WholeHome

Received new hard drive and memory – as you may have read in my previous post, the PC I chose to use already had a bunch of video cards, a full suite of video playback tools, and a PVR program already installed – along with a sophisticated remote control system. Long story short, that gave me a head-start and also highly complicated things so I decided to start from scratch. More specifically, I want to start from something closer to what you might find stashed in your closet rather than a tricked out video PC…

So, since we are going to work through a variety of operating systems and PVR programs together, I partitioned the new disk into 3  50GB partitions (for various operating systems), and one bog one to store media that they will all share. I downloaded all the drivers for my system from the ASUS website, and proceeded to install WinXP Media Center Edition on the first partition. The beauty here is that Media Center is basically just an application that runs on top of Windows, so to test other PVR programs, we can simply not start that application up. Note that getting a copy of media center is not simple as it is typically only installed as an OEM version by PC companies. So you either need to have a connection or order it online. Good news is that almost every version of Windows 7 comes with media center, but since that old PC in your closet probably has XP on it, we will start there.

A few general rules and things to consider for a media center (or PVR) PC

• You will be dedicating it for entertainment applications so strip it down
• Remove all software that is not critical to entertainment applications – both to save hard drive space and cycles
• Use msconfig (from the run menu) and disable everything that starts that is not critical – get rid of desktop and launch icons
• Consider a low overhead antivirus like AVG
• Make sure you have a good codec pack in place – Google XP essential codec for some good packages
• On top of that make sure you have xvid codecs installed
• Is your hardware adequate? 1GHz per encode or decode stream (less if you use a hardware encode option), an 1GB total memory is recommended
• Is it quiet enough? Fans and hard drives tend to be the loudest things – consider a quieter fan and/or hard drive
• Does it have bright blinky lights on the front that will be distracting when watching a movie?

So – there is an order to things:

1. Double Check BIOS settings to make sure nothing is set up for the PC’s “old life” – CD first boot, HDD Second, on board video activated, not overclocked etc.
2. Is your OS OK? If so, strip it down, if not install the new one now. Consider at least 100-150GB for the primary partition where the media center and or PVR resides for TV recording – some of them prefer to store recordings only on the same drive where the PVR program is running
3. If your on-board video card does not support the outputs you need, consider installing a second one now – make sure that is all up and running before proceeding
4. Install tuner cards and verify they work using the software that came with them
5. Install your PVR program of choice and get it functional – EPG is usually the hardest part, but make sure network connections, radio, proper recording all function
6. Verify video quality of live tv and recordings – different codecs have different performance with various tuner/video card combinations
7. Get Sound working – depending on your setup, spdif/optical is usually the best choice, but if you intend to use the computer for gaming as well, you might need analog 6 channel outputs to your amp (depending on your audio card and drivers and whether they translate everything to spdif or not)
8. Setup the second drive partition as a shared resource and consider installing other Network Attached Storage if your library grows.
9. Install whole-home distribution system like BOCS so every TV in the home can access your new creation

Yes – I’m working on covering all of this in detail in the Build-Your-Own-DVR writeup -

More to Come

I hope to publish the first section of PC-DVR overview this week, but I’m including a bit of a “day-by-day” journal as I think some of the things I run into will benefit others.

I started with an “old PC” I had in my garage – an AMD Athlon 2.2GHz with a NMT… Motherboard in a very nice “square” case that looks like it belongs under a TV. Strangely enough, this one had 3 video cards and 3 audio cards in it (long story but it was an initial demo unit for BOCS) running Windows XP.

First issue I ran into upon booting it up was that only one video card seemed to put anything out and it was not the primary so I could see a cool windows background but didnt have a taskbar, start menu, and when I right clicked and chose properties to bring up the video settings box, it seemed to appear on another display – stalemate – can’t see anything…  I rebooted into bios and noticed the onboard video was disabled – I enabled it and rebooted and then could at least see the primary monitor through the onboard VGA.  IF that hadn’t worked, the right answer would have been to remove all but one video card and start there.

OK – so now everything is working – I left 2 video cards (one onboard and one PCI-E) and 2 audio cards (one onboard and one PCI)… and added the Hauppauge tuner (PVR-350). Interestingly, the PC would not POST – It took three consecutive complete power removals for 30 seconds and then it posted fine.

Installed Hauppauge and GBPVR software and was immediately able to play movies (keyboard control)…

Oh, and don’t repeatedly stick your fingers in an 80mm fan – they have lots of momentum an dcan really slice.

DF

First, lets lay out the goal – Assuming you already have a PC of at least reasonable capability, what is the most cost effective way to convert it into a DVR? Not only is it a great project, you can ditch your cable company DVR or Tivo and save all those monthly fees. Recording shows should not cost you. While you are at it, creating a device that will play all your media files, display your pictures, and stream internet content is a huge bonus.

Good and lofty goals, but easily attainable. To start, though, we need to define some things and explain the different tuners and equipment out there. You will have to decide up front exactly what you want to record, how many independent outputs your system needs, and how you are going to serve it up to the entire home. Luckily, we have a BOCS system at our fingertips to distribute the signals home-wide and allow you to control your new creation even from across the home.

I’m doing a full writeup (with pictures and videos) but here, I’ll give a blow by blow as to the progress of the build and hopefully give some insight into typical problems encountered. So – this is the “diary of the build” – and the writeup will be published seperately – make sense?

DF

EDIT_ good news, the project has started – I’ve got a good portion of the equipment up and running and expect to publish the first section this week!!!

Its been quite an adventure so far, and now that we are up to about 100 pages, it is quite a document. I just finished and published the final core chapter on whole-home-video distribution. If you havn’t yet received a copy, feel free to grab one online at www.bocsco.com/prewire. Leterally hundreds of people have read and provided great suggestions and their own personal stories to go along with the text.

I’m going to take a slight diversion for a bit and do another series focused on building your own DVR – there are some great guides on the internet but I’ve not seen anything that covers the absolute basics for the beginner or shows you how to configure multiple outputs from a single PC.  I’ll do a formal writeup but also do a daily blog update on the progress.

Its going to get bust around here.