Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre – something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think! Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need…
My 1080p HTPC: Freesat with Vista
By Howard | Published July 13th, 2008My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners
By Howard | Published July 12th, 2008When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards. Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card. By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once. Out of the box the Vista Media Centre…
My 1080p HTPC: The Software
By Howard | Published June 26th, 2008As I mentioned in the last post, I’m running the Media Center (yes, that’s how they spell it) interface from Vista Ultimate to drive my HTPC. Out of the box Vista Media Center (VMC) is capable of playing DVDs and MPEG2 broadcast content – such as the output of a Hauppauge DVB-T or DVB-S TV…
My 1080p HTPC
By Howard | Published June 21st, 2008Part one of a series of posts where I record how I built my 1080p capable Home Theatre PC. Having ditched the increasingly expensive and irrelevant SkyHD last year, we’ve been watching what little broadcast TV we see via a Windows Media Centre machine upstairs connected to an Xbox 360 front end. This was fine…
New Laptop Time
By Howard | Published June 20th, 2008As regular readers will remember, I ordered the first generation MacBook Pro within hours of Steve Jobs’ keynote. That was January 2006 and at the time the spec – 2 GHz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM – was monster. The promise of dual booting OSX with Windows in a machine only an inch thick…
MacBook Pro Graphic Corruption
By Howard | Published November 30th, 2007This interesting rainbow effect is what greeted me when I booted my newly Leopardised MacBook Pro this morning. At first I thought it must be a driver issue, but with further investigation the video proved to be in “rainbow mode” when booting from the HDD, Windows and the Tiger DVD. It was even glitching on…
Apple support Vista on BootCamp
By Howard | Published March 28th, 2007Apple updated BootCamp today and introduced support for Windows Vista, so it looks like I can spend some time over the weekend doing a fresh install of Vista with supported drivers this time. Of course it also means I get to have some fun removing the Microsoft Bluetooth stack and replacing it with a fully…
Testing the K800
By Howard | Published July 19th, 2006I’ve been hankering after the K800i since it was announced some time ago. 3.2MP camera, 3G data, mp3 player, lots of memory and all sorts of other bells and whistles meant it looked like a good replacement for my Samsung D600 and my aging digital camera. As it happens, I ended up buying a new…
Philosophy majors shouldn't write technology editorials
By Howard | Published April 19th, 2006Richard sent me an email yesterday with a link to this article along with the message “You’ll love this one…” If you’ve followed the Windows on Mac saga recently go and read it now, if you’re anything like me and Richard you’ll have plenty to say on the subject once you’ve finished reading. I couldn’t…
Why my primary Windows XP machine is still a Dell
By Howard | Published April 12th, 2006The MacBook Pro is great running XP; but has several flaws which mean it probably won’t become my primary machine just yet… No Audio Routing If you plug headphones into the headphone socket audio continues to come out of the speakers. This is known (and documented by Apple) but is still irritating. If I’m…
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