New adventure worth blogging about!
It has been two months since my last blog entry. And not a lot entries prior to that, so my “blog record” is already a bit tarnished. Well I am excited to announce… our family is moving! Not out of the state or anything crazy like that (yet), but just minutes away to an older rural neighborhood with a couple acres for all of our 4H animals and horse and such. So why is this a big deal to the blog?? Because the new house is 30 years old and has NO technology infrastructure or functions at all. This gives me an opportunity to basically start from scratch. I’ll be documenting and posting many new things over the next couple months, including:
In wall speaker installation and reviews
Cat5e cabling and termination
Wireless N AP placement
Video Surveillance
Centralized tuners and distributed HD content over HD
and… most shocking…. moving off of Microsoft Media Center to Sage TV. Gasp!
All of this has the tremendous potential to rock the foundation of the WAF as I know it. But I am confident the journey will be entertaining, and hopefully my experiences (good and bad) will help another man on his quest to achieve WAF-tastic-ness!
Upgrading my home VMC to 7MC… fingers crossed
Over the last few years, my experience with melding technology and my family led me to create some key rules. The most important rule to obey is this: Always test new stuff in a far away lab before unleashing it at home on my wife and kids.
Today I am upgrading the trusty old Vista Media Center “server” that has Digital Cable-Card Tuners, ATSC tuners, and all bazillion-and-a-half hours of our recorded TV shows. Unfortunately, and not just because I don’t like following my rules, I didn’t test this first. Sure, I have been running W7 since January and have at least 10 different installs under my belt, but those have all been “clean” installs… not upgrades. My real excuse for not testing first is that CableCard tuners require a specialized BIOS in an expensive OEM PC, not to mention they require an expensive cable service subscription and the expensive tuners. So it isn’t like I could really mock up my environment in my remote lab very easily. Regardless, if this upgrade goes badly, the WAF will take a major hit and no one will care about the above expensive reasons.
My one saving grace is that I did have the forethought to tweak the original machine (an HP m9000t) by adding a RAID 1 pair of harddrives for the OS (TV is on a third larger drive). I unplugged one of the drives before I started this morning. If the upgrade fails miserably, I should be able plug the drive back in and rebuild Vista. So, here I am, typing up this blog because I started at 9am… and it is still going at 10:10. Fingers crossed!
—Update—
It’s 3:30pm, and all seems a-ok! Of course the wife and kids returned before the upgrade was complete, and I had to deal with some weeping and gnashing of teeth when their TV wasn’t working… but I suppose I should have expected that since I didn’t even warn them that I was going to be “tinkering”. (Rule 2 – Always communicate any potential tinkering prior to the actual tinkering.) The only slight problem I encountered with the upgrade was that W7 did not recognize the Cable Tuners (heart skipped a few beats briefly), but quickly found the resolution on the trusty GreenButton forums here. Everything seems to be working great now, the kids only mildly complained about the “new look and sounds” from the Extender interface, and I also installed MyMovies3 (awesome upgrade from version 2x!) and MyChannelLogos (nice aesthetic plugin to the guide). So far so good!
My fifth RRoD?
I’ve took the whole Media Center vision bait; hook, line, and sinker. We only consume media (live tv, DVR, movies, music, etc) via Extenders connected to my Media Center server. We were watching a movie with the kids last night in the master bedroom when all of a sudden the screen goes to a crazy mosaic pattern and a loud screech emitted from the speakers. Yikes! I immediately though RRoD… but it wasn’t there. I rebooted the xbox a couple times, and it would lock up randomly during the bootloader logo. Still no RRoD. That maybe it was HDMI cable, so i switched over to component. Power on… RRoD. Grrrr!!! I’ve lost track of how many of these i’ve had repaired and re-repaired. At least Microsoft is covering the cost. But in the 3+ week meantime while I wait for the repair, I have to go dig up another extender somewhere.
This definitely is NOT WAFtastic 
And she reminds me again that the Comcast box always just worked. Grrr… Does me no good to remind her that we can get to movies and photos and…
Plea to Microsoft: PLEASE bring out new V3 Extenders ASAP!
I’m hosting a W7 Launch Party!
My application was accepted, and I’ve got my party site configured… now I just have to plan something to showcase. Obviously it will be MediaCenter related.
The party is during the lunch hour on launch day, 10/22, at the office suite’s conference room (as to avoid any potential conflict of interest issues, its not during normal work time nor at my company’s office conference room).
The HouseParty site must be inundated with RSVP’s because it is painfully slooooow… in fact, seems to be down completely right now. When it comes back up, you can view the party details here.
Power strips are WAFtastic?
Yes! Well, this one could be. Thanks to Engadget for working on LaborDay to inform us husbands that there is a more aesthetically pleasing way to provide juice to all the phone chargers and game devices littering the floors of households across America. But wait… what’s that honey? You don’t want to see the cords at all? Doh!
Two steps forward, one step back. But progress!
Last weekend, I saw a post on theGreenButton that Andy Van Til posted a “Early Release” version of his popular tool todvrms that now supports conversion to the new WTV container format. Unlike pre-Windows7 MediaCenter’s dvr-ms format, WTV supports H264 which holds promise for easier conversion of 720P/1080P HD content.
So I got the bits today and got it a whirl. After working through some weird errors which forced me to reinstall DVRMSToolBox and Haali Media Splitter, I was finally able to test! For some reason, the first couple of sample files I was attempting to convert were x264, and todvrms threw an error stating “An invalid media type was specified.” I always thought x264 was just an open source implementation of h264… i need to research it some more…
Doh!! … the audio stream was DTS. I’ll need to run it through EAC3to first. Anyway, I then found a h264 sample file with a AC3 audio track. it was 20GB 1080P file, and todvrms had it flipped to WTV container in less than 10 minutes. That’s fast! Things were looking promising!
I then fired up my Xbox360 extender and it found the WTV file in the Movie Library. It started up right away (no buffering message)… but then started skipping. I know the 360 has the horse power to decode these high bitstreams because they play fine from the DashBoard, but the poor codec implementation within the Extender app continues to frustrate me.
I’ll hook-up Linksys DMA2200 early next week and give that a shot with the 1080P streams. Stay tuned!
Update: Hooked up the DMA2100 today and… nothin. Linksys Extenders don’t support H264 (not even sure they support WTV container), and I knew that already so why did I waste the time? Doh!
I’m such a procrastinator…
Finally. Four years ago I stated profoundly that I was gonna start blogging. Three years ago I came up with the blog name and a framework for its “mission”. Last fall I actually registered the domain name. Yesterday I pointed the domain to WordPress. And tonight… my first blog post! Wow.
crickets
So…. now what?
My goal is to capture here the journey in regards to my quest to perfect the “tinkering-with-home-theater-high-def-media-distribution-over-IP-and-maybe-a-bit-of-home-automation-all-while-staying-married process”. The larger goal is to have a thriving marriage, be a loving and thoughtful husband and father… and someday be able to experience a high-bitrate 1080P movie streamed from my NAS to a MediaCenter Extender playing flawlessly on a big screen display.
What will you see here? Hopefully step-by-step guides on how I got some of my things working, reviews on products I use, and most importantly, what my wonderful and beautiful wife (and sometimes kids) thinks of it all.
