Polska Brain Jelly

My WMC PC build was just about finished when my last post was written, I was just needing a mono 1/8th inch to rca adapter so I could use my Audigy card for surround sound audio.  Radio Shack conveniently had an adapter, and so I got home and connected my computer to my A/V reciever.  After around three hours of hunting and tweaking and some horrid digital static sound that will haunt me for years to come, I finally got the s/pdif out to work on that freaking Audigy card.  It worked well for about a week, then one day, for no other reason that I changed channels, that damned digital static sound came back.  I spent another three hours trying everything I could remember and everything I could think of to get rid of it.  Nothing except that damned horrific digital static.

I pulled out an old Sound Blaster Live! card because it also had digital out.  Too bad for me there aren’t any drivers or support for it since XP.  Strike two.

Fuck it.  I’m getting a card that I know will work with Windows 7.  Amazingly enough, there’s not a lot of information on cards known to work (much less work well) with Windows 7.  There were of course the X-Fi and Xonar fanboys extolling the virtues of their particular cards, but after all the crap that I have had using Creative’s cards recently, and not wanting to spend more on a Xonar card than I have on the entire rest of the build, I opted out of those options.  I decided on the Diamond Multimedia Xtreme Sound (oooh, it’s Xtreme!) XS71DDL.  This has onboard dolby digital decoding and optical out.  And from what I had read on the Inter-tubes it works with Windows 7 (or more specifically, the C-media chip the card is based on works with Windows 7).  Whip out the card and NewEgg makes more money.

Five days later (ordered it over a weekend) I get the card in.  Rip out the Audigy, and slap in the Xtreme Sound (it’s sooooo Xtreme!).  Windows Update doesn’t have any native drivers, so I grab the disk.  Only Win XP, 2000 and MCE are listed.  Great.  I take a chance and put the disk in anyway.  No go.

Head over to Diamond’s website and look for drivers there.  No Windows 7 drivers, but the driver framework is pretty much Vista anyway, so I grab the Vista drivers.  They install fine and I have analog sound.  There isn’t any custom sound app installed with those drivers, so using the built in sound manager in W7 I find there is no way to activate digital only.  It shows the digital out, but it’s not directing anything out of it, and there’s no way to force it.

Uhg!

Head over to C-media’s website.  Look for drivers.  Look on Google to identify which chip the Xtreme Sound (did I mention this card was Xtreme!) uses becuase Diamond doesn’t say (shh, it’s a secret), and then download the W7 beta drivers.  Uninstall the card, reinstall with new drivers.  Hey look, a custom sound manager was installed.  Hey look, it allows me to specify s/pdif.  Hey look, it works!  Holy crap!  It works!  It’s working correctly!

I cry tears of joy as I dance upon the Audigy card and speak of how if its lineage were shown as a tree, it would be all trunk.

Finally, I have surround sound that works.  Just a tip, if you have an Xtreme Sound (it’s really Xtreme!, you have to believe me), forgo the crap-tastic drivers that come from Diamond and go to C-Media’s site to download them. They are so much better.

Looking through some archived emails (searching for the CBC key that I finally found the software to) I found an email a friend of mine (nicknamed Big Red Monkey) sent to me when we were playing Sword of the Stars regularly.  Below is the email in all of it’s comedic glory.  It was sent as an intimidation email, I usually play the Liir (dolphin like race), and he usually played the humans.  That will put the email into more perspective.  Behold, I doth shiver in my fishbowl: (continue reading…)

Uhg, my sleep schedule is so screwed up right now, and to top it off, I have school starting tomorrow.  That’s what I get for staying up until 4:00 AM Friday night and then taking a four hour nap Saturday because I was so tired from waking up too early that morning.  Now, since I slept until noon today, I’m really going to be zombie-riffic tomorrow for class.  Yay!

After a few months of research into the options for media PCs, I finally found an option that I wanted to go foward with.  The only thing left to do was put all the pieces together and see what the puzzle looked like.

To start, I needed a computer.  Not wanting the expense of building one from scratch, I had an Emachines Media Center PC lying around that I figured would fit the bill for a testbed.  After my research, I knew that I would be using Windows 7, so I wiped the Windows Media Center 2005 off the hard drive and installed Windows 7 Ultimate RC.  It also came with only 512MB of RAM, so I bumped that up to 2.5GB with sticks I had around the house.  From here, I hooked it up to the tv using the d-sub connector and commenced to testing.  Windows 7 installed without a hitch and recognized all of the hardware so no drivers needed to be installed.  An antivirus download and an update later and I was ready to test Media Center.

Media Center ran well for the most part.  It was a little sluggish on screen transitions, and starting videos was time consuming, but other than that, it ran okay.  I had already figured on upgrading to a PCI Express video card, and this confirmed that it was needed.  I also needed to get a tuner card, and I decided on a cheap NVidia GeForce 8400 and a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1600.  I also ordered a Media Center remote because the tuner didn’t come with one that worked with Media Center.  I also was dismayed to find out that the board didn’t have an S/PDIF connector on it (the MSI boards that Emachines installed appearently were stripped down versions, this one doesn’t have S/PDIF in or out or the extra surround sound connectors on the board).  So I found an old SoundBlaster Audigy card and slapped it in the third and final slot (other than the PCIe x1 slot).  Now I will have digital audio that can run to my A/V reciever and surround sound speakers.

After installing all of the hardware, I also download Windows 7 Professional RTM through my MSND account and set forward to perform a clean install and get everything going.  The install went okay, although finding the correct drivers for the Audigy card was a little frustrating.  So with everything installed, I take the freshly installed cable from the back of the set top box Suddenlink installed and split it and hooked it up to the Media PC.

After running the TV signal setup in Media Center, I get… nothing.  No signal.  Great.  I take the lead out of the tuner card and hook it to the digital box.  Nothing.  Take the splitter off and hook it back to the digital box.  Cable.  Okay, so there must be enough signal loss when splitting that the tuner can’t read the signal.  So I dig out a signal amplifier and hook that up before the splitter, hook the leads to the tuner card and run the TV signal setup again.  This time I decide to run both the analog and digital setups.  Signal detected, channels added!  Whoohoo!

Only, the digital channels it picked up weren’t the digital channels it was supposed to pick up.  It seemed to pick up the analog equivalent of the digital channels and assign them to the digital numbers.  It was a mess.  Not only that, but I had no idea how Suddenlink mapped their digital channels.  Just to make sure it wasn’t a signal problem, I hook the split feed into my TV.  I run setup and it picks up both the analog and digital channels and maps them correctly according to Suddenlink’s channel guide, all without my intervention.  Huh.  Too bad my tuner card can’t do that.  Back to the Internet to look and see if I can find how the channels are mapped (my TV automatically mapped the digital stations to the 700 numbers, so I couldn’t go off of that).  Three hours later I finally find a site (thank you SiliconDust!) that shows the correct channel numbers along with their station names.  So I spend the next two hours manually adding the missing digital stations (my local HD channels) and combining and cleaning up the analog and digital signals it did pick up.

I now have an operational Media PC.  The guide is accurate and works well.  I also downloaded a utility that inserted the station logos.  Windows 7 Media Center is running very well with the hardware I installed.  Despite the troubles I had getting everything up and running, I am enjoying my unified media experience.  I have Windows 7 running on my main PC as well, and it has many Gigs worth of music and videos, so with HomeGroup I’m able to share those files with my Media PC.  All said, I’m enjoying it.

I have to wonder why Microsoft and others haven’t streamlined this and made it more available.  This type of frustration is only going to be overcome by enthusiasts and techies.  If Media PCs are going to take off, the complexity (which isn’t too bad now) needs to be reduced, and there needs to be many more options on integrating more TV feeds (digital cable (although there is CableCard, from what I have read it’s even more of a pain to set up and the equipment is many times cost prohibitive), satellite (DirecTV had a project going with a Media Center tuner, but that has been dropped.  Only Project Draco, which is Dish Network’s Media Center tuner, is still viable) and IPTV (still in it’s infancy, and there has been some success in getting U-Verse and Fios running in WMC) into the Media Center environment.

There is money to be made here, and I can’t fathom why there hasn’t been more of a push to go get it.

My only wish is that I had more HD programming.  My local HD stations suck. It’s severe storm season, and every time they do a weather watch overlay, the channel switches to an SD feed, so the shows that I should be getting in HD are now SD because the monkeys running the TV stations here can’t figure out how to overlay a digital image on a digital signal (except for the CBS affiliate, they seem to get it right, but who watches CBS).  Now that I know everything is working and my vision is complete, I will be doing incremental upgrades to the system, starting with a new case that is a little more pleasing to the decor than the old Emachines case.

My last post detailed my ambition to unify my media experience using Microsoft Media Center.  It also detailed some of my frustration (along with others) on making that possible.

It seems that in the last eight years since Media Center came out it’s been hit or miss on bringing together all aspects of your entertainment center into one box.  The digital transition and DRM (uhg!) has complicated things even more.

The first option that I looked at was cable.  The local cable company is Suddenlink, and to say their website is lacking is an understatement at best.  No information other than basic info on what services they offer and contact information.  So I contact Suddenlink and inquire on how much high definition programming would cost.  After picking my jaw up off of the floor, I decide to look elsewhere.

Knowing the DirecTV doesn’t have locals in my area, I turn to Dish Network.  Their site is much, much better than Suddenlink’s, detailing all of their packages and offerings, and how much they cost with and with out their promotions.  The cost for their hd offerings is reasonable, so I decide that I will go with Dish Network.  However, knowing that I will be tied to a contract for at least a year, I decide I need to do some additional research on the cost of tuner cards to integrate the feed into the media pc.  This is where things got confusing and frustrating.

The first obsticle I found was there is no tuner card for Dish Network (or DirecTV for that matter) that integrates their feed into a media pc.  There are sattelite tuner cards (DVB-S), but those only feed free stations and they don’t work with Dish Network (they, from what I can tell, are really only useful in Europe).  Okay, so I have to deal with their tuner box, that’s fine.  There is a neat little gadget called in IR Blaster that will handily interface with Media  Center and change the channel on a set top box as needed.  So I start searching for a high definition tuner card that I can hook up the Dish Network box and use Media Center with.  I find one.  Just one. Well, that’s not exactly true, I did find another solution that worked with certain set top boxes that was a do-it-yourself kit, but it was way more work than I wanted and it would only work if they gave a compatible box, which I couldn’t be sure of.

Anyway, the one box I found that could record high def signals was the Hauppauge HD-PVR.  Yay!  Wait, it’s not compatible with Media Center?  Boo!  Oh, it’s because Media Center doesn’t support the h.264 format?  But Windows 7 Media Center does!  Oh, but we don’t know when (if ever) we will support Windows 7 Media Center.

What?  You have the opportunity to be the first (and only) company to offer HD recording for satellite and cable users (for those that don’t have CableCard) and you are sitting on your thumbs when it comes to support in Media Center?

Uhg!  Okay, next.

There is a project that was announced about a Media Center tuner built just for Dish Network.  Project Draco shows incredible promise, and could finally mean an easy, ready made way to get your Dish Network programming into Windows 7 Media Center.  However, there is little to no information about the project other than a few tidbits that were released many months ago.  Not only that, but it probably won’t be available before the consumer release date of Windows 7 in October.

*Sigh*

Back to cable.  I choose to forego the HD for now because I don’t have a mint in my garage.  Doing a little more research and grilling a Suddenlink cable guy I find out that the local HD stations are available through the extended basic package, and that they multicast their digital signal with an analog signal, so with a tuner card with both NTSC and ATSC/QAM, I can get all of the cable stations I subscribe to in Media Center.  Finally, I’m getting close to my vision.

I call and subscribe to cable.  I look at the bright side: I don’t have a contract so if this goes bust I can cut my losses and cancel, and if the Dish Network tuner card does come to fruition, then I can switch over then without any hassle.  It’s a win-win of sorts.

The final post in this series will detail the massive headache it was to get the cable stations programmed into Media Center and the results so far.