Pre-configured HTPC roundup

While personally I'm happily tinkering around with individual pc components, the internet hardware stores provide pre-configured HTPCs as well. What can we learn from their hardware choices? A small round-up of the HTPC offerings in the dutch internet PC stores.

Judging from the amount of choice, Media Center PC's still don't account for a significant amount of computer sales. Compare that to the amount of choice in HTPC cases that's on offer and the conclusion must be that Media Center PC's are still the domain of DIY PC builders.

The bigger real-life stores offer nothing but disapointment. MyCom, Computerland as well as Media Markt have no Media Center PC's at all. Paradigit offers an OEM system from ASUS, the Aspire L5100-tv. This is pretty much an ordinary small form factor desktop with a tv card. It doesn't have a display or a remote control.


From the web stores, only very few carry pre-configured HTPC systems. Salland sticks out with a range of different systems. Their latest "Gold" model comes at a stunning 1031 euro and that's without operating system or a tv card! It's based on a 3 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 processor on a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4 motherboard. The case is a Zalman 160D. Fortunately Salland also offers more affordable "Silver" and "Bronze" models. Most are based on Intel the 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E8200.


Informatique has a single configuration on offer called the Informatique inDigho-a HTPC. It's priced at 649 euros. Add a Floppy DTV card and the total is 804 euro for a complete system. It's based on a 2.3GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4450e processor on an ASUS M3A78-EM motherboard. The case is the ever popular Antec Fusion.


Comptech has two systems on the website. Both run on the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850E processor. The CTW Media Center Deluxe has a Asrock K10N78HSLI mother board and a TopMedia case. It's priced at 579 euro, including Vista but excluding any tv cards.
The Media Center AMD is based on the MSI Media Live barebone with
nVidia C51PVG / MCP51 Chipset. The price of 699 euro is without a tv-card.



Without a doubt, QMotion is building the Rolls Royce under the dutch Media Center PCs with the DVB 400i. The folks at QMotion clearly want to market a piece of consumer electronics as opposed to a PC. The website lacks specifications like the type of motherboard and the size of the harddisk. What is clear is that this product is well thought through. It features a dual DVB tuner with a single CAM, and the manufacturer has developed an online service to help the user configure the tv channels. The case is a Origen AE S10V Black, the processor an unspecified Intel Dual Core. At 1849 euro it's not the cheapest though.

Server running

The home server is up and running for a couple of weeks now, so time for an update. I use Windows Home Server as the operating system. It's easy to use and helps with a couple of server essentials. The nice thing about WHS is that it manages the available harddisk space as a single large network drive. As a user you only see one network drive, regardless of how many physical drives the server has. Then for each individual share folder, you can set WHS up to duplicate the folder. The folders with this setting can always be recovered after a harddisk crash. Apart from that, WHS takes care of various types of remote access functionality. Unfortunately, my pc's with Windows XP Home edition can't be controlled remotely.

MediaPortal TV server is running and I have a working client on my desktop. Unfortunately the analogue cable signal appears to be too weak after the extensions I had to make to reach the home server, so I'll have to do some tweaking there. As a webinterface for the tv guide and scheduling of recordings, I use For the Record.
The server is running a couple of other web services. Whiist is taking care of the pictures and the links on the homeserver front page. Whiist has a very simple user interface and makes setting up a photo webpage incredibly simple.
For downloading goodies I gave up torrents and moved to usenet. The client I use is SABnzbd. It runs on the server and also provides a great webinterface, so I can manage my downloads from anywhere. It can even move the downloads to the proper folder based on the type of content.
WebGuide makes the full MP3 collection available through the internet. It offers streaming as well as downloads and has a very flashy user interface. As a minor hurdle, it's based completely off the Windows Media Player library, which isn't very easy to maintain.

My weather in MediaPortal

Since a transfer to MediaPortal 1.0 requires a fresh new install, I'm revisiting a lot of settings that I haven't touched in a while. Among which the maps for My Weather. With many websites using unsupported formats for their weather maps, finding images that My Weather can display is a challenge. For instance, the .png files that are used by the dutch KNMI website and many other weather sites are not supported. But I found a number of close matches:

Satellite: http://www.sat24.com/images.php?country=nl
Temperature: http://www.teleweer.nl/common/data/nl_middag2.gif
UV Index: http://www.knmi.nl/waarschuwingen_en_verwachtingen/images/zonkracht/zonkracht_kaartje_dag0.gif
Winds: http://db.eurad.uni-koeln.de/prognose/data/aktuell/sto_cen_1h_movd0.gif
Humidity: http://icons-pe.wunderground.com/data/640x480/2xeu_rh.gif
Precipitation: http://www3.buienradar.nl/images.aspx?jaar=-3&soort=sp-loop

This also gave me an opportunity to make my first ever contribution to the MediaPortal wiki.

Network troubleshooting

With the server hardware up and running, there is plenty of troubleshooting to do. My network now consists of a server and two client pc's, connected by 100Mbps ethernet and a router that I use a switch. The router is also connected to an ADSL modem that's also a router.

First of all, the network was behaving weird. Even though all three pc's had the same workgroup name specified, not all of the pc's were showing up when browsing the workgroup node in Windows explorer. Upon further research I found out that "ping" worked for the ip addresses of the pc's, but not always for the computer names. Eventually I learned that without a WINS server on my network, NetBIOS name resolution didn't work properly. I was able to solve this by creating LMHOSTS lookup files on all of the pc's.

Another problem, that I originally linked to the network problem, was very slow file transfers to and from the Media Center PC. When copying a bigger file, the CPU usage went up to nearly 100% while the network usage remained at less than 25%. Over a 100 Mbps network, that equals about 3MB/s, while the harddisk is capable of 133 MB/s (UltraDMA 6). Only after I solved the network problem did I find out that this even occurred while copying files locally on the Media Center PC. First I tried all sorts of driver updates for motherboard and hard disk. After running a Samsung hard disk self diagnostics program and trying the disk in an external drive case, I came to the conclusion that the disk was fine. A forum post directed me to look at the IDE channel transfer mode in the device manager. It appears that Windows XP sets this transfer mode back to PIO indefinitely, after six DMA failures. This PIO transfer mode was the culprit for my high CPU load and low transfer rates. Getting it back to DMA mode requires an uninstall of the IDE driver. Windows XP automatically reinstalls it at the next reboot.

The good thing from all of this is that the Samsung hard disk utility enabled me to set the UltraDMA mode from the default 5 to the maximum of 6. That improves the theoretical transfer rate of the harddisk from 100 to 133 MB/s at no cost.

Home Server Hardware

The hardware for my Home Server/ TV Server is in!

CPU: Intel Celeron 440 2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB
Mobo: Gigabyte EP35-DS3, Intel P35 Chipset, ATX
Harddisk: Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB, SATAII
Memory: Kingston Dimm 1GB DDR2 PC2-6400
Case: Cooler Master Centurion 5
OS: Windows Home Server UK

To be supplemented by some re-use components:
Power Supply 250W
2 Hauppauge analogue TV cards
Maxtor 160GB harddisk

Last.fm

In the battle between the music communities Last.fm and Pandora, the choice is obvious in Europe: Since Pandora had to block service to anyone outside the Land of the Free in May 2007, the prize went to Last.fm.

Wikipedia gives a decent explanation of what Last.fm is and what it does, so I won't repeat that here. This month, Last.fm released a new web layout with a number of improvements. The Last.fm blog visitors are raising hell about the layout, but it has actually improved. With so many links and information, the pages used to have a tendency to get cluttered up. The new interface does a better job at that.

Now, about the auto-dj capabilities. I like to play my local music and not be dependent on the quality of the streams that Last.fm provides. The plugin available for MediaMonkey is trash. It's based completely off of Last.fm's recommendations. Typically, the recommendations are songs that the user hasn't played, so there's a big chance the recommendations aren't present in the local collection. The plugin fails to find a hit and defaults back to a favorite.

The MediaPortal plugin seems to do a better job. It really looks for songs similar to the songs played. Just playing "Hunting high and low" by A-ha results in a true 80s playlist, while "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs gets me a playlist with recent Brit pop. Unfortunately, after a while some artists are played more and more often.

Part of the problem is that the auto-dj's use queries from last fm, but Last.fm doesn't really support the auto dj plugins. With all the data gathered by Last.fm, it should be possible to make a better guess of what song I want to hear next. I'd expect a setup page for configuring auto dj preferences integrated in Last.fm.

What I end up doing is just go to Last.fm, pick an artist and play the Music like... stream. Great fun, but anyone can do that, even if you don't have a profile at all. And then, what's the point in uploading data about every song I play?

Windows Home Server

With a desktop PC and a Media Center PC in my house, I've been contemplating a means of central storing for a while. With a wide array of NAS devices, what's to choose? And why not a full server? With the availability of Windows Home Server since last year, the answer is easy: Let's build a server!

With a broadband network in the house, separating the data from the user interface makes sense! A separate device in the house for storage of music, video and pictures is the future. More and more media-extenders are hitting the market that plug network data directly into your audio and video equipment. Many consumer electronic devices even come with a media extender included.
With a dedicated device, all this media is available instantly anywhere in the house. Or, anywhere in the world, if the device is attached to internet.

All of this can be supported by an off the shelf NAS device. A full server is only required to support tv server functionality. The MediaPortal community has been developing tv server software for a while now, separating the tv cards from the mediacenter pc. This, and the fact the hundreds of GB of harddisk capacity are no longer needed in the mediacenter pc, offers new potential for the ultimate sleek and silent htpc.
WHS makes RAID-like protection of your essential data easy. Already I have double copies of my pictures and music collections on different hard drives, but synchronizing remains a pain in the butt.

With that in mind, we're looking for an energy efficient and affordable server solution, with slots and room for up to 4 tv cards.

Microsoft released a hilarious "children book" about Windows Home Server:



Or view page by page, here.

FLAC test

What's the point of owning some fine loudspeakers and a matching receiver, if the set only gets to play crappy MP3 stuff? With todays prices for digital storage, storing music with a lossless audio codec has become affordable. Just exactly how crappy are those MP3 compressed music files?

To put this question to the test, I compared MP3 compression against a lossless format, FLAC. FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, and that's exactly what it is. It's also open source and it seems to become a standard. I used Exact Audio Copy to generate a quality WAV file from 10 very different CD fragments and converted to FLAC. The same WAV fragments were compressed to 192 kbps MP3 files as well. In my experiment, the set of WAV files was compressed to 22MB, while FLAC needed 76MB for the same set.

The FLAC fragments and the MP3 fragments got the same names, so I couldn't tell the difference when playing them in MediaPortal. Using mediaportal, I loaded all 20 fragments in a playlist and had the list randomized. Then I manually put the fragments with the same name together and saved the playlist. The result is a playlist that plays each of the 10 CD fragments twice, without me knowing if the first is the FLAC version and the second MP3, or vice versa.

Sitting back on the couch, I quickly noticed it was damn hard to spot any differences. I wrote down FLAC or MP3 for each of the fragments. After checking with the extensions in the playlist file, I found out I guessed wrong 8 out of 10 times!

In a way that's a disappointing result: so much for my audiophile qualities. But, for now I won't have to invest a whole lot of time in re-compressing my cd collection to FLAC. I'll probably redo the test with 128kbps MP3 files and FLAC, because I definitely still have a serious amount of music at that quality.

Windows XP

My Media Center PC runs on Windows XP. Today I visited Microsoft updates site and found out I had a backlog of 41 high priority updates since January 2007. I simply never do the updates and I get away with it. I never even bothered to install an anti virus package, for performance and stability.
But then again, I don't get exposed to risks too often. My DSL router has a firewall. I only use the Media Center PC for running MediaPortal. It doesn't have e-mail or any office applications and I don't use the web browser on it.
Knock on wood...

Keyboard (2)

My Media Center madness knows no boundaries. When shopping for paint for my house, I found the shop's paint blending machine was equipped with a very tiny keyboard with integrated trackball. How neat would that look in the living room? A trackball is much more precize than the little joystick-like device I have on my keyboard. On the downside: it was attached by a cable. Of course, I had to ask the shop attendant if I could inspect their equipment from up close. On the back it said iOne, and after I had bought my paint and returned home, I found their website. Sure enough, they do have similar keyboards in multiple wireless versions.

The best choice appears to be the Scorpius P20MT model. It combines a compact sized keyboard with 10 meters of RF range, multimedia keys and a trackball.

Update April 24th 2008:

Logitech released an innovative design for a Media Center PC keyboard with the diNovo Mini. It features bi-colored back lighting and a multifunctional touch pad. As with all products in the diNovo line: the price is prohibitive and I don't particularly like the style, but it has a high gadget factor.

And if you like using a laptop style touchpad, your keyboard of choice may very well be the Adesso SlimTouch Wireless. Their site also features other interesting keyboards.

Antec Fusion HTPC case

Tom's hardware has posted a review of the Antec Fusion HTPC case. The timing seems odd, this product is not exactly new on the market. But they did a thorough job and it is a nice case.

Album Artist View

I've been blogging before about the Album Artist view in My Music. I found out that not all of my album artists were displaying correctly, so I had to sink some extra calories in it.

In general, I like to play music by album. And I want to select an album from a list of artists. The trick is in here: I don't like to have artists in that list that don't have full albums on my harddrive. Hence the definition of album artist. Every album on my harddrive has a single album artist. If the album is a compilation album, the album artist is "Various". If the album contains guest artists or duets, the artist of the particular song can be "Santana featuring Rob Thomas", the album artist is still just "Santana".

The problem is that "album artist" was never formally defined in the ID3 tag definition. So different programs use different solutions. I use MediaMonkey to organize and tag my music, which I would definitely recommend to anyone with more than two mp3's on his pc. MediaMonkey does work with an Album Artist field, and using a plugin called MagicNodes it's even possible to view the database by Album Artist. By meticulously tagging and renaming all the music on my harddrive, I should have my mp3's set up for correct display in MediaPortal.

The configuration screen in MediaPortal that's applicable here is the one for Music Database. The top box indicates where the music shares are that need to be scanned into the database. The first tick box will ensure artists like The Beatles will be listed under B not T. It's important that the tick box for "Treat tracks in an individual folder as an album" is checked, this eliminates the compilation album artists from the album artists list. For folders with mp3's by multiple artists the album artist will show as "various artists"
The two boxes below only affect the generation of thumbnails. I don't like the automatically generated thumbs for artists, so I switched that off. Then, for the database updating you can select to do a full update or only incremental. I found out that even the full update does not overwrite all of the database. If you really want a fresh start, you need to delete the databasefile itself. It's called MusicDatabaseV10.db3 and is located in the MediaPortal\database folder.

So far there's a couple of things I don't understand: I found out that there's still a couple of album artists that don't show up as such in MediaPortal. Nor can I find those albums back under various artists. And how does mediaportal distinguish between an album from B. B. King plus guests and a true compilation album? Does it use an album artist tag or rules to convert artist to album artist? The fact that the database scan uses folder locations seems to suggest the last. Also, I haven't found out when the Auto-update on changes in share comes into action.

Shoutcast Plugin

Today I installed the shoutcast plugin. This plugin uses the shoutcast directory at http://www.shoutcast.com/ to find internet radio stations from within MediaPortal. For install it requires only unpacking in the MediaPortal directory and there are no configuration settings. The plugin is easy to use and within a couple of minutes I created a favourites list of the stations I'd like to listen to.

But that's about all the plugin has to offer. If I were frequently in search of new radio stations to listen to, I'd use the plugin more often. But once you found your station, it doesn't offer anything that My Radio doesn't do. So I'll write down the station names and add them to My Radio.

As an obvious improvement, the plugin could provide a list of the most popular stations, as shoutcast does on their homepage. An annoyance is how the selector for minimum bitrate resets itself over and over again. This is by design, as the author wrote on the forum.

My conclusion: this shoutcast directory search is great if it was integrated with the My Radio section of MediaPortal. As a stand alone plugin, I won't be using it a lot.