Media Center PC

In my previous blog entry regarding the AppleTV, I also mentioned it was also possible to build a small, quiet and efficient PC for more or less the same price as I brought the AppleTV (~£200). After some deliberation, I decided to take the plunge and sell the AppleTV and buy the parts needed to build this PC. This is what I ended up with:

• Shuttle K45 Barebones
• Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180
• Kingston 1GB RAM DDR2
• SATA Seagate 200GB HDD that I had spare
• Windows XP Media Center
• Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T 500

Verdict? Not as quiet as I would have liked thanks to the 40mm PSU fan but still quieter then my old PC tower and uses less power and infinitely more flexible then any of my previous media center solutions and easier to setup because solutions already exists for Windows and they work well. The software I installed:

• Combined Community Codec Pack (CCCP)
• Quicktime Alternative Codec
• Realmedia Alternative Codec
• PeerGuardian 2
• uTorrent
• AVG Free Edition 8
• Orb 2

Orb 2 was the icing on the cake. I added the link to my bookmarks a year or so ago and only recently found again during a cleanup session. In short, it can transcode and stream media including live TV from the PC to any device that can support Flash (or any of the stream formats Orb supports) connected to the Internet. Very nice.

I only have one gripe with the video format support from Media Center doesn’t completely support files that have multiple audio and subtitle streams which are uncontrollable from the Media Center frontend. I had to set DirectVobSub to force loading subtitles and set FFDShow to enable subtitles and default to a language to get softsubs overlaid in Media Center.

An alternative to Media Center is MediaPortal, arguably more powerful and better support for file formats in terms of audio and subtitle support. However, it isn’t as user friendly to setup and I am still struggling to setup the TV server. Currently, I have no need for the extra features of MediaPortal and content with Media Center.

New tech toy: AppleTV

First, a little background for the purchase. Initially I had a PC conntected to the TV that was running MediaPortal and acting as my file server with uTorrent running in the background. While it provided all the functionality I needed, MediaPortal had a tendency to either slow down the whole PC after being left on for long periods of time or crash. The other issue is the amount of electricity it used being left on all the time and being a full blown PC specification.

After a few months, I found out that I wasn’t really using the TV recording aspects as much as I thought so all I really needed was a fileserver that was a NAS and HTPC. The latter was solved when I installed an SVN version of XBMC (thanks to T3CH builds) on my softmodded Xbox and found that it could do 480p reasonably well. All I needed was a NAS drive and something that I could use as a torrent client.

Queue a lot of Googling and searching, the best I could find was the NSLU2 which was a hub for mass storage devices that could be connected to the network and shared the drives via Samba. Even better was that it could be flashed with custom firmware that allows the user to install 3rd party applications such as rTorrent.

I decided to buy the device and see what I could do with it and after a few days I managed to get what I needed out of the device, NAS and a torrent client using very little power (IIRC, about 25 watts including the external drive). However this success was short lived. The torrent client tended to crash and corrupt the filesystem when dealing with large files. This combined with the fact that the drive had to be formatted and partitioned a certain way for it to be used and the slow transfer speeds (even when wired) meant the whole thing seemed a bit pointless now.

However, on my search in attempting to fix this problem meant I came across other possible devices for the purposes I needed. The best out of the bunch was the AppleTV which could be patched via the USB port thanks to the guys at AwkwardTV. This meant I could install Samba, rTorrent and other plugins to play the various video formats of media I have in my collection. To sweeten the deal, it only used 18W on full load and was very quiet when running. A close second consideration was to buy another Xbox, upgrade the HDD and install Linux on it.

I promptly sold my NSLU2 to a friend who just needed the NAS capability and waited to buy an AppleTV on refurbishment. One eventually came up at 70% of the original price and I quickly snapped it up. A couple of days later, it is now happily running alongside the TV patched and playing my media collection. Below is a quick run through the steps I used to get going:

• Downloaded and used the ATV4Windows Patchstick for Take2
• Installed the commonly used binaries
• Installed Samba3
• Installed rTorrent
• Installed nitoTV
• Ran the codecs installer and Smart installer from nitoTV on the AppleTV

Generally, I am pretty pleased with the setup although I have found something that is very tempting literally a minute ago. The Wrath Series from EfficientPC are very cheap and look like they won’t use a lot of electricity during use could mean that I be considering going back to my first setup. It is even more tempting as MediaPortal are very close to a version 1 release which might fix the issues I was having before and it was a very nice setup with no hacking/patching needed since it would be running Windows.

Guess what I be pondering over for the next week .

XBMC updated

I have just upgraded XBMC on my Xbox after leaving it dormant for so long and was very surprised how much has been done since the last ‘stable’ release. H.264 support is much better and runs at full speed compared to the 8fps I got with the stable version. It has now made my large HTPC redundant.

Now all I need is a Xbox component cable and a NSLU2 and I can get rid of another PC. Time for some shopping on eBay me thinks.

Busy Bumble Bee

I have been right royally busy at work which is the main reason why I haven’t updated this for a while. It is times like these I really wished there were more hours in the day. However, there are a few cool things I have picked up over the last couple of days that I thought I share.

AnimeSuki’s MPlayer OSX: If you work with me, you should have at least heard me bitch about quality of softsubs on VLC on the Mac. Looks like I wasn’t the only one and some guys at AnimeSuki have compiled a version of MPlayer that supports most MKVs released by FanSubs, therefore I am a happy bunny to have true support now.

Mr. Jabberwocky’s Pssst!: A collection of posts made at the GP32X forums Jabberwocky’s progress reports on his development on a game. While I question some parts of his coding style, I can’t deny the amount of detail inserted. It gives a clear idea on the steps and blocks taken to build a game using SDL and getting it finished.