The Blog of Steve

Media Center PC musings

Well after messing around with our Media PC for a bit, I believe that I have finally got it doing everything that I want. It is now hooked up and running with full HDMI goodness.

Some of the set up issues were:

Playback of HD content within Vista Media Center (VCE)

The first bit of wierdness that I encountered with VCE was that when viewing digital TV, standard definition channels would come through fine but for HD channels I would get nothing more than a solid green screen with audio… Upon recording some HDTV I got the same result.

I installed DNTV Live! (which comes with my TinyUSB2 receiver) and attempted to replicate the issue. The problem that I found with this was that I could not get any of the Codecs in DNTV Live to run with hardware acceleration.

After this downloaded a tool that lets you select the Codecs used by Vista for Video and Audio.

http://mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com/2006/07/vista-media-center-decoder-utility.html

Since the sound worked fine already, I left it set on the default. I did however change the Video Codec to the Cyberlink Codec that comes with DNTV Live.

Upon restarting VCE I could view HD channels without issue… Happy days..

Getting Australian EPG information in Media Center

Upon setting up VCE with the channels for my region, it became apparent that Microsoft did not have any EPG set up for VCE to use within Australia.. What a shame..

This disappointment was short lived however as I found that epgstream provides a plugin for VCE that will allow it to use free EPG services like OzTivo and free*EPG.

<strong><a href=”http://www.epgstream.net/”> http://www.epgstream.net/</a>

Installation of Webscheduler

I have been using Webscheduler on my desktop PC for some time now and it has worked fine. Because I have never really had issues with it I have not been keeping up to date with the latest release.

Upon attempting to download the latest version for the Media PC I found that this software is apparently no longer open source… What a shame..

The previous GPL versions however are still available and do the job fine.

Version 4.0.14 (the last free version of DVB Webscheduler can be found HERE

Getting the PC to wake on lan while in Standby

Just one point that I noted with this PC.

I noticed that the PC would wake on LAN (WOL) from either a powered off state or from hibernate. It would not however wake from standby.

This proved most irritating but upon inspection of the Network card (and the switch that it was connected too) as the PC went into standby, it was switching its network card off.

Once the power options of the network card were changed so that it could not be shut down to save power, it would happily WOL from Off, Standby or Hibernate.

Allow the MCE remote to be used as a mouse

Another feature that I wanted to get working was to be able to just use my MCE remote to move the mouse around if required.

I found a great little app that lets you do this which also runs happily under Vista

It can be found HERE

And just for the sake of it, a piccy of the finished product