So I spent a happy few hours this Sunday cleaning the dust off the various parts and then hooking it up to the TV in the living room.  I gained a sense of perverse satisfaction from seeing a computer from 1982 hooked up via an RF lead to a 40″ 1080p LCD panel.  Of course every appears in black and white since it was only a quirk of CRT display technology that allow the Spectrum to have a colour display.

After trying out a few commands, and typing the obligatory “Hello World!” program, it was time to try and load something from “tape”.  Problem number one: I have no Spectrum software on tape.  Problem number two: even if I did have tapes, I don’t have a tape deck with which to play them.  The first problem is easily solved by downloading virtual tapes, these TZX files are backups of the original Spectrum data.  I downloaded a few 16K games from World of Spectrum.  Then I used the winTZX tool to convert these files into .wav files.  Yes that’s right – audio files of that godawful screeching noise you thought you’d never have to hear again.

For some reason the soundcard in my MacBook Pro was too noisy, or not loud enough, or too loud or something, but playing the audio via WinAmp resulting in the Spectrum not quite reading the data from the “tape”.  So I gave the Spectrum some solid state storage: a first generation iPod Nano!  I copied the .wav to the Nano, typed LOAD “” and pressed play on the iPod.  Boom!  Or should I say “screech” as the Spectrum loading screen burst into life.  A couple of minutes later (did it really take that long to load 16K!?) and I’m looking at the load screen for Escape which, it must be said, doesn’t seem nearly as “original and absorbing” as it used to!

So that was my nostalgic Sunday.  It’s reminded me of the rest of my early console collection, and that I need to get hold of some of the other 8 and 16 bit machines from my early computing days…

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?

Almost as impressive: there is now a BitTorrent floating around that contains all the series one tracks I originally collated for the page. I had always intended to create an iTunes “iMix” as per Richard’s suggestion – I still might if it hasn’t already been done. I can do the same for series two now my army of helpers has detailed all the tracks used.

Isn’t the web great?

1. Led Zeppelin – Immigrant Song
2. David Bowie – Life on Mars
3. Blue Oyster Cult – Stairway to the Stars
4. Lou Reed – I’m So Free
5. The Who – Baba O’Riley
6. Deep Purple – Rat Rat Blue
7. Deep Purple – Fireball
8. Cream – White Room
9. Wings – Live and Let Die
10. Deep Purple – No One Came
11. Willie Lindo & The Charmers’ Band – Drum Song
12. Thin Lizzy – Saga of the Ageing Orphan
13. Deep Purple – Lazy
14. Pink Floyd – One of These Days
15. Sweet – The Ballroom Blitz
16. Uriah Heep – Gypsy
17. Free – Wishing Well
18. Atomic Rooster – Head in the Sky
19. Hawkwind – Brainstorm
20. David Bowie – The Jean Genie
21. Jethro Tull – Cross-Eyed Mary
22. Hawkwind – Silver Machine
23. Slade – Gudbuy T’ Jane
24. Rolling Stones – Wild Horses
25. Sweet – Blockbuster
26. Thin Lizzy – Call The Police
27. Status Quo – Good Thinking
28. Thin Lizzy – The Rocker
29. Cream – White Room
30. T Rex – Jeepster
31. Roxy Music – Would You Believe
32. Hawkwind – Urban Guerilla
33. Roxy Music – Mother of Pearl
34. Nina Simone – I Wish I Knew (How It Would Feel to be Free)
35. Louis Armstrong – What A Wonderful World
36. The Hollies – I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top
37. Peters & Lee – Welcome Home
38. Nina Simone – Sinnerman
39. Atomic Rooster – The Rock
40. John Kongos – Tokoloshe man
41. Atomic Rooster – Ear in the Snow
42. Atomic Rooster – The Devil’s Answer
43. Wizzard – See My Baby Jive
44. Lindisfarne – Meet Me On The Corner
45. Free – Little Bit of Love

That ought to keep you busy searching your music collections (and iTunes)!

Edit (10 April, 2007): Corrected spelling of Uriah Heep (not Heap!), thanks to Dave in the comments. :)

Edit (6 December, 2007): There is a BitTorrent file floating based on this (Series 1) list.

Bonus geek points to anyone who finds this funny.

Half an hour (and several trips to iTunes for missing tracks) later, I have completed my “[Almost] Complete Life on Mars Soundtrack”. I say almost because I’ve deliberately left out the tracks from Episode 7 where Sam hears modern music on the radio… I think my soundtrack can do without Britney Spears and Pulp. Not that I have anything against them – it just ruins the 70s cop-rock aesthetic!

I shall enjoy a 70s cop-rock inspired journey to work tomorrow – although not driving quite like Gene does in the show…

Update (Feb 2007): With the release of the new series there’s a renewed interest in the soundtrack.  Since the BBC have removed the link I used, here’s a track list of my “Almost Complete” soundtrack.

Download the code and installation instructions.

I had to learn TCL to make this work. That’s a whole new language for me. Neat.

Back? Good. I know it’s a niche thing, but I imagine there must be a few others Wordpress users who have Tivo, and a home network and want to share their tivo status with the world. If you’re one of those people head on over here for a small download and installation instructions.

It works for me, but I’m a lazy coder and haven’t yet made sure it’ll work for every variation of the /info page on Tivoweb. If you rewrite bits of it (because it is ugly code) please send me a copy, thanks! Especially if you fix the screen-scraping parser to work more generically!

Oh, and can anyone explain why the hover text doesn’t hover in Firefox? It’s fine in IE! *grumble*

Update: Thanks to Garett (see comments) for pointing out my schoolboy error with the alt tag. Using the title tag has sorted it. Thanks!

I’m assuming at this point that you’ve already installed a network card in your Tivo, and that you can telnet to a bash prompt, FTP to Tivo, and have got Tivoweb installed. If not, go and read this excellent guide.

On the Tivo

You need to install the vserver software. You can get this from the tivo-mplayer sourceforge page.
I used this link: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tivo-mplayer/vserver-1.2.tar.gz

Installing vstream:

• Uncompress the archive and copy the vserver binary to /var/hack on the Tivo (or wherever your hacks live).
• Configure vserver to run on tivo startup by editing your rc.sysinit.author (or if you’re brave, the rc.sysinit file directly):
  I just added /var/hack/vserver & to the end of the file.
• Execute the binary:

  # ./vserver

Hacking Tivoweb:

Tivoweb is great, and you can use it to work out which ty stream to connect to (vstream takes urls of the format: tivo://tivo.ip.addr.ess/tystreamid) but wouldn’t it be nicer to just click a link in Tivoweb and have VLC just load and start playing? Of course it would!

In your tivoweb-tcl/modules directory you’ll have a ui.itcl file – this contains the code we need to mess with – specifically the code that generates the nowshowing list. Somewhere around row 2880 is a line:

if {$manual || $watchonly} {

You need to add a line before that. This whole chunk is towards the end of a function, the next function is action_nowshowing, if it helps you find it! So, the line you’re adding before that if statement is:

set delete_td "$delete_td [td [html_link "tivo://192.168.0.240/$fsid" "View"]]"

Note where I’ve lazily hard coded my Tivo’s IP address. I could have done this properly with a variable, but really couldn’t be arsed. Change this to whatever IP your Tivo has!

Save ui.itcl, and do a full restart of Tivoweb – the now showing list should have your View link now:

On your PC

• Install VLC – it is available for multiple platforms.
• You’ll need the VLC vstream binaries – these enable tivo streaming in VLC. They’re available for OS X, Windows and Linux. They need dropping into the plugins directory in the VLC installation folder.

You’re now in a position to test it. Open Tivoweb and the Now Showing page. Right click the View link and copy the link to the clipboard. Open VLC and hit open file, paste the URL (It should start tivo://). Click Open, and it should start streaming video to your machine! Horrah!

Finally:

• Configure IE to launch VLC from tivo:// urls

Here’s the registry settings to get Internet Explorer to open “tivo://” links in VLC. Double-click the .reg file to import it into the registry. Restart IE, and now clicking that View link will launch an instance of VLC and play your chosen video. Yay! Job’s a good’un. If anyone can work out how to configure helper actions for Safari or Firefox on OSX, let me know!

Update 15/11/2006:

Thanks to helpful folks in the comments, I realised that in cutting and pasting the example Tivoweb code above, I made an error (now fixed).  Hope that didn’t cause too many people any hassle!