Damn I Hate Windows Media Center

Actually hate is not strong enough of a word for I feel about WMC. Loath might come closer.

WMC almost immediately began complaining that it didn't have enough space to record programs. There was 60 GB on the C drive for Pete's sake and 30 GB on the media volume. At first I thought that it was freaking out because it the media volume was a mapped drive and not a using a drive letter, thereby making it difficult to tell how much space was left on the media volume. Then I discovered that there was even more space on the system drive (Drive C). So, I don't know what the heck its problem was.

So I went through and told WMC not to delete programs that are older than 2 week. ("Yes, I know how far behind I am. I don't need a piece of software to nag me.") So, I figured that it would just do the best it could when it actually ran out of space, or perhaps delete old programs if it actually ran into trouble. Nope, it didn't do something sensible like that. It just didn't record the program... that it had plenty of space to record... because, well, because its disk space estimation algorithm is horribly flawed!

No wonder Microsoft is not going to support this piece of junk in Windows 10. I really wish there was another game in town for recording encrypted programs.

So, my intention was to work really hard a watching all the programs on the media volume and then give it a drive letter. But after I discovered this crappy software was just refusing to record, I looked at the Fry's online ad and found that Western Digital 1 TB hard drives were on sale. I started to get an external drive and make my life easier, but my HTPC won't support USB 3. It did support eSATA, but Fry's didn't have any external drives with that, so I was going to need to purchase a drive enclosure and drive separately. After I picked the hard drive, I decided to dispense with the enclosure and try to install it in the machine directly. That went well, except for one little wrinkle: The SATA power cable, which had the perfect number of three connectors on it (two for the hard drives and one for the Blu-Ray DVD) wouldn't quite reach to all three drives. No matter how I turned it. The first connector would reach to the original hard drive, and the last connector would reach to the second hard drive, but I couldn't quite make the middle cable reach the DVD drive, although the new drive and the DVD drive are in the same cage. Or, I could make the second and third connectors fit into DVD drive and the new drive, but not quite reach to the original drive.

I almost purchased a SATA power cable extension when I discovered that I still had a second SATA cable for the Seasonic power supply. (Hooray for module power supplies.) I plugged it in, connected it to the original, booted the machine, created a volume for the entire 1 TB hard drive (this time with a drive letter), and told WMC to record TV programs there. (I had created a WMC\Recorded TV folder for it, but no, it just created its own Recorded TV folder on the root of the drive. Grrr.)

I hope it's happy now. I hear that Silicon Dust is running a Kick Starter campaign to write a DVR program that can handle encryption. I need to check that out.

SiliconDust's HD HomeRun Prime

I knew some day, it would come to this. Back when the country was switching to digital TV, and everyone without a modern TV set was going to have to get an adapter so that they could receive the digital signals, Time Warner Cable here was touting "If you're a Time Warner customer, no need to worry. We've got you covered." Yeah, right. I knew at some point, Time Warner would stop broadcasting its analog signals, and my HTPC would become a whole lot less capable.

I mean, they could have switched the basic cable channels to unencrypted and then it would be fine, but what are the odds of that?

So, in December 2014, we got the letter telling us that they were going all digital, and I started looking for a solution. I guess I could have given up and got one of TWC's DVRs, but I must admit that I liked being able to stream Netflix in my living room, so I looked into other solutions, and I found one: Silicon Dust's HD HomeRun Prime. I looked at the offerings of others, including Hauppauge's, but I liked the HD HomeRun Prime because 1) it could receive three channels at once, 2) it used Ethernet to communicate with the HTPC, and 3) it would send its signal to any computer in the house, not just the HTPC. Sweet.

In the spirit of full disclosure, my friend at work, Steve, did some research on this (in fact I think that the HD HomeRun Prime had originally been his suggestion) and found lots of glowing reviews on it, but there was one ominous post. Someone asked, how do I get this to work on TWC? The answer had been, you don't. Undaunted by this, I purchased the HD HomeRun Prime and plowed ahead.

Now, I could relate the entire sorry affair of all the dead ends that I took to get this thing working, but it's not that interesting, so I'm going to switch gears in this narrative and just tell you what it takes to "get'er done", as an ex-boss of mine says.

1. The first thing you'll want to do is get a network drop in the room where the HTPC is, if you don't have one already. The HD HomeRun Prime, hereafter called HDHR3, will not stream HD signals through a wireless network. Ever since I set up the HTPC in my living room, I've wished that I had a wired network there, so I took this opportunity to do that.
2. If you don't have one already, get a Gigabit switch, like the NetGear ProSAFE 8-port Gigabit Desktop Switch. There's no sense in pumping a HD signal through a 100 Megabit network.
3. Go down to TWC and request a CableCARD, Tuning Adapter, and a digital signal splitter. The signal splitters that they sell at Radio Shack are not worthy.
4. If you're HTPC is not running Windows 7 already, then take the time to install it. I was still running Vista, but the software for HDHR3 requires Windows 7, and you will need Windows Media Center. I have heard that Microsoft has dropped WMC from Windows 8 and beyond. Sadly, this software is essential for the effort, as I eventually learned.
5. Hook the HDHR3 and the Tuning Adapter to the cable network. TWC sent instructions to do this and, despite it being a very simple process, they still left out some vital pieces of information. The main problem is that they were instructions for several CableCARD devices, none of which are the HDHR3. They also have instructions on the web that, again, don't include the HDHR3. As I said, this is really a simple process: Connect the digital cable splitter to the network, if not there already, and run its output signals to both the HDHR3 and the tuning adapter. Yes, it looks like you can run the signal from the tuning adapter to the HDHR3, but that way lies madness. Give them each their own signal. Next, put the CableCARD into the HDHR3. Yes, the tuning adapter has a slot for it too, but the HDHR3 is where it belongs. Run the USB cable that came with the tuning adapter between the HDHR3 and the tuning adapter. Finally, plug the HDHR3 into your home network. The TWC instructions say to power on the CableCARD device first and activate it, but I powered on both the HDHR3 and the tuning adapter at the same time, with no ill effects. I don't think that it matters.
6. Open your browser, and navigate to the Silicon Digital's website for the instructions to install the HD HomeRun Prime. The most important thing that you will need to do is to download the software for the HDHR3 and install it. It's pretty obvious what to do, so I will not bore you with the details.
7. Now the clerk at TWC told me that my CableCARD was already activated. This was not the truth. Perhaps it was correct for the tuning adapter, but you'll need to activate it for the HDHR3. From the Start menu, navigate to HDHomeRun/HDHomeRun Setup. Click on the Device Inputs tab. On this tab, you'll see table of HDHomeRun Primes that the setup software detected. In the left hand column, there will be an underlined hexadecimal number. Click on it. Your browser will open and you'll be communicating directly with the HDHR3. You'll see a menu of choices on the HDHR3 webpage, click on CableCARD Menu, then click on Cisco CableCARD/Host ID Screen. This page will give you instructions for how to activate the cable card, which includes calling a number on the screen, having a pleasant chat with TWC customer support computer until you finally can convince it that it can't help you and it sends you to a human. Even here you might get bounced around a bit, but just keep asking for CableCARD support until you get one of the folks who can actually help you. They will eventually ask you for the Host ID and perhaps the CableCARD ID. Then they will work some magic on their end and your HDHR3 and the CableCARD will be paired.
8. At this point, your hardware is set up. If you open HDHomerun VIEW, you will be able to see the unencrypted QAM channels, but you might not be able to hear them. If this is the case, you need to install an AC3 CODEC. I downloaded Media Player CODEC Pack from www.mediaplayercodecpack.com, but I understand that the K-Lite CODEC Pack, available from several places, including www.free-codecs.com is a better source. You'll need the Full version of K-Lite for AC3 support. Be sure to look at the bottom of the screen for the download button. All of the other Download buttons on the page are ads.
9. If you are thinking, I'd really rather use Next-PVR or KODI, those might work if all you want are the QAM channels, but you'll need to set up your own source to the Electronic Program Guides (EPGs). Initially I went down this path, but I wanted to be able to record the basic cable channels, and for TWC, these pieces of software are a dead end. Press on to Windows Media Center.
10. Start WMC and go through its setup. Then, down arrow to Extras and then right arrow to Extras Gallery. If none of the Extras is the Digital Cable Advisor (DCA) (or you don't have an Extras Gallery at all), you will need to download it. The HDHR3 website gives instructions, but essentially you need to close WMC, open a Command Prompt as Administrator, and then execute the command C:\Windows\ehome\mcupdate.exe -u.
11. When you can run the DCA, execute it from the Extra Gallery. It will ask a few questions, and then run a scan on your system to see if it meets the "minimum requirements for performance and display capabilities". It declared my machine "not worthy" because the display adapter or driver was not capable of supporting HDMI. Sadly, it does not tell you what exactly is wrong, so you have no hope of fixing it. However, I knew that it was total BS since my HTPC had been handling HD for years. If you get this message, again the HDHR3 website has advice for this, and that is following instructions on www.missingremote.com for overriding the DCA. Basically this will involve you setting up an account with Missing Remote (not terribly onerous), downloading a Windows command script, and then running that script as Administrator. What this script does is tell the DCA that its system scan has already been run and it completed successfully. When the script completes, start the DCA again. This time, when it gets to the point of performing the system scan, it will announce "Congratulations" instead. Click Cancel to exit the DCA.
12. When the DCA has been run, you are still not ready to watch TV. Now, in WMC, down arrow to Tasks, then click on Settings. In the Settings, click on TV, then TV Signal, then Set Up TV Signal. Answer its questions until it scans your machine for tuners. It should locate the HDHR3 tuners. Accept this configuration and click Next. You'll next be presented with a screen to activate the CableCARD. Click Yes and then Next. You will then be presented with a screen asking you to contact your cable company to activate the card. You'd already done this. Keep clicking Next until you see a screen for setting up the TV Signal Provider. Select your provider, such as Austin, Time Warner Cable (Digital), and click Next. You'll see a confirmation screen, click Next and then click Finished.
13. At this point, you are ready to watch TV, but may not be ready to record. If you wish to have the recordings placed on a separate disk drive, down arrow to Tasks, and then click on Setup. Then click on TV, Recorder, Recorder Storage. There you will be able to add another drive to record on. However, if you have the second drive mounted as a volume, you will not be able to do it through this interface. Close WMC. Click on the Start button. In the Search Programs and Files box, enter regedit. In the search results, click on regedit.exe. (Insert standard disclaimer about being careful changing things in the registry.) Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Media Center\Service\Recorder. Change RecordPath to be the full path to the directory that you wish recordings placed in. I also changed LastRecordPathSet, but I don't think that is necessary. Note that WMC will not have an accurate understanding about the remaining space on the drive, since it only looks at the drive letter.

And there you have it. You are ready to record and watch TV. WMC will not be able to watch the SageTV recordings that I still have, so I reinstalled SageTV. It looks like there is a way for SageTV to see the HDHR3 cards, but you have to install some other software first. If I do that in the future, I'll cover it in a separate blog entry. I am also thinking about adding an HD antenna so that my Hauppauge card can pick up over the air signals. That way I can record 5 programs at once, and if TWC gets into another tiff with one of the local channels, I'll be covered.

Software Installed

Spent most of the weekend installing software on Diane's new machine. The OS installation appeared to have a problem at first because it didn't have a network installed (ARG) but this turned out to be that I needed to install the software that came with the motherboard. The network drivers were there.

I then copied the Thunderbird and Mozilla (FireFox) profiles from %APPDATA% from the old machine to the new one. Then I installed Thunderbird and FireFox and, like wow, all of Diane's settings came over without a hitch. (This is what happens when you DON'T hide things in the registry.)

From there I installed McAfee and it went without a hitch. Then I installed Acronis, and everything seemed to be going well. Too well. I tried to restore Diane's last backup into an empty directory so she could move over files at her leisure, and the restores kept messing up with odd messages about being out of resources. I then tried to copy the backup files off the NAS and got a similar message. Finally I tried a good old fashion COPY command. Still no Joy. I finally decided a 109GB backup file can't be handled by a 32-bit version of Windows. So, we're going to just copy files individually from the old machine via USB if necessary.

After I gave up on restoring the backup, I moved the machine into Diane's computer desk and removed the old machine. The only problem that I had was some of the USB ports weren't working. Googling the issue lead me to "uninstalling" the malfunctioning USB ports (in the operating system sense of uninstalling) and rebooting the machine. The OS then reinstalled the drivers for the USB ports and they all started working.

So, Diane has now installed Civ 5 and I think that it is working.

If I get a chance, I'll put up the final build parts soon. I took a lot of notes and meant to create a Build blog entry, but when I installed the new motherboard, I didn't bother taking notes, so I'm not sure how useful the instructions are now.

Success!

OK, I finally have a machine that runs. Yea!

Last night I called Fry's, told them what was up, and asked what was next. The associate on the phone sent me to the Returns department. The nice guy there, Chris, sounded like he had heard this one before, and said that they would have to verify that the part failed before they would take it back. I told him that I'd like to bring the machine in tomorrow morning. He said he would not be there, but the Returns department would be able to help me out.

So, I took the machine into the Returns department, told them about Chris, and they sent me to the Service department, where they told me that there would be a $90 charge and they would determine what the problem was. There would be an additional charge for the replacement part. I told him that I wasn't going to pay for them to determine that Fry's had sold me a bad motherboard and left. Then I headed for the Motherboard department.

In the Motherboard department, I got a more sympathetic reception. The guy looked at the machine, said that it looked like I put it together correctly, and then said that he couldn't help any further, except to tell me that Chris would be in at 2. I said I would be back.

After work, I returned to Fry's, headed directly back to Motherboards and asked for Chris. Unfortunately, no one knew where he was. While they looked for him, I looked at new motherboards. There didn't seem to be a replacement motherboard at a similar price, so if it was the motherboard, it was going to cost me some more money, a lot more money.

So, the mystical Chris was found, back in the Returns department! He remembered me from the night before and asked one of his Returns guys to try and figure out which component failed. We started with a demonstration of the problem. Then he put a tester on the power supply. No problems there. So we tried a known good PSU on the machine, and got the same behavior. Then we traded the VGA card, and got the same result. Then we tried known good memory, and still got the same result. At this point, Chris dropped in, got an update, and said it was hardly ever the CPU. Usually this was a problem with the motherboard. So, they asked me to go back and get a replacement board. I shrugged and headed back to the Motherboard department.

Back in Motherboards, I found a couple of cheap boards that would do, but they weren't ASUS boards. It didn't matter because they were all out of stock of these boards too, except for the Demo boards. I said that I wasn't going through that again, and picked up an ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard.

Back at Returns, we put my CPU, memory, graphics card and PSU into the new board, plugged in the monitor, flipped the PSU power switch. Fans whirred, lights blinked, the speaker beeped, and the monitor displayed the BIOS menu. Yea!

I spent sometime at the Returns desk putting the motherboard into the case and verifying that it still worked. Then I went to the checkout desk, paid the extra $100, and headed home.

I spent the rest of the evening installing the disk drives, routing the power cables better, and hooking the remaining case cables up to the motherboard. I then plugged in a USB keyboard, flipped the switch and was rewarded with a BIOS menu.

So, a some point while I was in the Motherboards department I was a sign that said that they would take any motherboard and power it up to the Power On System Test for $10. I wish I had seen that on Sunday. That would have been $10 well spent.

So next up, installing the O/S.

Still no joy...

Well, I followed the steps described in Tom's Hardware PERFORM THESE STEPS before posting about POST/boot/no video problems! article but I didn't have any success. The only thing I didn't do was double check that the BIOS will support the FX CPU.

I also pulled the motherboard out and bread boarded the system, and still received no beep codes. Finally, I used the paperclip trick to power up the power supply and check its voltages. The EATX12V cable is producing the proper voltages, but the EATXPWR is not. I don't know if that is normal for a system whose CPU isn't running, or the sign of a problem.

Time to talk with my guru!

Update on Diane's new machine

Well, I wish that I had better news, but I can't get the new machine to come up. I don't hear any beep codes when it powers on and the monitor doesn't see any signals. I have verified that the monitor and cable works with another system. The fact that there aren't ANY beep codes is very troubling.

Sigh. Time for a break.

Here we go again

My wife's computer is dying ... A moment of silence ... And now, YEA! Diane said "Yes" to my offer to build her a new machine. YEA! Ack! I need to do it this weekend! I can't stare at specs for two weeks. I can't send my proposed machine off to my hardware guru friend Judy for her blessing. I can't even order it from Newegg and then wait impatiently for it to arrive. I have to do this now. Fortunately, I have this blog to refer to find out what I did last time. But, let me back up just a bit.

Diane's current machine is a Dell mini tower and, to be honest, I couldn't have asked for a better machine for her. Usually Diane needs a new machine every two or three years, but this XP class machine has been with us for maybe 9 or 10 years. (The previous machine was a ME class machine.) Anyway, this weekend it started having problems connecting to the network. It appeared to be connected, but it couldn't see any machines on the Internet and barely could connect to the router. I spent a couple of days trying to figure out what was wrong. At first, I thought it was the network card, so I put the NIC from the ME machine (I really need to recycle that machine) into the XP machine, and it didn't help. I thought that perhaps it was a problem with the DNS on the router, but doing some simple tests seemed to eliminate that possibility. I thought about taking the machine up to my work to see how it behaved on another network to eliminate the router. I also searched the Internet for similar issues, but I didn't find anything useful except that the error code 0x5b4 is a Time Out. Ultimately, I decided that Diane has been waiting for a new machine since she discovered in 2010 that she couldn't play Civ 5 on her XP machine, so I just decided to get her a new machine rather than chase this problem any further. I should have done this in June when she and I first discussed it. If I had done that, I wouldn't be making a crash job, so I have no one but myself to blame.

Anyway, I started with investigating the current state of hardware since my last foray into HTPC land. I purposely stayed with AMD CPU's. I worked at Texas Instruments for 8 years and Motorola for 2, so I'm afraid that I still see Intel as "the other guys". And, even though Steve from work tells me that Intel is making better CPU's than AMD these days, and Rick the IT guy at work is empathic that Intel is the best and "AMD is crap", I'm going to stick with AMD because I see them as the home team. After some investigating and looking at the Civ 5 specs, I decided on an AMD Athlon II X4. From this I found a couple of ASUS mother boards that I liked, the M5A97 and the Sabertooth. However, since I was gearing up for a shopping trip to Fry's and I didn't have a clue what they had a stock, I decided that I was going to have to take the plunge and decide on the remaining items on the fly.

At Fry's I started with looking at the available motherboards. They had the Sabertooth in stock, as well as the M5A97. Even though the M5A97 is based on the AMD 970 north bridge chipset, and Sabertooth on the 990FX, I ultimately decided that the M5A97 was sufficient to run Civ 5, and was cheaper. Ultimately it turned out the M5A97 was a closeout item and I have no problem with eating the last piece of cake. Unfortunately, even though the warehouse inventory said that there was one in a package in the store, the Fry's guy couldn't find it, so I ended up with the display model. It was up high in the display and difficult to get down, so I'm hoping it was not handled too much. Also since it was the display model, I got 20% off of it. There's a 15 day return policy, and I should know way before then if there's a problem.

From there, I went graphics card hunting. I was trying to stay with AMD, so I settled on a HD6450. I could have gotten a lot cheaper and a lot more expensive Radeon graphics card, but I decided on a middle of the road card. The thing that troubled me the most is that the card said that it used a PCI Express 2.1 Bus, and the M5A97 had only a 2.0 bus. So I took the HD 6450 and asked the Fry's guy over in the motherboard department if that was going to be a problem. He said that there's a PCI Express 3.0 socket on the board. That was not my recollection, but I hope that the card could probably handle a 2.0 bus too, so I decided to stick with the M5A97. (I just checked, and I was correct, it does not have a PCI Express 3.0 socket.)

The next problem was that they didn't have any Athlon CPU's. So I got an AMD FX-4100 mostly because it had 4 cores (a Civ 5 recommendation) and the lowest wattage of the available CPUs, 95 watts.

Then I looked at ATX cases. I must admit that all of the cases looked like something out of a bad science fiction movie, with all sorts of weird shapes. I settled on a CM Elite 371 because it looked like a normal computer case and because it didn't have a power supply. I wanted to get a modular power supply, and I didn't want to trust whatever cost reduced piece of junk might be in an inexpensive tower case.

From there, it was a flurry of buying the remaining items. I'm afraid that not a lot of thought was put into them.

So, here's what I finally ended up with:

Item	Size	Description
AMD FX-4100	95W	AM3+, 64-bit 3.6Ghz, Quad Core CPU
ASUS M5A97	AM3+	Motherboard with AMD 970 Northbridge, 950 Southbridge, 4xDDR3 2133 (OC), 32 GB, USB 3.0, and 6.0GB/s SATA
CM Elite 371		ATX Mid Tower
DDR3 Memory	4 GB	1333 Mhz Memory
Antec HCG-620M	620 W	80 Plus Certified Bronze Modular Power Supply
HD 6450	1GB	XFX 6450 graphics card with 1 GB DDR3 memory, Direct X11 support, HDCP, 2560x1600, HDMI, Dual Link DVI, VGA, 650 Mhz core clock
WD 100000 CSRTL Green	1 TB	Hard drive with SATA/300, 16 MB buffer
LG Internal BD-W Drive	10 X	BlueRay internal drive, SATA interface, MDISC Compatible, 3D Playback
Windows 7 Home OEM SP1	32-bit

The final cost, about $670, not including tax.

Tomorrow I'll build this beastie and we'll see if I know what I'm doing.