Good Gear in Big Boxes

Well, looky what just arrived on my desk! An order from m'verygoodfriends at Umart down in Bris!

You may recall we've been having some troubles with our media centre PC at home. Where we last left off, I'd been speaking to Jeffa at Microsoft Oz, who suggested that the hardware I was running was just too old. I had kind of anticipated this, but had hoped he had some magical insights that would let me get out of spending money, but it was not to be!

The most sensible solution seemed to be to upgrade our main PC, and filter it's insides down to the media centre box. That has the dual benefits of significantly upgrading the MCE machine, but gives us the best bang-for-our-buck on our main use machine. And since Windows7 RTM is available for me to download tomorrow via Microsoft's corporate volume license website, I'll be building both machines with Win7 RTM. I've already been using the RC on the MCE machine, and it's been working brilliantly despite the hardware disadvantage, so I've got high hopes.


So - what have we got here??? :)

For the main machine:

• Intel Corei7 920 CPU - full of quad-core goodness. The 920 is the smallest i7 you can get.
• Gigabyte motherboard to suit the i7
• 6Gb GSkill triple-channel DDR3. 6Gb is overkill for day to day stuff, but as I want to get more involved with editing out FullHD camcorder footage, it'll pay big dividends for those sorts of tasks.

For the MCE Machine:
From the main machine:

• Intel Core2Duo CPU - replaces the old Athlon CPU
• Gigabyte C2D motherboard
• 4Gb DDR2 RAM

New from the order:

• Corsair HX-620 low noise power supply - replaces the current old and very noisy PSU
• 1Tb WD GreenPower HDD - plenty of space for recording TV
• Compro Videomate dual DTV tuner card - for recording up to two TV shows at once
• Sapphire video card with integrated HDMI out - includes it's own on-board 7.1 channel sound, and, more importantly, has a passive heatsink to keep the noise down. Also helps to decode FullHD video.

And to tie it all together:

• Netgear 5 port Gigabit ethernet switch. Will allow much quicker network access for music, DVDs and recorded TV shows between the two computers.
  

So between all that hardware, we should have two very capable machines, for not very much money. And with Windows7 x64 loaded onto them both, performance should be pretty good. Plus, we'll be able to take advantage of all the new tricks that Win7 brings to the table, like Libraries, and HomeGroups.

So now the only thing I'm waiting on is for Windows7 RTM to be released via the MS VLK portal, and we'll be away! I'm hoping to be able to hook into this on Saturday afternoon, if everything goes in our favour. I certainly hope it does!

Media Centre IV - The Finale

I've finally sorted the Win7 Media Centre, and it's now working "correctly". After the last post, the machine rebooted, and started again it's "Updating You Library" malarky. After 3 days, it was still going. Previously, I had turned off the "Automatically update your music with information from the internet" option inside WMP12, but HADN'T turned off the same option within Media Centre. It was still trying to download coverart and other such info every time you were to go into the music library in MCE.

Turned that option off, and voila - fixed. Now, whenever you go into the music library, it's pretty much straight up. Scrolling through the library is now considerably faster too - it must have been trying to update the music as you scrolled.

So - if it's all working well, why the inverted commas around the word "Correctly" in the first sentence? Because it's not actually working correctly, but I believe it's working as well as it can. Problems continue to exist, but I can't lay the entire blame at the foot of MCE. For instance:

• When playing an album, the audio output will occasionally (IE, once or maybe twice per song) skip a bit. It'll pause for half a sec while the machine does something more important, then resume. Hard to blame MCE for this when the underlying hardware is so old.

• When playing a DVD, occasionally the sound will drop out for 3-4 seconds. The video keeps going, but the sound stops. The sound comes back, and it's in-sync again (which is good), but it's still annoying. Again, might be a hardware thing, but it's still annoying.
  

• Random reboots whilst playing a DVD. We discovered this one when playing Dora yesterday for the kids. Dunno?

• Random screen blanking. Every now and then MCE will get itself in a knot, and the screen will go black and blank. The system is still responding - plug a mouse in and you get the USB-plugged-in boo-boop! noise, and the cursor move fluidly. But even ctrl-alt-del to bring up task manager takes about 3 mins at this stage, so you're better off just rebooting the machine - it usually needs it even after you've managed to end-task on MCE.

• Random "Windows Cannot Start Media Centre" dialog boxes pop up. Oddly, they pop up when MCE is running, and working faultlessly. Leaving them there doesn't introduce any problems, but why?

• I've not uninstalled MediaPortal yet. Every now and then you'll flick over to the MCE machine on the TV, but instead of MCE on top, it's actually started MediaPortal, and it's on top? There must be a button on the remote that's being mapped through to media portal still? Very odd.

• MCE still has trouble with keeping it's window on top of everything else. It's disturbingly common to switch to the MCE machine and have an AV dialog (or some other warning message) on top, with no way to get back to MCE without plugging in a mouse and dismissing the dialog box. Annoyingly, the remote's OK button won't work for this, despite the "OK" button on the dialog having the focus. Sometimes you switch across and the Start menu/taskbar has the focus, with no way to get back to MCE other than attempt to start a second instance, which then doesn't play well with the running instance.

These currently are my main gripes with the system. The first few are easily blamed on the old hardware - I readily admit that I'm probably under the minimum suggested specs, and would be prepared to upgrade the hardware if it meant a better experience.

However, it's the last few items above which have me worried. In all the years that I ran MediaPortal (even through it's beta builds), I could count on one hand how many time I needed to plug in the mouse, and I'd still have fingers left over. So it's currently not looking so bright for MCE, I'm afraid.

I do, however, love:

• The "Now Playing" screen for music, with the coverart scrolling down behind it.

• Playing a DVD or ripped DVD is simple, and no need to muck about with selecting the right video decoder, or so forth - it all just works. Love that.

• The GUI design of MCE. At first, I wasn't sold, but I like it now - very easy to get around.

• The screensaver - uses your photos from your photo library - nice touch!

Bootnote
I dropped Jeff Alexander from Microsoft Oz an email about the issues I was experiencing, and asked for his suggestions, since he posted a few weeks prior about how much he loved MCE under Win7. He got back to me a few days later, and basically confirmed my suspicions. Running on 7-8yr old hardware that's well under the minimum specs just isn't going to give a good experience, no matter which way you slice it. 4Gb of RAM and a dual-core CPU seem to be the absolute minimum needed, and a quad-core CPU yields even better results. So it looks like I'll need to invest some money into the box to get it to perform how I want it to.

The other thing that Jeff suggested that hadn't even crossed my mind was to upgrade the wired network with a gigabit switch, instead of the hundred-meg switch integrated into my router. This will be a "quick-win", as it's certainly cheaper than the ~$1100 to upgrade the MCE machine, and should make indexing the shares a lot quicker. Also, it should take all the MCE/main computer traffic away from the router, so I might even pick up an increase in my VoIP call quality.

The good thing from this is that it looks like the main big issues I was having above are probably all related to the underlying hardware being unable to cope. Since I've uninstalled MediaPortal, I no longer have issues surrounding it "taking over" the session in front of MCE, but still experience random error messages popping up on screen, closing MCE and taking the focus. Library population is now much quicker than it was, but still takes too long to be usable, especially the music library. Scrolling through takes ~10 seconds per single right-button-press to move one album at a time. Again, a combination of increased bandwidth on the LAN, coupled with more CPU horsepower should see issues like this disappear, with any luck.

The items from the "Things I love" list above have really grown on me more now though - it really is a slick system. I just hope I can get it running right, and then will be able to really enjoy it.

Media Centre III - The Reckoning

Well, we've made some headway with my Media Centre trial! After the PC spent a week "Updating Media Library...", it's finished! And it works! I didn't change anything - I jsut left both machines on for a week, and left them alone. Even if I change some ID3 tags, or move some mp3's around on the source PC, it only takes a 5 mins to update the library on the media centre machine, and then it's right again! I had feared that it would require another week to sync up, but it seems to be smarter than that. I had turned off the "Retrieve additional information from the Internet" option on the media centre machine, but I'm not sure if it actually made a difference. I'm planning on turning it back on, and seeing if it needs to re-index the share.

So why did it take a week to do it's initial sync? No idea! Am I happy that it's finished? Yes!

The hardware is starting to show through a bit now - scrolling through the media library is slow, and occasionally the music playback will pause for a second as the PC needs to do something more important. But overall, I think it's acquitted itself very well, given the very old and basic hardware that it's being run on. It certainly is running better than I expected, and better than it has any right to. I might try upgrading the RAM to more than the 1Gb that it's currently got, but I suspect it's still mainly CPU bound.

Media Centre, however, has past the acceptance test. Jess was using it over the weekend, and was easily able to find the album she wanted to play and get it going. I particularly like the "now playing" screen with the album art scrolling down in the background - very visually effective, and good for our plasma TV, since the screen image is constantly changing.

The next step will be to budget for an upgrade to the main PC, which will allow us to shuffle it's current insides down to the media centre machine, and give it a fair upgrade in the power stakes. I'm reasonably confident that that will see Media Centre start to really hum along. In the meantime though, even with the slight performance issues, it's sold on me.

Windows 7 Rocks, Media Centre Doesn't

Last week I downloaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate. I had briefly used the Beta earlier in the year, and was mightily impressed with it. On a 6 yr old laptop it installed perfectly, without needing any drivers. And it ran considerably quicker than the previous XP install ever had. So I had pretty high hopes for the RC and the subsequent released product.

One of my main drivers for downloading the RC was to install it on my home theatre machine. It's currently running XP Home with MediaPortal installed to take care of the UI and remote control functions. It works really well, and allows me to have all my mp3s, DVDs and other media stored on my main PC, and watch/listen to them all in the lounge. However, it's not without it's issues. Chief amongst them is it's very inconsistent DVD playback ability, and the fact that it takes a long time to load the (rather large, but not as large as some) mp3 folder across the network. And not to mention the grumpy old audio drivers that every time I rebuild it take me a couple of hours to get it to use the coax SPDIF output in any meaningful sense.

I've been thinking of upgrading both machines to Vista, and using the Vista Media Centre on the HTPC box. My concern with this plan was that the HTPC machine wouldn't have anywhere near enough grunt to run Vista acceptably. It's an old Athlon2400+, with 1Gb of DDR Ram, and a Nvidia 7600GS graphics card. The graphics card isn't very old, but the rest of the machine is around a 7yr vintage. Certainly not cutting edge. One option was to upgrade my main PC to a new Core i7 setup and move it's Core2Duo brains into the HTPC machine, but that was an $1100 option, and hence not very attractive. By using the Windows 7 RC install though, I had the chance to see how it would run on the old hardware, as well as try out the Media Centre functionality, all for free.

The Windows 7 install was a mixed bag. It took a VERY long time, but keep in mind this is on older hardware that it's really designed for. First time through the install failed when the machine rebooted to continue the install in Windows. An error about corrupted files had me doubting whether the download or subsequent burned DVD install media were corrupt. Restarting the install from scratch though saw it install perfectly fine, which was pleasing. I still don't know what caused the problems first time through - I certainly didn't do anything differently the second time.

The biggest surprise, and what impressed me the most, was that Win7 detected ALL the hardware in the old clunker. The weird old onboard sound with it's coax output - 100%. As soon as the machine booted, I had system noises coming out the big speakers via the Sony receiver. The 7600GS AGP graphics card - 100%. All features enabled, all ready to go, and the res set to the maximum that the plasma TV can handle on it's VGA input (1280x1024). The XP Media Centre remote and IR receiver - 100%. Including all buttons mapping through the main shell, so you can navigate around in Windows with the remote if you wanted to.

So very impressed with Windows 7 itself. It takes a good while to boot on the old machine, but once up and running, things happen quite quickly. You wouldn't want to use it as your every day machine, but for it's intended role, it's perfect.

However, this is where we start going downhill. I fired up Media Centre, and set it up. Music and Movie folders were pointed at the network shares on the main PC (which Vista had automatically discovered and knew about - much nicer than XP!). However, the following issues soon raised their heads:

• My mp3's are sorted into a standard folder structure - \\music\artist\album\files. As such, I've never payed much attention to ID3 tags, since I've always just navigated the folder structure that way, and played an album by playing all files in a folder. MC doesn't work like this. There's no way to make it view the files as they present on the disk. Everything is sorted by ID3 tags, which are either not present, or wrong. So there's a lot of fixing up needed there. But that's not really MCE's fault.
  

• Either due to the low spec of the HTPC machine, or the speed of the 100Mbps wired ethernet network, when you go into the Music Library in MC, the display will freeze up. It'll show the first page of albums, then freeze. Button presses on the remote control will eventually be processed, but after 5-6 mins. Basically, MC just locks up and goes non-responsive for an amount of time. No matter how long you leave it, it doesn't get better. I thought that MC worked off a local database that indexed and referenced the file shares, in the same way that Media Player on a PC does? Apparently not. Whilst MediaPortal would take a couple of minutes, then eventually read all the remote files, Media Centre just seems to get itself in a knot, and locks up completely.

• There's no way to play netradio in Media Centre? There's a Radio option, but it tells me I need an FM tuner to listen to radio. This is a big one for me, as I like listening to international netradio on a Saturday morning whilst doing chores around the house.

• Media Centre doesn't seem to be able to stay on top. Often, after resuming from an overzealous screensaver, Media Centre had dropped from the foreground app, which left the remote control operating on the Win7 Start Menu and seemingly unable to get back down to the task bar. Thinking it would be smart enough to pick up the running instance, I had no choice but to click on the Media Centre icon on the Start Menu. Unfortunately it wasn't that smart, and so then I had two instances of Media Centre running on the one PC, which only a reboot could straighten out.

They're the main issues. Nothing wrong with Windows 7 at this point - it's just Media Centre that's playing up. I don't know whether it's the old hardware that's at fault, or if it's the network playing up. But at this point in time, Media Centre looks to be a bit of a bust. It's too inconsistent, it's too flakey in it's operation, and it just plain doesn't work with my mp3s across the network.

In it's defence, I did like :

• DVD playback. Playing back a DVD that had been ripped to the main PC across the network was bliss. No need to muck around with installing DVD decoders, no need to change the decoder to a special one that came with the DVD drive's software to avoid stuttering, anything like that. Point it at the DVD, and it plays. no mess, no fuss. Love that.
• Coverart. Media Centre seems to play much nicer with the coverart for CDs that have been ripped to mp3s. It just works, which is nice.
• Music - playing a CD. When you can manage to get it working with a folder of mp3's ripped from a CD, I love how you simply "click" on the album with the remote, and the list of tracks opens up in a new window, with a handy "play all" button. And the new "Now Playing" screen with the coverart in the background is beautiful.
• TV integration. This is not something I've played with yet, but I want to invest in a dual digital tuner card at some stage in the near future, and record TV that I'd like to watch. Even though I couldn't actually try it out, Media Centre impressed me with it's deep integration of TV services, EPGs, burn to disc or convert to iPod/PMP formats. I suspect that this alone might bring me back to Media Centre in the future.
  

For now though, I'm experimenting with a hybrid setup. I wanted music to play in the background for the mother's day brunch we had at our place, and MC wasn't working. So I quickly installed Media Portal on Win7, and that worked fine. I've not tried playing a DVD or anything, but at least I can see my mp3 folders, and can play an album, and it all works. I've still got some bugs to iron out, such as clicking the "Home" button on the remote inside MediaPortal actually launches a new running copy of Media Centre, instead of taking me back to the MediaPortal home screen. And the Back key on the remote doesn't work. And the music vis doesn't work anymore, by the looks of things.

So it's still a bit of a dogs breakfast, so to speak. I'm going to try to sort it out this week by removing Media Centre from the installation, and seeing if I can get MediaPortal playing nicely on the Win7 RC base. I hope so, because the device integration and support of Win7 is excellent. Whilst it takes longer to boot than the previous XP install, I feel it's snappier once loaded, and the networking seems rock solid. So I want to persevere with Win7, if at all possible. Hopefully once MC is uninstalled, MediaPortal will take full control of the remote, and assign all it's keys back to itself, and we'll be rocking and rolling.

There's still some things about MediaPortal I don't like - it's still slow to open up the Music share across the network, for instance. However, I think it's probably the best of a bad bunch for my needs. I did consider using XBMC, but it has no support for recording TV, which is a definite contender in the near future. MediaPortal has quite robust TV support, but I suspect it's not as slick or as polished and integrated as Media Centre is.

So we shall see. In the meantime though, the score is firmly planted at :

Windows 7 : 1
Windows XP : 0

and
Windows Media Centre : 0
MediaPortal : 1 (just 'cause it, you know, actually kinda works)

(Bootnote - after having this blog set up for ages, and not actually using it for work purposes [despite having half a dozen half-finished articles written in draft], I've decided to use this as my technology-specific blog. It'll be my nerd corner, as opposed to a strictly work-related blog. So expect to see articles such as this, which is clearly home-based, intermingled with interesting tid bits taken from my day to day wranglings with technology in a SME environment. Hope it's interesting!)