My Home Theater PC Project

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.

Despite my previous post, I decided to install Microsoft Windows Vista 32 on my HTPC. Installation went smoothly, running Windows Update revealed 48 updates to be downloaded and installed, so it took some time

Next I started the struggle with the graphics card(s). The Gigabyte BIOS switches to the graphics board in the PCI-Express slot when you put a board in there. It works, but it will not allow to enable crossfire to have both cards running..... It took some time to find out that I had to change the BIOS setting back to the motherboard graphics board and after reinstalling the ATI Catalyst 8.3 driver it worked, at least within Windows......

Of course because of the change to Vista I also had to reinstall Media Portal, TV Server, etc... TV Server found an amazing number of channels on my @Home Digital TV signal. Firing up Media Portal was the start of a problem that up until now is not resolved. For one or the other reason when I switch on the TV in Media Portal, Media Portal crashes. Up until now I did not find a solutions for this problem, so please post a comment when you have a solution. Switching the system back to the Radeon 3400 board only, solved the problem, but it is not the way the system was intended to run. Hopefully I will come up with a smart idea on how to resolve this issue tonight.....

Next thing was testing the recording function of TV Server. I set it up to record the detective serie Lewis tonight. The system went into sleep mode automatically after one hour of inactivity, so let's see whether it wakes up ontime . I will keep you posted.

Last Monday I installed the Club3D Radeon graphics card, as mentioned before I need this card for its TVout connection:

Also on Monday the floppyDTV card arrived:

Unwrapping it reveals the card and the Alphacrypt CAM module:

And built into the system it looks pretty crowded:

After building all the hardware together I also installed the Media Portal TV Server, following the installation guide on the Media Portal site. I'm using @home digital TV, and TV Server is not coming with the configuration file for @home. But google assisted me in retrieving the configuration file.

The weekend has passed with - besides a lot of other activities - installing all the Specific Drivers (using the Gigabyte supplied DVD, which did it's job perfectly well), the Antec Fusion front display driver (from the Antec supplied CD), Windows XP updates, the ATI Catalyst 8.3 driver, Daemon tools, codecs and Media Portal. I currently don't have a keyboard/mouse/monitor connected to my HTPC so I'm using the Windows XP Remote Desktop facility to install the software. I have encountered one problem, that is the installing Mdeia Portal latest snap shot was complaying about Visual C++ redist SP1 not being installed, so I had to download/install it from the Microsoft site. I alos installed McAfee to keep me virus free (I hope). In the mean time I also created the data partition and formatted it as a NTFS partition, to enable me to store all the necessary data.

Unfortunately it seems like DirectX is not able to run over remote desktop, so up until now I did not see the real Media Portal....

I will probably connect a mouse/keyboard/monitor tomorrow to continue the installation and testing of the machine. I also still have to install the Club3D card and the wireless LAN facility. And I am watching the post man for the FloppyDTV card.....