What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?

That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month.  He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room.  All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of redundant storage and accessed over the network.  Be it full VOB rips of DVDs to Xvid or x264 encodes of movies and TV it can all now be played back by the new HTPC.  Of course with as much digital content as we have, we need a decent system to manage and search it.  Read on for the best solutions I’ve found…

MyMovies

This plugin provides a full management suite for keeping details of your movies.  What I particularly like is the standalone Collection Management tool that allows you to add and edit details from any machine on your network.  Once installed you can create categories and filters that, for example, limit the list on screen to just your HD movies.  The onscreen interface seems to be some kind of HTML variant rather than the “native” media centre applications, this is the only criticism I have of it.

Imagine having a version of IMDB tailored specifically to your movie collection.  That’s effectively what you end up with onscreen.  Just enjoyed a film and want to see another by the same director?  Click his name in the interface and you’ll find not only a biography but a list of all his other films that you have already got.  The same goes for the actors in the films.  You also get full cover art (front and back of the DVDs), audio track information and a brief synopsis of the film.

MyTV

The MyTV plugin reminds me of the Library functionality that I could never quite get to work in XBMC, only this time it works.  It queries thetvdb.com to find the titles, graphics, synopses and a myriad of other details for every episode of nearly every TV series you might have on your server.  Even if it can’t find them you can, in true collaborative style, add them to thetvdb yourself (as I have done for several shows).

Once it’s found the show, it relies on you having named the episodes correctly; for most TV downloaders the format will look familiar: Battlestar.Galactica.s01e01 would cause myTV to populate the database with the data from here.  Outstanding.

Both of these plugins work immediately out of the box and require relatively little faffing about.  They also both have very healthy communities built up around them offering support.  MyMovies has a contribution feature whereby if you find data missing in their database, you can upload if yourself earning points in the process.  You can also show off your entire collection via a free website should you want the world to see.

Hauppauge’s WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 card is a Freesat compatible, HDTV capable satellite card. Hauppauge themselves provide (local mirror) a modification to the Windows driver that fools Vista into seeing a DVB-T card instead of DVB-S.  It’s a simple install: run the application and choose the satellite you intend to view – in our case Astra 2 at 28.2 degrees for the Freesat transponders – and it imports some settings into the registry to enable the device as a fake DVB-T card, and remaps the satellite transponders to appears as DVB-T channel muxes.

After a reboot you can start Vista Media Centre and perform a channel scan on your new tuner using the Sky headend (usually at the end of the list of available sources).  By default this will result in over 200 channels, most of which you can’t view because they’re protected by Sky’s encryption technology.

It’s worth editing the registry to remove transponders that you know you won’t need such as the multiple regional BBC and ITV channels, all the encrypted channels, and the myriad shopping TV channels.  Each transponder is stored as a key in the registry under:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HCW88bda\DVBS_as_DVBT

In my case, I used the LyngSat information on the Astra 2D satellite to compare the frequency and channel list.  The dvbs_freq value in the registry represents the frequency listed in the leftmost column on the LyngSat page. For example removing the registry entry with the value of 10788000 will get rid of a load of Midlands and Yorkshire BBC channels.  Just delete the entire key that contains the value and when Vista scans for channels it will skip over that transponder.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HCW88bda\DVBS_as_DVBT\474000] ; #14
"dvbs_freq"=dword:A3B628 ; 10729000
"dvbs_polarity"=dword:2 ; 2
"dvbs_srate"=dword:55F0 ; 22000
"nit_onid"=dword:2 ; 2
"nit_tsid"=dword:7FA ; 2042
"nit_nid"=dword:0 ; 0
"DiSEqC_Port"=dword:1 ; 1

The only transponders I’ve left in are:

10729 (for E4, More4, Film4, Channel4)
10758 (for ITV2, CITV, ITV4, Men & Motors)
10773 (for CBBC, BBC3, BBC4, CBeebies, BBC2)
10818 (for BBC1 South)
10847 (for BBC HD)
10891 (for ITV1 South)

Until their contract expires with Sky, none of the Five network channels appear free to air.

Once you’ve scanned for channels you will end up with a somewhat unorthodox channel list.  You will need to rename some, and reorder and add channel listings to the rest.  You can do this via Settings->TV->Guide where you’ll find Change Channel Order, Edit Channels and Add Listings to Channel.  For example, by default Channel 4 appears as a channel named 5830.  You’ll need to rename this to Channel 4 and then add the guide listings for the appropriate channel.  Ordering channels is a real pain since you can’t just define channel numbers; you must labouriously move the channels up and down in the list.  Let’s hope that the Fuji update addresses this too.

Next post: the must have Vista Media Centre plugins for Movies and TV.

Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI is only capable of setting up 2 tuners at any one time.  This is odd since the underlying tuner architecture is actually quite capable of using as many tuners as you can fit in the machine.  Your limiting factor, really, is the speed you can push the data to your hard drive.

So, how to enable the extra tuners?  Here’s the process I followed to make it work:

1. Start Media Centre by pressing the Green Button.
2. Go to Setting -> TV -> Set Up TV Signal.
3. Follow the process for configuring the tuners, in the first run through you will configure the first 2 tuners.
4. Close the Media Centre interface.
5. Stop the Media Centre Receiver service.

   net stop ehrecvr

6. Open the Registry Editor, and navigate to this key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
   \Media Center\Service\Video\Tuners\{71985F48-1CA1-11D3-9CC8-00C04F7971E0}

   That GUID on the end is the one for the DVB-T tuning space.

7. Under the GUID key there will be one key per tuner device – you need to find the two keys that were just configured by the Media Centre interface.
8. You can locate them by looking for the EnabledForMCE value under the UserSettings key.  If the value is set to 0xffffffff it has been configured, if not it’ll be 0×00000000.
9. Export those two keys to .reg files by right-clicking on the GUID key and choosing Export [Selected Branch Only].  Name each one separately (Tuner1.reg, Tuner2.reg, etc).
10. Repeat steps 1 to 9 for each set of two tuners you have, in my case I just had to do the process twice, once for tuners 1 and 2, then again for 3 and 4.
11. Once you’ve exported all the registry keys, and ensuring the ehrecvr service is still stopped, double-click all the keys to import them into the registry.
12. Close Registry Editor.
13. Start the Media Centre interface.

You can test that this has worked by entering the guide and starting recordings on 4 channels at once.  You should be able to go into Recorded TV and watch the streams of any of the channels as they are being recorded.

Sounds great, right?  So why am I using satellite cards instead of Freeview?  Two reasons: signal quality, and HD support.  We’re in a bit of a fringe signal area, and our aerial is fed via a series of boosters and distribution devices through multiple apartments.  I happen to have a Sky Minidish with a quad LNB anyway from when I used to subscribe to SkyHD.  I can’t put a new Freeview aerial on the roof, and loft-based aerials don’t offer the signal quality necessary.  So I turned to the satellite cards, which offer the benefit of HD content too.  More on them, and why using Satellite under Vista is a pain in the proverbial in the next post.

In order to play these files in VMC I had to install a few extra codecs and applications:

Haali Media Splitter

This is the standard app for any system trying to play video stored in the Matroska container format. It “splits” the file, piping the video, audio and – if present – subtitles to separate codecs for further processing. It does not do any decoding itself, merely allows other decoding apparatus to see the streams. It also allows the system to see into the containers to create thumbnails – which makes things in VMC much prettier.

ffdshow tryout

This does nearly every other codec you can imagine. During installation on the mixer settings screen I turned the mixer off. After installation I ran the audio and video configurations to make a few more changes: AC3 and DTS audio were set to spdif: this allows ffdshow to direct the audio stream directly to the optical out for my A/V Receiver to process.

Also, in the Video Configuration I set x264 decoding to disabled, because instead of using ffdshow, I used:

CoreAVC

CoreAVC (which actually includes Haali as part of its setup) is a multi-core aware AVC video decoder. With a fast enough processor it is capable of decoding 1080p MKV files while ffdshow pushes DTS audio to my receiver. It’s not free – setting you back a measly 15$ – but is well worth the price. Rumour has it that ffdshow will soon be multi-core aware, if so it would mean you could do without CoreAVC. At the time of my build however, this seemed the best solution.

In the CoreCodec Settings, make sure that Explorer Integration is set to Yes – this enables thumbnailing.

In order for VMC to recognise .mkv files as video, I had to add these settings to the registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mkv]
@="CoreMedia.MKV"
"PerceivedType"="video"
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.ts]
@="MatroskaVideo"
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Content Type"="video/x-matroska"

Save that as “mkv.reg” and double-click to add it to the registry.

With those applications installed and with those few changes made your system (assuming decent processor) will be able to play 1080p x264 mkv files, complete with 5.1 DTS audio. You may congratulate yourself with a cup of tea. Come back soon for why I’m using satellite TV cards rather than Freeview (and why doing so is a pain in the proverbial in the current version of VMC) also: the must have VMC plugins to manage your movie collection and TV episodes.

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 for the odd episode of Doctor Who or the Apprentice, but we wanted an interface that gave us access to all our music, archived TV, ripped DVDs along with live TV. Since the old XBMC can do neither live TV nor HD content and since the Xbox 360 in Media Centre Extender mode can not play back the more esoteric formats (such as MKV or XVid) it was necessary to build a true Home Theatre PC.

The requirements of this machine:

• record at least two TV channels at once
• allow playback of any recorded or archived content
• indexed access to our music, TV and movie library
• playback of any format up to full 1080p content in MKV containers
• small enough to fit into the AV rack
• quiet enough that we wouldn’t notice it

I’ve now completed the build and configuration of the HTPC, and I’m very pleased with the result. The compents I used for our system are:

• Antec NSK2480-UK V2 Media Case (Scan)
• Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Motherboard (Tekheads)
• AMD AM2 Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Windsor CPU (Scan) with Scythe Mini Ninja CPU Cooler (using Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound) (Overclockers)
• 4GB of RAM (Crucial)
• 2x Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 satellite cards
• 2x Western Digital 750GB SATA-II GreenPower HDD (QuietPC)
• 1x 16x DVDR (bog standard from PC World!)
• Logitech Dinovo Edge Keyboard (eBuyer)

I originally installed the low power AMD 4850e CPU which worked fine for MPEG2 content (standard TV/DVDs) and could even drive a 720p picture with DTS surround sound, but it wasn’t quite up to the task of decoding 1080p MKV files – a task which the onboard Radeon is unable to hardware accelerate.

The system runs quite happily with no CPU fan, only needing the large slow moving fans in the Antec case running on medium to generate enough airflow. I was concerned that the faster AMD would run too hot but the Ninja Mini heatsink is performing admirably. Fan noise is minimal; you can hear it in an empty room but it is far far quieter than having the Xbox 360 running, and any noise virtually disappears once we’re listening to some content.

The system has two harddrives which the Antec case cleverly mounts against small rubber grommets which absorb any vibration. This stops the noise you would otherwise get when vibrations travel through the chassis. I’ve opted for lower power, variable speed drives from QuietPC; these spin from 5400 to 7200 rpm depending on what the system is doing.

I’ll talk about the decision to use Hauppauge’s satellite cards in a later post.

Video and audio output is via DVI to HDMI and optical out into my Pioneer A/V receiver. All of my devices are controlled by a Logitech Harmony 895 RF remote. For the few occasions where we need to type at the HTPC, I have a stylish looking Logitech Dinovo keyboard.

More detail on the software later, but in summary the software running on the system comprises:

• Vista Ultimate
  I know that Vista gets a lot of bad press, but I am convinced that the Vista Media Centre component is its killer app. It is without doubt the best reason for upgrading to Vista and running as a dedicated HTPC I have had no issues with it. The interface is fast and attractive, and with a few extra plugins does everything we need.
• Out of the box Vista won’t decode High Definition content, and doesn’t know how to display Divx or MKV files in the Media Centre inferface. To achieve flawless 1080p playback I had to install and configure a few extra apps and codecs – I’ll detail this in a later post.
• MyMovies plugin
  This gives me an indexed view on my movie collection which I can also manage from an app on any machine on my network. It contains information on all my movies be they DVD rips, Divx or full 1080p MKV containers. I can search by actor, director, genre, format etc, and can even publish the information in my database for others to search.
• MyTV plugin
  Using thetvdb.com as source, this pulls down series information including episode summaries and screencaps. It means I can browse TV series season by season, episode by episode with a far better idea of what each episode is about.

  Both MyMovies and MyTV make use of a SQL Express database I have hosted on my main server – this means that multiple Media Centre machines are able to make use of the data, and reduces the resource use on the HTPC machine.

• Autologon
  The old SysInternals (now Microsoft) tool is handy to ensure the system logs on automatically, and starts the Media Centre interface without me doing anything.

It’s very handy knowing that we can watch or listen to any of our content via one slick interface, and having full 1080p video with surround sound is something to behold. It’s made us very picky about the content we view though, and terribly snobby about going to the movies. After all, when the video and audio at home are so good, why bother visiting the cinema?