As my remote is working now, it is time to install a new skin for Media Portal. I picked the famous Monochrome skin, to be downloaded from the Media Portal site. The current version comes as a nice installation program, which first let's you pick the installation language:

Of course, as always, I'm using English as the setup language, clicking OK reveals the following dialog:

Clicking Next brings us to the license agreement:

Of course we accept this agreement, as we can not continue otherwise. Pressing Next:

This let's you select the installation folder, which I left as is, pressing Next again:

This let's you select all the options. The only thing I changed compared to the default settings is the IMDB Data view, as you can see above. Pressing Next:

Pressing Install will start the actual installation, which displays the following dialog when finished:

As we need to activate the skin in the Media Portal Configuration, I ticked the Media Port Configuration Lunch bullet. After pressing Finish the Media Portal Configuration starts, and in the Skin section you can activate the Monochrome skin. I hope you like it as much as I do.

According to a thread in the Media Portal Forum, the IR Server Suite will enable me to resolve the problem I had with my Harmony 555 remote control. The setup to make it all work is not straight forward, but finally I succeeded in solving all the problems I was having with my remote control. So, bear with me, while I take you through the steps I took to make it all happen.

First of all I downloaded several files from the thread mentioned above:

1. The IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1
2. The IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1 - MP Control Plugin Update
3. The IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1 - IMon update
4. Imon USB Receivers_05_12_2008_test

Next step, after unpacking all the zip-files, is launching the IR Server Suite installation program from the first zip-file (IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1) downloaded. This will pop up the main installation program:

Clicking Next reveals the following:

On which you have to agree to the GNU General Public License, no choice, as the only way to continue is to press "I Agree":

I decided to install all the MediaPortal and TV Server plugins, I removed all the settop box drivers as I don't have any of those things. Pressing Next:

You have to supply the Media Portal installation directory (the one shown above is the default directory). After a click on next:

Asking for the IR Server Suite installation directory, for which I left the default untouched. Add a press of the Install button, the installation takes place:

After a short while, the installation is completed, and by pressing Next we get to the next screen:

And by pressing Finish we close the installation program. Now the difficult part starts as we need to copy some individual files manually to the right place. But, before doing so, we need to stop the Input Service, as this was automagically started when we installed the IR Server Suite. To stop this service, type services in the Vista Start menu. In the services window that pops up, find the Input Service in the list of services installed on your machine. By pressing the right mouse button, a popup menu appears. One of the options is "Stop" to Stop the service:

Select the Stop option. After the service has been stopped, we can start copying the relevant files to the right folders:

1. Copy the contents of the IR Server Plugin folder (three files called "Imon usb recievers": a dll file, an xml file and a pdb file) from the "The IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1 - IMon update" file to C:\Program Files\IR Server Suite\IR Server Plugins.
2. Copy the contents of the Abstract Remote Model folder (one file called "imod pad": an xml file)  from the "The IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1 - IMon update" file to C:\ProgramData\IR Server Suite\Input Service\Abstract Remote Maps\iMon. The ProgramData folder is a hidden folder on you system C: drive. To access this folder type C:\ProgramData in the location box on top of the windows explorer program:

   

3. Copy the contents of the The IR Server Suite - Test Build 1.4.2 RC1 - MP Control Plugin Update (three files called "MPControlPlugin": a dll file, an xml file and a pdb file) to  C:\Program Files\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\plugins\process.
4. Copy the contents of the Imon USB Receivers_05_12_2008_test (a dll file called "iMon USB Receivers") to C:\ProgramData\IR Server Suite\Input Service.

After copying all these files, we need to start the Input Service Configuration program, by clicking Start, All Programs, IR Server Suite, Input Service Configuration:

Scroll down to view the iMon row, which should have a tick in the Receive column, and press the Configure button in this row:

I kept all the defaults, but it is very important to press OK on the configuration screen, as otherwise the appropriate configuration file(s) will not be generated. After closing the IMon configure screen, click on Advanced in the top bar of the IR Server Configuration program:

Select "Server Mode (default)" in the Input Service Mode section, and activate the "Use the Abstract Remote Model" in the Abstract Remote Model section. Press OK, and close the configuration program by clicking OK again. The configuration program will restart the Input Service automatically for you, which will assure the use of the configuration as we just configured:

Finally we have to configure Media Portal to use the Input Service as the remote control. We will do so using the Media Portal Configuration program. So fire it up by clicking on the appropriate icon on the desktop, and go to the remote control section:

As you can see, I deselect "Use Microsoft MCE remote or keyboard". Next, go to the plugin section by clicking on the Plugins in the pane on the left. It might take some time before the infor appears in the right pane. When it appears scroll down to the process plugins section. And click on the MP Control Plugin for IR Server icon with your right mouse button. This will pop up a menu, in which we select Configuration:

This will bring up the MP Control Plugin for IR Server Configuration window:

In this screen delete the MCE remote from the Remote Controls, by selecting it and pressing Delete (and OK in the confirmation dialog). Select Abstract Remote Model in the popdown box besides the Add Remote button, and click the button. Finally select OK to save the configuration, and close the Media Portal Configuration program by pressing OK again.

On my system the Harmony 555 remote control is working all the way through, all the buttons are showing the expected behavior.

As you could have read in my previous post, I downloaded the latest Media Portal SVN Snapshot from the Media Portal site. After installing and configuring (don't forget to change the number of CAM crypto channels, refer to one of my previous blogentries on switching channels) TV Server I fired the Media Portal SVN Installation program:

Pressing Next gets us to the following screen:

I like the defaults, so I pressed Next, revealing the following:

Also the default location is fine with me, so click Next again:

Start menu group is fine with me also, so let's press Install:

The installation takes some time to create a backup and install the new files, but after it finishes I presssed Next:

And the installation is finished already. Up until now I did not change anything to the configuration, I will keep you posted!

Today I had some time again to spend on the installation of my HTPC. I decided to start with the download and installation of the latest SVN Snapshot. The snapshots can be downloaded from the Media Portal Site. Unzipping the downloaded files reveals to installation packages, one for the TV Server and one for Media Portal. I started with the installation of the TV Server snapshot, by firing the appropriate install program:

Pressing Next reveals the following:

AS you can see, the installation program detected an existing installation of the TV Server software. As some time has past since experimenting with the system I decided to do an uninstall first (selecting the appropriate radio button as shown above and pressing Next):

Off course Media Portal is not running, so I press Next again:

The installation program warns you that all configuration information will be lost, so make sure this is what you want! It is exactly what I want, so I pressed Yes to continue:

It seems like the programmers are trying to make this a really fool proof installation, as they ask for confirmation again. I'm really sure, so I pressed Yes again:

Now the actual uninstall will start be pressing Uninstall:

The uninstall will take some time to remove all files and folders, after it has completed, press Next to continue:

The system let's you know that the uninstall was successfully completed, which is exactly what we wanted. By pressing the Finish button we can continue with the installation:

First thing is to decide which components to install, I need them both so no much thinking on this one. Pressing Next reveals the next screen:

Here we have to decide were to put the software. The default settings (as shown above) are fine with me, so pressing Next again:

Picking the start menu folder or group, again I'm going with the default settings, and press Install:

After a while the installation completes, and by pressing Next we get to the following screen:

Which brings us to the final screen, which will automatically brings us to the TV Server Configuration screen after pressing Finish when we want this. As the system is useless without configuring it, I keep the default and press Finish. The will automatically fire up the TV Server Configuration program. As the procedure for the configuration has not been changed since the last time I configured TV Server, I will not describe the configuration process again. Please refer to the TV Server Configuration Blog entry for more information on the configuration process.

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.