New Windows Media Center System
For a few months now I’ve been running Vista and Windows Media Center on prospertine, hooked up to a nice widescreen LCD monitor mounted to the wall in my bedroom. Whenever I want to watch movies or TV shows and I’m not working in my office, I play them on ‘prospertine’ over my GigE network from my NAS box. I even have the Vista IR remote control, and a nice little wireless keyboard complete with a trackball. I can sit back on my bed and watch my media and even do basic web browsing.
However, prospertine is four years old, and has some serious thermal issues which cause the ICH6R chipset to ‘forget’ about one of the drives in its RAID 0 volume from time to time, which causes the system to crash. I then have to turn it off and let it cool before it will work again. So, I set about to upgrade my HTPC without spending alot of money.
As luck would have it, around the time I started contemplating this project, I ran across a post on Coding Horror covering just this subject. Jeff Atwood put together a nice AMD-based HTPC with DirectX 10 graphics, HDMI output, and low power consumption for around $500 bucks. I already had a hard drive, keyboard, IR remote, and various audio bits, so I just did an incremental build. I put together a shared wishlist on NewEgg with the details.
Anyway, I bought the mobo, AMD CPU, case, DVD drive, and 4GB of DDR2 800 RAM (Jeff spec’d out 2GB but it’s so cheap I couldn’t resist). Grand total: $380. I slapped it all together, powered it up, and that was it. The Vista Experience scores Jeff posts are for real; once I installed the chipset drivers I got a 3.5 Experience score, compared to 1.0 on prospertine. I’m not a huge fan of the Aero Glass eye candy bullshit, but it’s good to know I have the option.
I still haven’t figured out how to get hardware-accelerated x.264 decoding working, and even w/ a reasonably powerful dual-core machine Media Player Classic has trouble decoding 720p x.264 HD video without skipping or artifacts, though VLC managed ok. As Jeff has noted, codecs are the new DLL Hell, so I’m sure I have some penance to do before it’s working properly.
I also love that the Gigabyte mobo has all the connections I need on board. For the first time I’m using the optical S/PDIF port on my audio receiver, and placebo effect or not it sounds great! I use a LCD monitor with DVI input for my display, but the board also has HDMI out for proper TVs. The box is silent as far as I can tell, and certainly uses less power. I am reusing a 350GB 3.5″ Seagate Baracuda 7200.10 SATA drive, so that’s more noise and power than I would’ve liked, but it’s such an improvement over what I had before that I don’t really notice it.
If you’re thinking about going the HTPC route or upgrading one you have, you simply must check out this build. For the money it’s the most featureful, quiet, and efficient config I’ve seen.
Vista Windows Media Center And Video Content on Network Shares
I just upgraded my media center box from XP MCE 2005 to Vista Ultimate. While I still believe Vista should be detected and reported as malware, I’m willing to acknowledge areas where it’s improved, and Windows Media Center is definitely a big improvement.
However, there’s one change in Media Center since 2k5 that really pisses me off. On my network, all of my video files are stored on an Infrant ReadyNAS box. The box, kassad, has a Windows file share called media. Within media is the videos folder, and within that are folders TV and Movies (as well as folders I do not want WMC to browse). Since I want to expose only some of the folders on the share, I can’t add the whole share. In 2k5, I could map drive letters to network shares like \kassad\media\videos, add the mapped drives as “local” folders, and thereby have access to just TV and Movies without any hassle.
Now, though, WMC is much better. Now it’s smart enough to detect when a drive is a network drive, and not let you map it as a local folder. That makes alot of sense! What’s worse, I couldn’t find any MS docs describing a workaround. Surely I’m not the only one who wants to access media on some nested folder within a file share!
Turns out, I’m not. I ran across this post, which revealed the secret handshake. In the C:\Users\Public\Public Videos folder, you add shortcuts to the folders on the network share that you want to expose, restart WMC, and voila!, they show up. Not a bad solution, I suppose, except that it seems to be woefully underdocumented.
As an aside, if you’re still using a keyboard and mouse to start and stop your video content, you really need to look into WMC. You can buy a remote for $30, hang a widescreen LCD monitor on the wall, and have a nice digital media center using an old (two years, not ten!) computer. Now I know what it was like for early television viewers when the remote control was invented.