HDTV PVR

It has always been my goal to have a unified media center where we could watch TV, movies and listen to music. For awhile, we were using Suzanne’s PC that was hooked up to the TV to watch movies that we had ripped from NetFlix DVDs. However, this was awkward because even though we had a remote for the computer, you had to fumble with several remotes and it didn’t always work well.

Windows Media Center

So when I retired in April of 2005, I set out to create a unified media center. I probably should have used an open source application like MythTV but I was still learning Linux at the time, so decided to go with Windows Media Center.

Hardware

This turned out to be a much bigger project than I anticipated because HDTV requires a very fast video card and has high data transfer rates. To make it more difficult, I chose a slim-line case, so I was limited to what cards I could use.

I also ran into a lot of problems with the ATI video card. Bottom line: ATI drivers suck. For instance, the motherboard had a video controller on it, so the ATI card was secondary, which should have worked fine. But the ATI didn’t show any video display while the system was booting. This was a real pain whenever I needed to change the BIOS (which happened a lot at first) because I would need to yank out the ATI card, and then plug the monitor into the primary display.

Here is the hardware I used:

• Case: Black Ahanix MCD302B Slim Micro ATX
• Power Supply: SeaSonic Super Silencer 400W ATX 400W
• Motherboard: Biostar TForce 6100-939 (NVIDIA chipset)
• CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 1.8Ghz
• CPU Fan: Scythe ACS64U Arctic-cooling Silencer
• RAM: 1Gb DDR-2
• Video: ASUS NVIDIA 6200TC 64MB PCI Express x16
• HD Tuner: Dvico FushionHDTV Gold
• Remote: Microsoft Media Center remote
• Hard drive: Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA
• TV: Syntax Olevia LT 27 HV

Things To Watch Out For

Case

If I were to do it again, I would probably get a full height case. While the Ahanix 302B is a great looking case, it was hard to find high-powered slim video cards that would fit.

Quiet

One thing to be very careful about is the noise. You don’t want a computer whirring and squeeking while you are trying to watch a movie. The SeaSonic Super Silencer power supply is awesomely quiet – you literally can’t hear it. However, the Scythe CPU fan isn’t nearly as quiet and causes most of the noise, although it is acceptable.

The Hitachi hard drive also makes a surprising amount of noise. Although, in reading blogs it seems as if Western Digital and Seagate are a lot noiser.

DVI

Don’t even think about using anything other than DVI or HDMI. Interestingly, our experience showed that DVI doesn’t make the picture much sharper over using component inputs, however, the colors are much, much better. With component inputs, when watching a Stanford baseball game, the red jerseys seemed to glow red. With DVI, the jerseys were bright red and vivid but looked normal, not like they were glowing.

TV Selection

Be careful when selecting the HD TV. Of course get one with DVI or HDMI inputs and that has resolution at least 1280×720p. But check out the TV first with DVI inputs and make sure that the pixels are all sharp, and there is no waviness at sharp color transitions. The problem is that a lot of HD TVs, even expensive name-brands, often convert the digital signal to analog and then back again. This causes a lot of degradation in the picture quality.

Setup

In December of 2008, the PCI-Express slot went out. So I ordered a new motherboard, RAM and harddisk and reinstalled everything. It took a few days and I ran into problems, so in case I have to do it again, I wanted to record the proper steps I should have taken.

My biggest problem was that I installed the Fusion HDTV7 Dual Express tuner card first, and this seemed to mess everything up. It wasn't recognized in Media Center (although it did work fine with its own software) and then when I installed the AVerMedia board, it wasn't recognized either (although it worked fine with its software too). I don't know how I got the AVerMedia board working except I deleted all drivers, deleted the Tuner registry entries and reinstalled drivers - and did all of this several times and then magically, Media Center started seeing the tuner card.

Here is the new hardware:

• Case: Black Ahanix MCD302B Slim Micro ATX
• Power Supply: SeaSonic Super Silencer 400W ATX 400W
• Motherboard: Zotac GeForce 8300 (NVIDIA chipset)
• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4850e64 - 2.5 GHz, 45W, Socket AM2
• CPU Fan: Scythe ACS64U Arctic-cooling Silencer
• RAM: 2Gb PC
• Video: On board GeForce 8300
• HD Tuner: AVerTV Combo PCI-E
• Remote: Microsoft Media Center remote
• Hard drive 1: Western Digital 320GB SATA2
• Hard drive 2: Hitachi Deskstar 250GB SATA
• Monitor: Vizio VS42L 42" LCD

So if I had to reinstall again, here are the steps I would take:

• Boot from Win XP Media Center CD-Rom
• Setup standard except:
  • When it asks for ‘asms’ file on Disk2, put in Disk 1
• (Note: It installed the bootup drive as e: and except for being weird, it seems like it works okay)
• Install Zotac utilities: NVidia chipset (but not the network manager) and HDA sound driver
• Change display to 1480×1024
• Plug in network cable
• Activate Windows
• Update Windows, SP3, but not IE7
• Optional updates, MCE2, AMD, Nvidia GeForce 8300
• Keep doing optional updates until done
• Get Adobe Reader 9
• Get Firefox 3.0.5
• Installed Netgear WG311v2 USB wireless card – didn’t work so put in a Netgear PCI wireless card
• Installed nVidia PureVideo decoder
• Installed FFDShow Beta 4a, defaults except ‘do not limit’ for compatible programs
• Install Adobe Flash 10 (Gave error about insufficient disk space, ran ‘subst c: e:\’ from cmd line to fix)
• Shared storage drive
• Enabled hibernation, power button
• Installed AverTV PCI-Combo.

HDTV Setup

Also see HDTV if you just want to get HDTV without PVR.