Evolution

The first mediacenter that entered my living room - October 2003 - was merely intended as an MP3 player. I had heard of this new invention called "time shifting" so I bought a Hauppauge TV card as well. The PVR-350 came with hardware encoding and a remote. Another use that I could think of was digitizing my LPs, so that's why I got a Soundblaster Audigy Platinum.

All of this was mounted in a Lian-Li desktop case. It fitted full size PCI cards and two 5.25" front slots. It was a full size desktop model, not a sleek small little gadget. I never really understood why people care so much for ultra small barebone cases for their media centers. Small means less options for heat dissipation, more heat means more noise. My advice if you're on a budget: buy a big ugly case and put it away in a cabinet. You only look at the case when you put a DVD in anyway.

For watching tv, the PVR-350 was delivered with the WinTV2000 application. It was pretty decent and, as advertised, it could pause and resume live tv! Not before long I discovered that the remote could be tweaked by editing a remote.ini text file. I spent hours mapping shortcut keys of many applications to keys on the remote.

I also developed a couple of HTML pages that could launch these applications, again using shortcut keys. The Hauppauge remote itself was very basic, so I exchanged that for a universal remote by Sony. So far, I'd been using three separate remotes for tv, receiver an mediacenter. Obviously that makes watching TV quite an operation. But the Sony remote had a nice option to direct the volume signals to the receiver, even while the other buttons still operated the mediacenter. So at least I could get by with one remote most of the time.

From the start, I used a Zalman CPU cooler. Over time, I changed the cheap case fans with more state-of-the-art Pabst fans. And, although the power supply was advertised as "low noise" it was rattling disturbingly through my music. So I took the fan out and replaced it as well. And when the harddrive was up for expansion, I switched from a Maxtor Diamond Plus to the Samsung Spinpoint. It does make a difference!

Another nuissance from the early days was that the analog audio out created a big burst of noise at every change of channel. It was so bad I used to swap channels with the receiver on mute. That only stopped when I changed my good old Pioneer stereo receiver to a digital Marantz AV receiver. The Marantz receiver also marked the entry of surround sound in my living room. Now, sound from every corner of the room is nice, and some special effects in dvd's work really well. But what makes 5.1 sound worthwhile is the center speaker. Having the actors or the news reader talk from a place near the tv makes speach much easier to understand. I watch tv in the Circle Surround II mode, but I still prefer my music in plain and simple stereo.

The last major change was the case. I ran into this GreenPower case that would look really nice with the receiver, plus it has a VFD display and would fit a more silent power supply. And voilà, that's the setup at the time I started this weblog.