Wonky Gibbon Ramblings

I’m a big fan of reusing old kit from the loft (ie tight fisted!) and we’d been wanting a PVR for quite a while. Windows Media Centre PVR’s are often specced to be high performance pieces of kit that can handle the latest games etc… However the actual TV part of the requirement needs next no grunt at all. The spec below is more than capable of recording 2 channels simultaneously whilst playing back a third pre-receorded show – and the heart of it, was recycled from the loft…

Reused bits:

• Soltek 75DRV2 Motherboard (circa 2002)
• AMD Athlon XP 1600+
• 1.0 GB Ram (can run on 512MB – but gets sluggish once you have many recordings to index)
• NVidia Gforce FX5200 Video card (fanless) with TV output (cost £20 when new).

Additional Hardware:

• Big Slow Spinning fan to keep it cool quietly (cost about £15 if I remember correctly).
• Similarly, quiet PSU bought (do you really want a noisy PC in your living room? Nah!)
• A single Seagate Barracuda drive for storage (again quiet) £50
• Twin Black Gold TV cards to encode DVB-T (Freeview) signals £50 each.
• A Silver fronted DVD drive (£20).
• A nice case. To make it a simple build, the normal PC case height. A Silverstone LC17 – this wasn’t that cheap (almost £100).
• You will also need a Remote Control and an IR receiver for MCE. These can be found on ebay.
• If you are going to want to store (or process) the recorded files on other machines, then buy a gigabit LAN card if you don’t have one (£10) so that you can move the files around quickly (they are huge!) – if you opt to do this over wireless you may contemplate suicide.

Software:

You will need a copy of Microsoft Media Centre for XP which you probably can’t buy new anymore. Its quite likely that the Vista version may not run on a machine this low spec as Vista is rather more hungry. But the XP version can be found easily on ebay. Would be interesting to see if the equivalent Windows 7 MCE is efficient enough to run on this when that comes out though…

Surprisingly, MCE doesn’t come with an MPEG decoder built in, so you need to buy some additional software to do these. Some DVD based products such as WinDVD or PowerDVD provide this (usually has to be the pro version, not the ones bundled with cheap DVD drives) – but I bought the cheaest standalone one from NVIDIA (PureVideo Decoder Gold) for $35. You can check compatability of whatever you with with MCE using this download:

All in – up and running for under £400.

Installation Gotchas:

The machine build was a doddle. As was the installation of MCE2005 including the rollup packs and the NVIDIA PureVideo drivers.

Once that is done and stable I’d recommend turning off “Auto Updates” – I’ve been knackered by these several times. If the machine works – why fix it?

If you have a gigabit LAN card, make sure you set Jumbo packet sizes to move data around efficiently (you should do this for all gigabit enabled machines on your network as a matter of course anyway) – this makes a big difference in transfer times.

Install the XVID codec for viewing XVID or DIVX video, dont use ffdshow. This is a shame as ffdshow is a great codec bundle which will allow you to watch practically any video file you will ever come across. Unfortunately it isn’t threadsafe. When you go into the “My Video’s” area it uses these codecs to generate the thumbnails that you see. Mediacentre does this in a multithreaded fashion so that it can be doing many at once, however because ffdshow is not thread safe, it hangs the machine. If you are using XVID’s / DIVX ‘s I would suggest you just install the XVID codec instead which is both free and thread safe.

Power Consumption

Initially, the machine was always switched on. It uses about 100W. I was able to see this on my energy bills in hard cash. So I decided to sort out the management to be more efficient. MCE has all the software control built in to correctly switch itself on and off to record shows. I didn’t realise this originally so setup the BIOS to switch the machine on at lunchtime and off at about 2 in the morning instead, This made some difference to the energy bill.

Then I discovered MCE Standby Tool (available here http://slicksolutions.eu/mst.shtml)  – which makes the Power Management config (that I could have done if I realised through windows control panel) a doddle. This made a big difference to my energy bills once I got it working. The problem I had was that because I had set an automatic startup time in the machine’s BIOS, MCE will not override this – so you’ll never get power management to work. Took me AGES to debug this one. Just wipe the setting in the BIOS – then it all starts working.

By the way, to configure the Audio Surround setup etc, bizarrely its in the DVD setup area!!!

In general the best site for MCE questions and other advice is www.thegreenbutton.com. Very helpful.