My Home Theater PC Project

After the installation and configuration was finished, it was time to test the new Media Portal installation. Unfortunately I encountered the following error message when I tried to change the channel from Nederland 1, which is my first TV Channel, to another TV Channel:

Media Portal is complaining about Unable to start timeshifting because No free card available. Add first I did not understand the problem, as from a hardware point of view nothing was changed to the configuration. Using the always help full google guided me to a thread in the Media Portal Forum that delivered a solution to the problem.

It seems like the default TV Server installation sets the number of descrambler channels available on the decrypter card to one. Actually the decrypter card can handle more than that, so I had to change this in the TV Server Configuration (launched by clicking the appropriate icon on the desktop):

I first tried to use a 0 for the number of channels, as the dialog suggests that this will disable the limit completely, but putting a zero in did not resolve the problem. So now I changed it to 10, and the channel switching works as before.

As during the previous installations and tests I was noticing a considerable flickering in the screen when switching on the TV and switching from full screen TV to boxed TV I decided to deactive all Windows Vista graphical interface features (Aero and the like). You can easily do this by right clicking on Computer in windows file explorer (Windows Explorer can be easily called up by pressing the windows logo key together with the 'e' key), and selecting properties. This will bring up the following window:

After selecting Advanced System Settings in the top left menu, the following dialog appears:

Clicking the Settings... button in the Performance section reveals the place to change the settings we are looking for:

As you can see from the picture above, I selected the Adjust for best performance option. This effectively disables all Windows Vista's window manager advanced graphics features, and boosts the DirectX performance in Media Portal.

After installation of the Media Portal and TV Server 1.0 RC1 software, the system has to be configured. The first step I took is configuring TV Server, by clicking on the TV Server Configuration Icon on the desktop. It seems like TV Server Configuration needs administrator access, so click Allow when Windows Vista asks for it.

The first configuration step is the configuration of the database engine and the creation of the database:

In the Password box the password as provided during the installation (the default password is MediaPortal) should be entered here. Remember that the password is case sensitive! Pushing the test button will (when the password was entered correctly) show the following dialog:

And the boxes in the "Setup database connection" window will turn green:

Pressing Save will try to create the TV Server Database, but in my case it failed with the Error message "Failed to create the database" :

At first I could not find out why this was happening, so I decided to take a look at the windows log files by launching Event Viewer (type Event View in the Vista Start Menu):

This revealed that TV Server Configuration was trying to create a database that already existed (TvLibrary.mdf). I decided to manually delete the TvLibrary.mdf and associated TvLibrary_log.mdf file, and retry the Database creation by relaunching the TV Server Configuration tool. This worked, but now the system was complaining about the TV Server Service not running:

Just clicking Yes in this box, activated the Tv Service and the TV Server Configuration window was displayed on the screen. The first thing to do is scan for all the TV and Radio channels available on my cable connection. The nice thing is that with the new TV Server version 1.0 the country information file for @home digital TV in the South of The Netherlands is included in the installation, so I selected this one in the Country selection box. Pressing the Scan predefined provider box start the scan process. After completing the scan, the result is 148 TV Channels and 99 Radio channels, which is the same as last time, so it looks like this step went flawlessly:

Of course I want to include the Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) information from the digital channels, so I had to go to the TV Channels/TV Epg grabber settings part of the configuration:

For the time being I decided to select all channels, I can allways decide to remove channels that I'm not going to use.

The same has to be done for the Radio Channels:

The only thing left to do is make sure that TV Server is using the D-Drive to store it's recordings and time shifting files. The configuration for this is in the Recording settings section of the configuration tool:

That completes the configuration for now.

Time to start testing the Media Portal software, you will be able to read about that in the next posting.

As Team Media Portal has decided to release the first release candidate version of Media Portal and TV Server in one easy to use Deploy Tool, I decided to start all over again once more....

After uninstalling the previous installation, which means removing Media Portal 0.2.3, TV Server and Microsoft SQLServer Express, and of course downloading the latest RC1 version from the Media Portal site, the installation can start by launching the downloaded file:

Just pressing the Install button starts the extraction process, and the actual installation -you have the option here to change the extract directory (I am just using the defaults supplied) - starts with the option to select the language used during installation:

I decided to leave the default option, being english, to allow you all to follow the installation. The next step in the installation process is selecting whether an install is to be performed, or only the necessary components to be downloaded from the net (the latter will enable you to install the package on a machine without an internet connection):

As my machine is connected to the internet, and I want to install the software, I picked the default choice of "Start the installation now". The next choice is determining whether we want to use the system to watch TV:

As I certainly wish to use Media Portal for watching TV, I kept the default selection, and pressed Next....:

Are we also watching HD content? Indirectly this is asking whether to use TV Server or the original Media Portal TV Client. As I wish to use the TV Server package, I kept the default choice once again. Next we have to determine whether we want a One Click Installation from here onwards, or we want to change any of the default settings.

As I want to make sure that the software will be using the right directories to store it's data, I selected the - non default - advanced installation.

The first step in the advanced installation is to decide if TV Server will be running on the same machine, or on a different machine in the network.

My Media Center machine has the TV Card built in, so it will also be used as the TV Server machine, so I selected the first option. Unfortunately the screen capture of this screen was not done very well, my apologies for that.

Now we have to decide which database engine we want to use with TV Server. TV Server needs a database engine to store information with respect to recordings and the like. I select the default Microsoft database server, and as I removed everything before starting this install, the install tool has to install it.

The configuration screen for the MS SQL Express server pops up next. I kept the defaults. Be sure to remember the admin password - default "MediaPortal" - as we will need that later in the configuration process.

The default Media Portal Installation directory is fine with me, so I kept the default once more.

The same applies to the TV Server Installation directory, so I pressed Next again. Which reveals the overview of the actions that will be taken by the installation program when you press Install.

After pressing install, the system will download and install all the software for you. Note that during the installationg of MS SQL Express an intermediate dialog pops up:

After all the download and installation steps have been completed, the status will be updated:

Pressing Next show the final screen of the installation tool:

After pressing Exit on this one, we can start the configuration of the TV Server, which I will show you in the next posting.

ATI/AMD released an update of their Catalyst drivers for all operating systems, so time to try it out, and see whether the 8.4 driver resolve the issue I had with Crossfire. The installation of 8.4 went flawless, and Crossfire has been activated. Now it is time to continue with the installation of Media Portal. After downloading the core Media Portal software from the Media Portal website, we can start the installation. During the installation I kept all the defaults, except that after the installation has finished the system asks to start the configuration, which I am skipping for the moment, as I am first going to install the TV Server software.

Installation of TV Server is a little bit more complicated, as MS SQL Server Express Edition has to be installed first. I started by downloading the latest snaphost, which is dated 8 April 2008 at the time of writing. Installation of SQL Server is pretty straight forward (accept all the default settings), although there is one important step that you should be aware of:

You have to select Mixed Mode (Gemengde Modus in Dutch) in the dialog box above, and supply a password (please make sure you remember this one ).

After installation of SQL Server I fired the TV Server installation file, and it started with the following error message:

It just tells me to install MS Visual C++ Redistributable Package Service Pack 1, which you can download from the Microsoft site. After installing this, the TV Server installation runs smoothly. Again I skipped the automatic start of the TV Server configuration. First I have to move the @Home Digital TV Config file into the proper TV Server Directory: C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server\TuningParameters.

Now I can start TV Server Configuration by clicking on the appropriate icon on the desktop. In the first dialog box, you have to enter the password that you supplied during the MS SQL Server setup:

After supplying the password and pressing the Test button, the following message box pops up:

Click YES on this box, to make sure that the SQL Server Service is running in Automatic mode, and will be started automatically when you reboot your machine. Clicking the test button again will show all green fields in the Setup database connection dialog, and a Connection succeeded! message. By clicking the Save button, the connection information is saved, and the configuration can continue. By default the TV Service is not running, so it has to be started before we can continue with the configuration:

Clicking Yes will launch the TV Server Service and the MediaPortal TV Server management console will appear:

Expanding the TV Servers Section will bring up the following configuration screen:

At the Country drop down box select the NL-AtHome configuration file that we copied to the TV Server Tuning Parameters directory (as shown above).

By pressing the "Scan Predefined Provider" button the system will scan for all available channels on the cable. This will take a considerable amount of time, so get yourself a cup of coffee....

As you can see the scan found 99 Radio channels and 132 TV Channels. To enable Electronic Program Guide functionality the TV Channels tag has to be expanded and in the TV Epg grabber section all Channels should be selected in the Greb EPG for channels box.

Of course the same applies for the Radio channels:

Next thing to change is the Recording Folders in the Recording Settings. As I don't want the recorded channels and the timeshifting files to end up in the system partition, I change the folders to a folder I created on the Data drive:

That should be all for the time being on the TV Server.

Before testing Media Portal I decided to install the latest SVN snapshot available on the Team Mediaportal website, which is from 8 April 2008, version 05-05-Rev18584. To allow for a quick check whether the crashing problems with Crossfire I reported in an earlier post have been resolved, I only entered the TV Server host as being htpc in the Media Portal configuration. Firing up Media Portal and switching on the TV resulted in a crash again.

Because of the crash, I decided to go back to the Club3D card, which means uninstalling and installing ATI Catalyst Drivers once more.