Media Center Details

Update: November 20th, 2008

In the Spring of 2007 I built a media center to replace our 7 year old Series 1 Tivo Player. The Tivo player is still going strong and we do have a lifetime subscription so there are no immediate plans to fully decomission it and scuttle the box. It is, however, showing its age, the encoding quality is not good and it is limited to analog SD signals.

My first attempt to put the system together didn’t go so well. The system had several little annoying problems that I just couldn’t figure out. I decided to spend the whole Saturday rebuilding from scratch. After about 7 hours or work I’m happy to report that the system is running much better. Some problems disappeared with no explanation. Another problem disappeared with specific updates to some driver files.

11/20/2008 Update: Not really an update at all. The Media Center is still running well. I’ve done very little in terms of maintenance on it all year. It’s reliable and stable. I do reboot it every couple of weeks just for posterity (it is Windows after all). This remains my only Vista installation. All my other systems continue to use Windows XP Pro or Windows XP Home.

These are the details of the media center:

Hardware Summary

  • AMD Athlon X2 4400+ w/2GB RAM
  • MachSpeed MSNV-939 Mobo
  • OS/Apps on WD 74GB SATA Raptor Drive (loud!)
  • Media on Samsung 500GB SATA Drive (quiet!)
  • Hauppauge PVR-500MCE Dual Tuner Analog Card
  • 2x CatEye 150 ATSC Tuner Cards
  • Creative Labs Audigy SE SoundCard
  • OrigenAE X11 Chassis w/VFD Panel and Remote

Key Software Components

  • Windows XP MCE 2005 Rollup 2Windows Vista Ultimate
  • DVRMSToolbox (awesome plugin)
  • WebGuide 4
  • AC3Filter 1.46
  • PowerDVD7
  • Hauppauge PVR-500MCE Driver
  • CatEye 150 Driver
  • SB Audigy Driver
  • Acronis True Image 9 HomeAcronis True Image 10 Home

I highly recommend using an imaging tool like True Image. I captured images at each stage of the rebuild so that I could easily revert when problems started happening. I needed this ability a couple of times during the rebuild. Now I have an image of a stable working system that I can revert too anytime problems start happening.

Keeping all of my recordings (and commercial xml files) on a second hard drive means that I can revert to my stable image without losing any of my recordings.

Problems I’ve Had (and how they were fixed):

  • This list refers to problems experienced when I was using Windows XP MCE 2005. Since my upgrade to Vista I’ve been essentially problem free (at least with regard to major problems).
  • Couldn’t manually tune from one ATSC channel to another ATSC channel.The only way I could get this to work was to go to an analog channel between each digital channel. This problem just went away during my rebuild. No explanations. I didn’t even update the CatEye drivers. This is also probably related to a problem I was having with the DTV signal strength setup page. The results on this page were completely unpredictable. I messed with my antenna for weeks trying to get a good signal on all the DTV channels in the area. (Here in Portland, OR all the major stations come from towers that are very close togther.) After the rebuild all the channels report full strength signals.
  • System would hang during boot 30% of the time.For the last several months I thought this was a problem with the PVR-500 card. In fact, disabling one of the tuners improved the odds of getting a sucessful boot. So I ran this card as a single tuner card. During the rebuild process I noticed that the system started hanging during booting right after I installed the AMD CPU Drivers. The system failed to boot 4 times in a row. Recovery was to boot in safe mode with networking at which point I went tothe AMD website and found updated drivers. After installing them my system has booted sucessfully everytime. And both tuners on the PVR-500 are enabled.
  • ATSC Playback would stop working after a few seconds. I would get a blue screen saying that the files required to play the file were not installed correctly and to please reboot and restart MCE (which, of course, didn’t help). During the rebuild I found that this started happening again right after I setup my music library under WMP11. I reverted to WMP10, but the problem continued. Right now I’m resigned to not using the music features of MCE and WebGuide. Need to try uninstalling KB925766 which has been reported to fix this problem.
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