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