready GeForce 7600 GT which is pipe cooled and fanless. Fanless is very important as fans make noise and the graphic card fans are very noisy. They spin flat out all of the time even when the graphic card isnt working that hard. Now to my theory…I bought a higher specification than needed (maybe not so much now with Blue Ray HD) so that the graphic card wasnt every working that hard to do 95% of whats needed out of my HTPC. Basically like under-clocking the CPU but without actually under clocking it. Just allowing more head room so the graphic card runs cooler. And my theory has worked so far. I only have 768GB RAM in the PC as I had it lying around. I have just bought another 2GB stick so this should help out. The final two important pieces to the puzzle are the projector (a very nice Panasonic 100AE with a HDMI input) and a remote control which is the Harmony 575 with a MCE remote extender unit plugged in via USB.

Now for the software;

I have run just about every piece of software there is and there is a lot of good and bad htpc or pvr software. It is the most important part of the entire system and can bring all the best laid plans of hardware unstuck instantly. Here is my quick summary of my main picks;

• GB-PVR - Not open source but free with an open API for designing plugins. It works well and reasonably easy to setup. Small but faithful following of users. It is unstable and I have never got a week from it with out it falling over. You might blame XP for this but I can run my XP machine for weeks with needing re-boot. Adding GB-PVR causes this to reduce to a week. The old interface was basic and a little ugly but worked nice and quick for most things. They have a version 2 interface that looks much better but it is slow and the looks are not worth the costs. It was also very iffy with TV card support. I used a DIVCO fusion dual card and it detected it and said it was OK but would always crash when trying to tune the card.
• Media Portal - Media Portal is slightly better with what appears to be a larger following. It has great support for streaming with a client server type arrangement for local networks. Its open source so that’s a plus. It worked well and although occasionally slow was OK. The way it stores recordings is a bit funny and took a while to browse directories but over all it was fairly complete. It was very slow in loading live TV and especially when changing channels. Not sure why but it was slow. The guide was OK but it was hard to remove unwanted channels when all the channels are in the guide and I only wanted 6 out of the 12 (most HD channels in Australia still don’t broadcast anything other than a sample loop).
• MCE 2005 (XP) - Despite being Microsofts first attempt at a PVR it was pretty good. It was at least stable with the XP service Pack two. I know its not free but I do think if you have the money its worth it. Very stable and good support through a few different forums such as “The Green Button” and “Australian Media Center Community“. It has all the major features you want and through the plugins adds the extras such as weather modules and commercial skip and conversion utilities. If you have the cash, buy this.
• Vista MCE - As luck would have it just when I had some spare cash and tax man looming around the corner the first service pack was released for Vista. I always said I would move to Vista when the service pack came out and so I did for the most important piece of computer equipment in my home, the HTPC. Its a great visual improvement and by for the most responsive. Its quick and easy to setup and detected my dual cards with too much drama. I had an issue with sound chip support from Realtek but after one frustrating night find out that it was mainly user error and bad documentation from realtek. Its new UI is great and according to two of my friends, Noel and Mark, its very stable as well. I’m very happy so far. Its supported by the same two forums and many others as XP MCE. Vista have disabled remote connections but there is a hack to fix it that I will try tonight.

So my advice is if you want to stay free try Media Portal. If you already have XP upgrade to Vista Home Premium as its only going to cost you $130 and is worth it! Dont buy the Divco Dual TV Card as its possibly buggy compared to the other cards (I say possibly as it seems to work OK under Vista and MCE 2005). My friend Noel recommends the Kworld PlusTV Dual Hybrid PCIe (DVB-T PE310RF) which I would agree as I had the DNTVLive single tuner card of this same model and have had no issues with these.

I will take some photos tonight of my system in action.

I am waiting on the arrival of a touch screen I have ordered last week whcih will complete the picture. Its a 8 inch touch screen with a VGA input and USB plug for the UI that should work great under Vista.

Its designed for GPS units but for my application should be perfect. I have this idea to use a picture screen saver to make it look like one of those digital photo frames when not in use by the HTPC operations.

This is a photo of Tara swimming in the pool at the oaks festival towers when we went to Peta’s semi-formal school function. Tara really enjoyed the pool and especially loved the new swimmers that included the little skirt.

After buying the projector I also bought the harmony remote which is very cool. A small LCD shows the soft buttons very nicely and the setup was about as good as it gets. Logitec’s software is really cool and works well. The activities were easy to setup and control. The only thing I had issues with was selecting Media Centre XP as the PVR remote. It really wanted to select something else and finding the MCE XP stuff wasn’t as easy as I suspected. It was really easy to change the remote to do other things such as changing the signal selection on the amplifier to do something different. It also looks nice and so far has passed the wife test (although she has had to put up with a lot of crap lately).

Just a quick entry to give an update on my mobile phone. In my last entry I gave a bit of an insight into my purchase of the new nokia N95.

Well so far so good. Its nice and the camera works well.

The good;

• The navigation system is awesome and well worth the extra $100 or so per year.
• The wireless lan is excellent
• Once I found the way to change the front screen its easy to update and customise it the way I want. Its buried in the menu “Tools - Settings - General - Personalisation - Standby Mode”. Once you get here you have to turn On active standby(most likely already on). Shortcuts gives you access to the left and right menus. Active Standby Apps gives you access to the 6 mini icons on the top of the phone. Once you get there its easy. It sort of makes sense after you think long and hard for several hours about it.
• There is an application called “Sports Tracker” thats a very nice GPS and excersie program in one. You can even export the route it traces as you run or ride and put this on Sanoodi (my favorite running site). It looks like experimental software at this stage but it works well so far.

Me being me I have a few suggestions to nokia to help improve the phone. Yes they are picky but considering all Nokia do is design phones I would have expect some of these to be a little better thought out.

• The camera takes forever to start. Its a great camera but sometimes it takes 60 seconds or more. By this stage my 4 year old daughter has lost that cute smile and turned it into something much worse!
• The camera lens opens occasionally when I remove it from my pocket. When this happens it takes ages to shutdown and use the phone. Usually happens when I have an incoming phone call.
• The phone occasionally reboots for no apparent reason. This has happened a few times. Maybe even once every two weeks or so. Im use to the Windows Mobile software so I dont mind too much. Windows Mobile use to reboot twice daily! Its never happened while I have been using it. Usually occurs when I have left it sitting some where.

We packed up our camper trailer and headed off to Dubbo zoo on the long weekend and it was very surprisingly good! I was a little worried as many times the places are not what they are cracked up to be but on this occasion it was great! It was great as my Mum and Dad came along with my sister and her boyfriend Chris. Peta and her first man “Richard” aka Richie, Dick, Dickie or Sunshine also came along which was great to have so much family around. The caravan park we stayed at called “westview” comes highly recommended as the sites are well grassed and excellent shade for our powered sites. Everything was clean and tidy which is about all you can ask for from a caravan park. The zoo was only 3km away and town was around the same. Sites were cheap.

The zoo itself is very large and open and many people drive their cars around. We decided to hire some push bikes which was fantastic (you can also take your own bike as well). It was so good and reasonably priced. I think the bikes are around $15 for the half day and a little more for the caboose style we needed to carry Tara. Biking around the zoo is the only way to see it! It makes it so easy and with the caboose in tow Tara loved it. She is 4 and I thought she might get a bit bored but she enjoyed the ride and even decided to have a quick snooze while a rode along.

I highly recommend people try the Dubbo Zoo and suggest you try riding your bikes or hiring the bikes at the zoo. The feeding times are the best things to go and watch as the animals are much closer to the fences and very active when feeding….especially the hippos as they are much too look at in the water but on land they are amazingly large…..and fat!

Our camper trailer was great but the kitchen I have ordered from Luke at drifta will be a welcome addition. It will make setup quicker and easier and it is especially important to have “everything with a place and everything in its place” when camping. The Kitchen and box will make life much easier!

As soon as I get a chance I will upload the photos to my gallery.

Moving jobs was painful but nothing compared to buying my new phone.

The actual process of choosing a phone is painful. No phone actually has everything you want or need. I certainly couldn’t go back to the Windows Mobile editions of phones. As nice as it might be its still slow and still full of bugs. I had a look around and eventually chose the Nokia N95.

So it looks very nice and has a very nice sliding action. The battery life worried me cause even the guy at Vodaphone suggested it was poor..ish. I read some reviews and decided it might be OK. I only got a day out of my O2 Atom and I survived. I also read a review which commented that an upgrade of the firmware will help with battery life. So far the battery has been OK. Easily got two days of heavy use from it. I charge it most nights anyway. I also thought that the navigation system would be OK to have as Im quite often on foot or in a cab and trying to get to an address for work. I would not normally have my GPS on me but I always carry my phone. It might not work too well but I thought what the hell, why not.

So what’s nice about my new phone;

• Two way slide - Slide the phone up and the screen turns sideways and gives you the media manager with easy play, stop, fwd and rev. Slide it down and the screen flips the other way and you get the keypad back. Slide it closed and the phone locks. Slide it open and the phone unlocks. All very intuitive which is surprising for a phone.
• 5 Mega pixel but with a Carl Zeiss lense - So press camera and 3-4 seconds later the camera is ready to use which compared to my O2 is lightening fast. But the phone turns side ways so you can get the right veiws in normal use. The Carl Zeiss optics works very well and seems to take excellent quality images.
• The GPS and navigator - Surprisingly this works great. I used to navigate to a few places and the instructions are great. Of course you have to pay for the navigation but its only $100+ for 12 months and well worth it.
• The phone is quick - Coming from a Windows mobile world the phone seems lightening fast with most functions.
• In Car holder - The universal holder actually works well.  I will admit that its no docking station which means having to get the car charger, plug it then place it in the dock but the dock works well, its sturdy and the suction cup method sticks fast!
• Menus are slick - The menu rotation is very slick and very well polished.

So what I dont like;

• When I went to upgrade the phone it failed. After reading hundreds of blogs I removed the memory card and it worked. Nice tip!
•  I still havent worked out how to change the options on the front screen. Why would I need the clock on the front screen?
• Changing profiles is hard - To change a profile from General to silent (like I do just before I work into a meeting) is a five step process and takes way too long.
• Turning on bluetooth or Wlan - So I dont have wlan or bluetooth on all the time but when I need it such as a handsfree kit its buried 4 levels deep in the menus.

But so far so good. The phone seems like a winner to me but its early days.