Media Hardware

Hopefully the final post in this mini series about my Media PC trials (I'd much rather just be using it!). Most of the hardware in the PC is not particularly important. It's an old Athlon XP on a micro ATX motherboard in an Antec Aria case if you must know :). The imporant parts are the Hauppage WinTV-NOVA-TD 500 with remote control and a wireless Emprex keyboard with built in trackball (you can get one from Amazon here).

The TV card contains two DVB-T tuners allowing us to record two different Freeview channels at once, plus a remote control which works with the provided software and also with at least MythTV and MediaPortal.

The keyboard includes a small trackball, which allows you to completely control a PC without needing an extra mouse. It runs on 4AA batteries and as a pleasant surprise comes with 4 Duracell batteries rather than the usual generic batteries that often come with electronics. The second pleasant surprise is that plugging in the USB dongle and fitting the batteries was all that was needed to get it working. I guess that the dongle must pretend to be a normal keyboard so the computer doesn't need any special drivers to make it work. Whilst the trackball isn't the best in the world it works fine, and given the low price this keyboard is great value for money.

Media on Windows

With the new operating system came the choice of what software to use; MythTV on Windows requires you to build it yourself and I didn't fancy going down that road. I started with the software that came with the TV card. This is version 7 of their software and I dread to think what the previous versions must have been like. If you just want to watch TV it's fine, but the UI for recording is pretty poor, and in my case didn't even work. I found a couple of possible solutions on Google, but didn't bother trying them out as I knew there was more user friendly software out there that I wanted to try first.

I tried out GBPVR briefly but the flaky website (Google's cache helps here) and some rough edges put me off. I then went on to MediaPortal. I have used MediaPortal before, but not for TV as my previous TV card wouldn't work with it. On the whole I've been reasonably impressed. The UI is nice and if you tell it you have a Hauppauge remote control it all just works together. There were a couple of things that could have been easier though:

1. Picking up the programme guide information over the air doesn't seem to work for me which meant I had to follow the instructions here to set up an included tool to get listings from a RadioTimes XML feed. (Although I had to use the XmlTv plugin to read the listing file rather than the WebEPG one).
2. My first trial recording failed because apparently the TV card takes some time to wake up and so it wasn't ready when MediaPortal looked for it. There is a setting specifically for this under:
   
   
   • TV-Server Configuration
   • General Settings
   • Delay for TV card detection
   I set this to 30 seconds and since then it's been fine.
   

The final problem I've yet to satisfactorily solve is the "Black screen of death" which can happen when you plug a computer into a TV's HDMI socket and then switch the source on the TV. As I understand it, when the source on the TV is switched the HDMI connection to the computer is broken and it gives up on the display. When you switch back to the computer source on the TV the computer doesn't know and continues to ignore the display. You can get round this by getting the computer to re-detect the display but so far the ways I've found are not ideal:

• Unplug the HDMI connection, wait a couple of seconds, then plug it back in.
• Put the computer to sleep and then wake it up again.

I've found this program which turns the monitor connection on and off again and can be bound to a particular key combination, but unfortunately doesn't yet work with XP. However, it seems likely that the author will be adding XP support shortly.

To end on a positive note one thing that has worked unexpectedly well is the scheduling plugin. Once enabled you can tell it to put the computer to sleep after a certain amount of inactivity and wake up for recordings. So far it had been hibernating and waking up perfectly which definitely beats having it on all the time. One caveat, if you want to watch a DVD using a different program you need to tell the acheduler not to go to sleep or your viewing will be rudely interrupted by a hibernation screen every few minutes.

Media on Linux

I've had a media PC sitting under the TV for quite a while now and it's been very useful for recording TV and showing photos to the family. A few months ago I replaced the TV card with one supported under Linux (a Hauppage WinTV-NOVA-TD 500) and thought it would be a good opportunity to learn a bit about how Linux works, plus I'd heard good things about MythTV and wanted to try it out. A few months later the things I have learned are:

1. With a family and a full time job I don't have the hours of free time needed to get things working, especially when I know I can do the same thing under Windows with far less trouble.
2. Mythbuntu sounds like a good idea, but when things don't work (which in my experience was all too often) it's another layer of unfamiliarity to work through. i.e. "Is this a problem in MythTV, Ubuntu, or Mythbuntu specifically?". Also walkthroughs for Ubuntu may not work as various tools have been stripped out of Mythbuntu to make it lighter-weight. So if you are familiar with Linux already then Mythbuntu may help, however, if I was doing this again I'd install the full Ubuntu first and then MythTV on top.
3. MythTV has a pretty slick frontend and when it works it is good. However, it's quite fiddly to set up. If you want to get a TV card IR remote control working at the same time as a USB keyboard and mouse (which may or may not be plugged in at boot time) then be prepared for an unnecessarily convoluted fight with various configuration files. (I believe because the IR receiver in my TV card also looks like a USB device to the operating system.)
4. For some reason DVDs are jerky under Linux using either VLC or the built in DVD decoder in MythTV. The same (rather old) hardware plays DVDs fine using a free copy of PowerDVD on Windows.

So when DVDs stopped playing altogether it was the final straw. In that particular case it turned out that the DVD drive had actually died but by then the die was cast and Windows XP was back.