One goes east, one goes west -- so what.

Unable to find an image of the fantastic painting in Goodfellas, I decided to take three screen caps from a pan across it and stitch it together for personal use.

Dialogue from the scene:
Joe Pesci: "I like this one, the dog, uh, one dog's goin' one way, the otha one's goin the otha way"
Martin Scorcese's Mom: "Yeah, one's goin' east, the otha one's goin' west, so what."
Joe Pesci: "And this guy here's like 'Whaddya want from *me*?'"

Enjoy.

Update: MCE Remote

I received the MCE remote. Love it.

It does a wonderful job of controlling the external Scientific Atlanta set-top box (extending reception to include all the digital channels). The HD STB is still connected directly to the HDTV via component cables (so I can watch HD channels when necessary) and simultaneously outputs to the RCA in on the Hauppauge capture card.

Of course, the HD channels aren't viewable on the PC.

I wish I could easily switch between the coax in and the rca in on the capture card, but I can't. Not without re-setting-up the tuner and channel lineup settings.

If I could switch on the fly, it would make it easy to switch inputs on the HDTV back to the STB to watch shows in HD while the HTPC would record the show in SD on an analog channel. But I can't. Hopefully adding a second tuner will allow me to do this. I suppose this means I might have to get a second PVR250 card instead of the dual-tuner PVR500.

Or maybe I'll just wait until there are HD-from-an-STB input options available...

My Real-World Econo-HTPC Building Experience

I’m a Canadian who recently moved into a high rise building. Having enjoyed the Satellite/Tivo dream team at my previous location, the reversion to analog cable/VHS (due to the prohibition of dishes here at the new place) felt a lot like they make delirium tremors look in the movies.

Canadian cable is monopolized, so the apparent solution was to purchase (or rent) a PVR from my only available cable provider, Rogers Cable. But I knew that much of my previous enjoyment had relied upon how hacked the Tivo was. An off-the-shelf Rogers Cable/Scientific Atlanta PVR would not, to my knowledge, allow for burning my recorded shows to DVD and sharing them with friends and family. (I personally don’t feel there’s anything wrong with archiving and sharing broadcasts, especially if the commercials are left in place).

Moreover, Rogers PVRs are currently priced at $600CAD for standard definition with 50 hours, and $800CAD with 20 hours of high def. Ouch. That’s a big pill to swallow for nothing more than basic scheduling, recording & playback.

With the arrival of Windows Media Center Edition 2005, I decided it might be worth the effort and investment to see if I could affordably replace the functionality of my old hacked Tivo. Here are the specifics of what I was looking for:
- Clear viewing on a living room television
- Good program guide
- Scheduling & automatic series recording
- Intelligent predictive scheduling
- Background recording
- 5.1 Audio
- Some reasonable means of archiving recordings
- Background scheduling over the network from another PC
- A means of watching AVIs of various codecs on a TV

Existing Hardware

I started with a generic Athlon 2200+/512MB system that I wasn’t using anymore. Its Matrox G450 dualhead used to do a perfect job of letting me watch oddball codec videos on my standard def TV when necessary. So it seemed like the perfect rig to migrate into an MCE box; all I needed was a tuner/capture card, right?

After a few hours of online research it became clear that a Hauppauge WinTV PVR250 was the card to get. $150CAD picked it up on sale at Future Shop. It came with its own IR remote for the same price as the remote-less 150MCE, so even if MCE was a bust I’d still have basic PVR functionality in the long run.

1st Attempts

The existing Seagate 120G drive was wiped and onto it went a fresh install of MCE2005. Installation was simple and problem-free.

Once hardware drivers were installed, I launched Media Center and was greeted, of course, with a warning that my video card was not designed for use with media center edition. Ignoring the warning and continuing through the very easy 1st time setup, video playback was simply a big black screen.

More research told me that MCE requires a video card with DirectX9 support. But what is much harder to find on the web is a description of just how beefy a video card is needed for MCE.

MCE renders using VMR9. From what I’ve learned, video has traditionally been rendered in overlay mode. But if you want to add graphics on top of the video image, you can’t use overlay. So, from what I can figure out, it seems all the video information is converted into a big pixel grid of colored 3D polygons(?) Or something like that. Anyway, those of us who have been satisfied with non-gaming cards in the past will find they need to shell out for a not-dirt-cheap 3D gaming card.

Long story short, sadly it was time to let the G450 go, and I bought what was very close to MCE’s minimum required video card, a Sapphire Radeon 9600 with Tv-Out for $130CAD.

Video Out

I have never been able to find a good online reference for comparing the quality of TV-output on video cards. Knowing how good the Matrox cards were, I always laughed when reading ATI & Nvidia posters debating who was better, when they were, compared to the Matrox, laughable for several years. But Matrox, the bozos, haven’t made a DX9 card yet to my knowledge. My local parts guy told me he liked the TV-Out on the Radeons better, so lacking any better online advice I just accepted his suggestion.

I got the 9600 home and installed it, only to discover there was no S-Video to RCA converter in the box. Aw crap. Of course I only discover these things at 2AM on a Sunday morning, too. So for the remainder of the weekend I’d have to play with MCE on my 21” monitor.

So far I loved everything about MCE. The interface is just plain sexy. Setup is a breeze – my channel line up and guide came in like butter. The guide is blazing fast and easy to read. It was a bit of a pain figuring out which keyboard keys did what in MCE (as the MCE remote on order would not arrive for another week or so).

The video was a little smeary in high motion sequences, but nothing intolerable. I’m still not sure if this is as a result of the capture card’s compression or a weakness in the video card, but I can tell you that the smeary-ness is the same whether watching live or recorded video.

I went back to the store and retrieved the missing S-Video to RCA adapter and hooked my 27” standard def TV into the Radeon. And I was disappointed. The overscan was ridiculous. And without overscan checked in the Catalyst driver, it looked even more ridiculous. Way, way underscanned with big black gaps around the outside of the picture. And over the RCA, the smeary-ness just got worse, complicated by a choice, no matter how I tweaked, of either weak contrast or blown-out whites and reds. So, as in the past, I found TV-Out via RCA from ATI (and I’d assume Nvidia) just plain sucks.

So now what are my options? Well, I could buy a new standard def TV with an s-video input. But as the bad RCA signal had been converted from the 9600’s s-video out, I have serious doubts that the picture over S-Video would improve all that much. And I’d have to be crazy to invest in an SD TV today.

So I guess I’d just better buy myself an HDTV and use that DVI port there.

Out to HD at 480p

10 hours of online research, 6 hours of driving around shopping, and $900 later we have a Philips 30PW8402 30” CRT (direct-view, not projection or LCD or plasma) HDTV in the living room.

I’ll spare you the details of the DVI-to-HDMI cable purchase. Long story short, Future Shop was the only local retailer with a suitable cable in stock. And it cost *literally* 3000% more ($311) than the equivalent cable on EBay. Good thing they have a 30 day no-questions-asked return policy.

And after a mere 12 hours of online research and tweaking timings in powerstrip, I’m mostly happy with the video output via DVI from the Radeon 9600 to the Philips HDTV CRT. The overscan is still a touch over-overscanned, but if I were really serious about fixing it I’d just correct with the vertical overscan in the TV’s service mode. But it’s a little frightening in there, and I don’t want to screw up the way things look from my other sources (standalone progressive DVD player and HD STB).

The MCE interface looks a little odd at 1080i (1920x1080) – the navigation bar is so tiny in the bottom left corner – so I’m running in 480p. God knows I couldn’t find a 720p CRT anywhere, I hate rear-projection HDTVs, and LCDs are still ridiculously expensive. Besides, if I really want a DVD at 1080i, I can switch inputs and use my standalone player (hell, man, they’re $50 at Wal-Mart). Another set of composite cables isn’t much.

Compared to the SD set I’m used to, 480p is really fantastic. No complaints at all. Granted 480 vertical lines doesn’t give me a lot of room to play in Windows itself, but it’s still usable. It’s certainly enough to surf for basics and launch WinDVD and other windows apps besides Media Center.

I’d guess that output to an LCD would have been much easier than getting my CRT working. Hell, it took 6 hours before I even saw a progressive screen. Remember, this is someone who’s never touched an HDTV set before and has no idea what to expect to see. The text I was seeing on the 720x480i that came up initially already looked significantly better than how it was on SD over RCA. Imagine my delight when I finally saw a crisp, stable image at native 856x480p.

Deinterlacing/DVDs

And I don’t know if it’s the Hauppauge capture card or what, but analog channels seem to be beautifully deinterlaced through the MCE box. Even with the persistent mild motion smearing, I prefer watching TV through the MCE box over the Scientific Atlanta HD set-top receiver (which I couldn’t resist renting for $15/month). And DVDs look great. Intervideo WinDVD6 is installed and seems to be running fine in spite of the reports I read of incompatibility.

DVD navigation, though, is weird in MCE, but maybe that’s because I still don’t have my MCE remote. I still can’t figure out how to skip to chapter points and get back to DVD menus, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out eventually. They play fine, and if I really need navigation I can always hop over to WinDVD.

Input Devices

Pending the arrival of my remote, I bought a Benq x730 wireless mouse and keyboard combo for $70. They look and feel nice, but will probably be going back. The range is just pathetic. I had to run PS2 extension cables around the baseboards of the room to place the receiver under the couch, right under my butt. I’m getting 3 and a half feet range. I don’t know about you, but my couch is more than 3.5 feet away from my HDTV.

That being said I might keep them, because albeit MCE’s minimal messenger interface, I really do enjoy having messenger overlay messages pop up while I’m watching TV. No more cursing at my friends for making me get off the couch to see who’s messengering me. J Searching for shows is certainly less tedious when you can type the title in directly, too.

I had originally anticipated that surely I’d be able to get the Hauppauge 250 remote working in MCE. Well -- rewind, fast fwd, pause, stop, and volume work. But nothing else. I’d imagine another few hours hunting and I’d find somebody’s config to get Girder working, but to hell with it – the MCE remote’s on order and I’m sick of the research for now.

5.1 Audio

My motherboard is an Asus A7V400-MX. As mentioned, I just had this board in a system I wasn’t using. Previously I had just been using the analog 1/8” jacks for 5.1 audio. But in my living room, optical or coaxial are the only 5.1 options to connect to my cheap-ass Koss Home Theatre in a Box (as they would be for almost any 5.1 standalone receiver/amp). Asus hadn’t included the S/PDIF adapter with my motherboard. Grrr. It’s “available for purchase separately”. Well god knows I couldn’t find one *anywhere* for purchase. The 6-pin variation is widely available, but not the 4-pin. I know it’s probably a walk in the park to convert a 6 pin to a 4 pin, but don’t ask me how. Or any of my pals.

Even Asus couldn’t sell me the bracket I needed directly. If it weren’t for a friend who just *happened* to have an unused one lying around, I would have been buying either a new motherboard or a new daughterboard for one of the SBLive sound cards I have lying around to give me a simple coax digital audio connector. I’m glad to have found the bracket, though; now I can use the optical out from the HTPC into AV1, and coax from my standalone DVD player into AV2.

The Case

Why Gateway, HP et al seem to think people are willing to put a mid tower in their living room is beyond me. I’m not putting a noisy, ugly mid tower into my entertainment unit. Nor am I going to try to find 30-foot HDMI and optical audio cables to run from another room.

But I’m also not spending $200+ on a Silverstone. Having been so pleased with the recent purchase of an Antec Sonata for my desktop box, and with some help from htpcnews.com’s review, I decided an Antec Aria might be good for the job. And it was. What luck; my Asus board just happened to be mini-ATX form factor. With my new generic $60 32” TV stand, I can still comfortably fit the Aria, my HD STB, and my 5.1 audio receiver under the TV. And inside the Aria we’ve got a DVD-R, the Radeon, the Hauppauge, a PCI slot blower, and two 120G drives. And it’s still dead silent. God, I love Seagate drives. And I really love Antec. There’s even room for a 3rd drive down the line, but I think I’d have some jimmying to do.

SageTV

I tried SageTV too. Without getting into it – it’s fugly. It seems to do everything that I want, but it’s just plain fugly and unstable. Works on some boots, doesn’t work on others. And running a script to kill the MCE processes that load on boot is just a pain that’s not worth it. Maybe I’ll try again once some versions that have been skinned with the Sage Studio come out.

Dreams fulfilled?

Back to my original wish list:
Clear viewing on a living room television
Yes. Windows is usable, even text, although small at 856x480. Interlaced resolutions are pointless for text, but I could see myself playing the occasional game. I hate to see the relatively good gaming power of the 9600 go to waste anyway, so I’ll try.

Good program guide
Beautiful. Channel lineup came in like butter and channels can be added & removed. Navigation is very quick, easy to read, and understandable.

Scheduling & automatic series recording
Scheduling seems okay – conflict resolution takes a little bit of effort, and I can’t find a simple list of conflicts – I have to scroll through the list of upcoming recordings – but it’s easy enough. Series recording and prioritization is good too.

Intelligent predictive scheduling
I still haven’t found this feature. Hopefully I’m just missing this, or this will come in the form of a plug in.

Background recording
Not yet. I’ll need to add another tuner. I’d have to lose my PCI slot blower to accommodate another card. I’ll probably just wait until the PVR500 dual tuner is finally available – selling my 250 will certainly not be a problem.
Or I might just wait until there’s an option for getting STB/HD signals into the PC. OTA HDTV is a waste of energy as of yet in Canada.

5.1 Audio
Yes. Setup was flaky – running MCE’s audio setup wizard seems to screw up the rear channels. If I go into WinDVD itself and configure the audio, it sticks. In fact I’m not quite sure HOW I got it working, but after an hour or so the rear speakers finally worked. I’m not surprised, considering I’m using cheap onboard audio. But it sounds fine, it finally works, and it’s true 5.1.

Some reasonable means of archiving recordings
Sharing to my home network is a breeze. I can burn straight out of MCE, or pull files off the network share if I want to convert to standard mpg2 or whatever. Wide open for however I want to work with the files. Granted, the native mpg2 format Sage saves the files in is better, but I’ll cope.

Background scheduling over the network from another PC
Not in the background, but I can hijack the machine via remote login and run the scheduler from my desktop. Now this, I’m sure, will be eventually available via some sort of plug in.

A means of watching AVIs of various codecs on a TV
As mentioned, Windows itself is still usable at 856x480 so launching an alternate player is no problem. And furthermore it seems to me that any old codec will play back through MCE as long as it’s installed on the system. I have noticed, though, that fast forwarding and rewind navigation in DIVX files is temperamental brings the system to a crawl.


What It’s Worth

So what did I spend in total on the upgrade? Prices are in Canadian dollars. ($1CAD=$0.70 US or so)

Tuner/Capture: Hauppauge WinPVR250 $150
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon 9600 $130
Case: Antec Aria $135
Remote: MCE Remote $60
Key/Mouse: Wireless Benq x730 $70
Cable: HDMI to DVI $20
Misc: S/PDIF adapter $10
Software: MCE2005 $160

$735.00

Existing component equivalent value:
Motherboard: Asus A7V400-MX $75
Chip: Athlon 2200+$75
Memory: 512M DDR333 $99
Hard Drive: Seagate 120G $99
Hard Drive :Seagate 120G $99
Optical Drive: 8x DVD-R $75

$522.00

And of course the rest of the entertainment setup:
HDTV: Philips PW308402 $900
TV Stand: Generic $60
Cable: Generic Composite (for standalone DVD) $15
Audio receiver/amp: Koss piece of crap Home Theatre in a Box $200

$1175.00

So the whole entertainment center, if purchased new, would cost about $2500 (*including* a brand new 30” HDTV monitor!). But my actual migration to an HTPC was only $700.

Not bad considering the cheapest MCE2K5 box at Future Shop is $1700 *without* a monitor, half the drive space, and an ugly mid-tower case.

Also not bad when I realize a PVR set-top box that can only record and playback SD shows is $600, with absolutely no options for future improvements. Contrast that with the MCE box, ready for future upgrades like dual tuners, HD input & capture, an additional hard drive, and the plethora of plug-ins that are sure to come, that will help make MCE2005 an ever improving experience.

Was it worth the 50+ hours I’ve put into it so far? Well if I could stop screwing around with the new toys and just sit and watch TV for awhile, I’d be in a better position to tell you.