My Home Theater PC Project

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.

Now it is time to start with the actual Media Portal installation. First things first, so I start by installing the necessary codec's, as suggested by the Media Portal Requirements documentation. I downloaded ffdshow from sourceforge. Installation of ffdshow is not straightforward, so I will show you the options I have choosen:

I decided to leave the configuration for now, as I don't have a clue on what to enter for the time being.

With all the playing around with the ATI Catalyst Drivers and the swap between Windows XP and Windows Vista, I was not sure whether it was wise to continue with the system software setup as it was currently. So, I decided to restart from scratch with a fresh installation of Windows Vista Business 32. I removed the previous system partition and created a new partition of the same size (20 GBytes). The installation of Vista is currently taking place. I will try to track all the steps I take, to keep a good logging of the installation process.

After the installation was completed, the first thing I did was to install the driver for the WLAN (Wireless Network). I used the installation CD supplied with the Belkin USB dongle I have. I hate those vendor supplied WLAN Utilities, so I removed the utility after installation and only kept the drivers for the USB dongle, havind Vista managing my network connections. Next thing was to connect to my home wireless network, which of course is secured by a network key. After supplying the system with the key, I left the system alone, because I had a meeting with friends scheduled.

While being left alone, Windows Update installed 51 updates, and 1 update failure. The system was waiting for a reboot, which I just did.

Next step is downloading motherboard drivers from the gigabyte site. I have downloaded the following drivers:

1. Realtek Function driver for Realtek Azalia audio chip (Including Microsoft UAA/HDMI Driver in English edition), Version R1.67
2. AMD Chipset Driver (include chipset\sata raid\vga driver), Version 8.452rc2
3. Realtek LAN Driver, Version 6.202.0125.2008
4. AMD RAID Driver, Version 3.1.1540.25

After unpacking these packages by running the executable files, the installation can start. By the way, Vista keeps on asking if the packages installed correctly or not, seems to be a symptom of the RAR expander, and can be ignored.

Installing items 1, 2, and 4 have to be followed by a reboot after each installation. I just launched the setup files in each package, without making any changes to the - whenever applicable - settings. Item 3 did not require a reboot, but I rebooted anyway

The get the graphics up to speed and get a proper resolution I installed the ATI Catalyst 8.3 drivers, after downloading from the ATI website. The installation needs some tweaking. First of all I do not need the Earthsim applications, so I deselected that one. Another thing you should be aware of is that ATI by default install Free Games stuff, which of course I do not need on my Media Portal machine. To disable the installation of the stuff I need to select Custom Install and uncheck the options as shown in the next picture:

Of course the system has o be rebooted after the installation. After the reboot I was able to set the resolution to my LCD screen currently attached to the system, which provided me with a bigger working area.

Next step was the installation of the FireDTV driver, by, after downloading it from the Digital Everywhere website, launching the setup. One important step in the installation is the selection of the driver I will need:

As I am going to run Media Portal, I need to install the BDA drivers.

Only one driver installation left, which is the remote control/LCD screen driver. The driver can be downloaded from the SoundGraph website. I decided to use the latest beta version of the driver 7.01.0204 2nd Beta, which according to several postings is stable. By the way, during the installation, I deselected the iMedian HD part of the installation, as I am not going to need that one.

As Device Manager shows now, all the necessary drivers have been installed. I went to the Windows Update site to assure that all the necessary updates were installed on the system, and of course, new updates were available, so I installed all available updates.

Before creating an image of the current installation, I had to change the workgroup, as the windows default workgroup is named "Workgroup", and that is not the one I am using on my home network. Changing the workgroup is an easy task, by clicking "change settings" in the System part of the control panel:

My home network is connected to a Windows Home Server machine, which is taking care of all the backups of my home PC's. To enable this backup facility the Home Server Connector software had to be installed from the Home Server. After completing this, I created an image of the system partition of my HTPC (meaning backup the C-drive).

By the way, by default Windows Vista puts your machine to sleep after one hour. For the time being I don't want this to happen, so in the Power Options I changed the option Sleep after 1 hour, into Sleep Never.

Not sure how quickly the remaining installation will continue, as I have to go on a business trip the coming week.

Of course on a Home Theater PC you don't want to have to supply username and password every time you start up the machine. So in order to establish that I enabled the auto-logon feature:

1. Start "netplwiz" from the start menu
2. In the window that comes up, uncheck the "Users must enter a username and password to use this computer".
3. Click "Apply"
4. A new dialog pops up in which to supply the username/password combination you want to auto-logon
5. Click OK and exit.

Job done!

First of all the test of my last post did not succeed, so still some work to do to enable me to record things when the system is in sleep mode. No time to investigate this further now.

I installed the latest - unofficial - release of the BIOS for my motherboard, hoping that it would resolve the Crossfire problem I encountered. I downloaded the F4D BIOS revision from Anandtech and installed it successfully. Switching the active graphics board to integrated graphics again and re-installed ATI Catalyst drivers (still version 8.3 as I am not aware of any more recent versions). Unfortunately Media Portal is still unstable with this set up. Switching on the TV will result in a crash. So, back to the PCI Express Graphics board.

The weather was nice, so I took my motor bike and got my self a Logitech Harmony 555 remote controller, to enable me to control my HTPC remotely. The Harmony comes with a nice configuration utility, and the utility is even familiar with the Antec Fusion II IR sensor.

I tweaked the power options to keep the system from going to sleep, and scheduled another recording - for testing purposes - during the night. This morning I quickly checked the recording, and it looks fine.