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.

Win 7 - The Stench of Failure

I have not completely given up on Windows 7, but this weekend I trimmed 100 GB off my media partition and restored a Vista backup on the NAS. I fired it up and started to record normally for the first time since early August.

I got here because while WinTV 7 was able to record normally, and it's viewer is pretty good, it has a very elementary scheduler. Windows Media Center has an OK scheduler, but it doesn't record HD very well. (It doesn't appear to use the hardware encoding on the card. Of course, it also doesn't appear to use a standard file format, so perhaps it is reencoding it. All I know is that the audio is fine and the HD picture is jerky. So, the latest beta for SageTV 7 came out. I ponied up money for it and I reinstalled it from scratch. Everything was going well until I got to scanning the digital channels. SageTV reported that there were no digital channels. I tried to play one manually and got bits of audio and no video. I checked with WinTV and Windows Media Center and they could view the channel fine. I thought that perhaps it was a problem with the capture card drivers, so uninstalled the card and reinstalled the same ones that worked on Vista.

So, at the end of my rope, and with the new TV season upon us, I fell back to good old reliable Vista. (How often do you hear that?) Unfortunately, I have about a half a week's recordings on the Windows 7 partition in Windows Media Center format, and nothing else appears to be able to play them, so I'm going to have to boot Windows 7 to watch them, which means I can't watch them when something needs to be recorded, and I don't feel like installing Windows Media Center for Vista. (I didn't really want to install the Windows 7 one.)

I reported the signal problem to SageTV and I'll keep trying SageTV on Windows 7, but I just can't deal with this nonsense anymore. I want to watch TV on my HTPC, not fix problems with it.

Audio Problems

Well, I just thought that the upgrade to Windows 7 was complete. In early August, a couple of weeks after I let SageTV start recording programs, I finally worked my way through the programs that I had recorded before the conversion and got to ones that I had recorded after the conversion, and their audio was awful. It wasn't quite a stutter, more like living in an echo chamber. Sometime the audio problem would clear up, but the audio would be behind the video.

I put a request for help on the SageTV forum, but didn't get much help. The only person to reply suggested that I also try WinTV and Windows Media Center. Sadly, those two things worked, but I was no closer to solving the mystery. The only thing that I learned was the WinTV was using only about 2% of the CPU, while SageTV used 25% to 30%. So I gave up and submitted a request directly to SageTV's support, and their answer was to install the SageTV 7 beta. Well, I did that and I got the exact same results. They had me turn on some tracing and simultaneously record a minute of same programming using SageTV and WinTV 7 and send them to them. After some mulling things over, they sent me an updated DLL, which fixed the problem, for the GUI version of the software. However, the service started to reports:

Error - Capture Device failure while starting recording.

So, I reported this problem and left the GUI version running hoping that the next beta would fix the problem. Unfortunately, the Beta license was a temporary one and I couldn't figure out how to pay for the upgrade. With no new beta in sight, when the beta license expired, I just uninstalled SageTV 7 yesterday, and the new TV season is starting this week.

Installing SageTV on Windows 7

There were a few challenges to installing SageTV on Windows 7, although they don't directly relate to Windows 7. The first is that SageTV has some files, I believe that they are for the online services, that SageTV can update automatically, unless the SageTV is installed in it's default place on Vista and Windows 7. This is because the new security features prevent programs from modifying directories in C:\Program Files, and that is where SageTV stores its configuration files. There is a simple fix for this in the software, but SageTV hasn't made it and their solution is to install SageTV in a directory other than C:\Program Files. Instead they want you to install it in C:\SageTV. GAG!

The second issue is that I really didn't want to try and setup SageTV again, especially the channels.

So I went to the SageTV forums and searched for a procedure but I didn't find much. However, I did find a 2003 article that told how to move SageTV from one machine without losing recorded programs. I must admit the age of this article bothered me. I also didn't like the first step, "Install SageTV completely and completely configure." So, here's what I did instead:

1. I started my Vista SageTV and opened Setup/Detailed Setup. I looked at all of the setup options and made note of the important ones. I also noted all of the channels.


2. I downloaded and installed the latest drivers from Hauppauge for my HVR-2250. The install kindly let me install only the drivers. I skipped WinTV this time.


3. I downloaded and installed the latest SageTV from SageTV into C:\SageTV. I did not start it.


4. I went to the copy of my Vista SageTV that I had copied to DVD, and opened the SageTV\SageTV directory. I then sorted the files in the directory by descending date. There I found several files that had been modified recently: Sage.properties, Wiz.bin, TSSpliter, sagetvmsgs.txt and several FRQ files, one for each HVR capture device. So, you can see where I'm going with this. I copied each of the files and dropped them into the new C:\SageTV\SageTV directory.


5. I then edited C:\SageTV\SageTV\Sage.properties using notepad. I searched it for references to C:\\Program Files\\SageTV and replaced them with C:\\SageTV. I saved this file and I then started SageTV.


6. I am sorry to say that this only had partial success. I still had to go through the setup wizard, but most of the defaults for the prompts were already correct, including the channels. I did select MCE remote for the Remote Control Configuration.


7. I also had to go through the Detailed Setup again and fix some settings. Sadly, I didn't note what.

This seems to have worked. There is probably a file in the SageTV directory that causes the setup wizard to run and the wizard removes this file when it is finished. If I had performed a litte research, I probably could have prevented the wizard from running. However, the channels and the already recorded programs were still there, and those were the important things.

Seven of Windows

Last weekend I started the installation of Windows 7. Here are the highpoints of that process. As usual, I'm going to go into as much detail as possible in hopes of helping others. (I also found it a good reference for myself later.) This is not the actual steps that I followed, as mistakes were removed to protect the innocent.

1. Begin with going to http://www.gigabyte.com/ and downloading the latest drivers for the motherboard. I clicked on Support & Downloads and entered MA78GM-US2H, my motherboard's part number, into the download search box and clicked the Search button. There are now two revisions of the board, and I was presented with a list of revisions from which to choose. I'm sure this information is somewhere on the motherboard, but that would require me to shutdown the machine and open the case. I tried using a few utilities to determine the revision using software, but without success. Finally, I uncovered the motherboard's original box and the revision was plainly printed there on a label. I have revision 1, so I clicked Drivers. I was presented with a list box of OS'S and I selected Windows 7 64-bit. I then downloaded the audio, Chipset/VGA, and LAN drivers into a new directory for easy access. For the SATA RAID, I only downloaded the AMD SATA AHCI driver, as I am not using a RAID. Then I changed the Download type listbox to BIOS, and downloaded the latest BIOS, which was F8. (I stayed away from the F9 beta.) Finally, change the Download type to Utility and the Choose your OS to Vista (no that is not a typo), and downloaded the @BIOS utility.


2. Next, go to http://www.ati.com/ and download the latest display drivers. In Download Drivers, from the Component Category listbox, choose Motherboard/Chipset. From the Product Line listbox, I chose Radeon 3xxx Series. From the Product Model listbox, I chose Radeon 3200 Series. From the Operating System listbox, I chose Windows 7 - 64 bit. Click the View Results button to see the latest drivers. Download the driver to the same directory as the Gigabyte drivers.


3. Next, in your download directory, unpack the motherboard_driver_ahci_amd_sb7xx_bootdisk_win7-64bit file. A directory named ahci_bootdisk_win7-x64 will be created. The first time I that I did this, the OS installed floppy drivers and attempted to format a floppy in a nonexistent floppy drive. If this happens, just cancel out of it. Copy the ahci_bootdisk_win7-x64 directory to a USB drive instead.
   
4. Next, either copy the remaining drivers to the USB drive, or place media into your DVD burner and back them up there. Also make a copy of any other interesting files in your download directory.


5. Next, I copied the C:\program files (x86)\SageTV directory to my backup media. I wanted it easily accessible when I reinstalled SageTV. Fortunately, all my recorded programs are in a different partition, so I didn't have to worry about excluding them from the copy.


6. Next, I used Acronis to backup both my OS and media partitions to a NAS, Network-attached Storage. It is a small box with a 1TB drive running Linux and Samba, which provides Windows networking support. Unfortunately, the wireless network, which has 54 MBit download speed, could not handle the high volume upload, and I had to move a router and the NAS into the room with the HTPC. I plugged both the HTPC and NAS into the router and perform the backup to the NAS.


7. Now is the time to upgrade the BIOS. Despite all the warnings about installing a BIOS while running Windows, I unpacked the motherboard_utility_gbtools_gbt_atbios file, and then installed the atBIOS program. I then unpacked the mb_bios_ga_ma78gm-us2h_f8 file. Finally, I ran the @BIOS utility and upgraded the BIOS from file. (It is still nerve racking to wait while it installs the BIOS.)


8. Say goodbye to Vista and shut it down.



We are almost ready to start the Windows 7 install. I was ready at this point with a wired USB keyboard to perform the install, but it turned out that the wireless Gyration keyboard would work.




9. Push the power button and be ready to press the Del key to to enter BIOS setup. You'll probably be greeted with a (too) brief message about your SATA drive being used in IDE emulation mode, and asking if you want to switch to AHCI mode. Ignore this message and press the Del key.


10. Select Standard CMOS Features.


11. Make sure Drive A is set to None and Floppy 3 Mode Support is Disabled.


12. Select Advanced BIOS Features.


13. Set Onboard VGA output connect to D-SUB/HDMI. Set First Boot Device to CDROM. Set Second Boot Device to Hard Disk.


14. Select Integrated Peripheral.


15. Set OnChip SATA Type to AHCI.



Make any other changes that you feel comfortable with. These are all the changes that I remember making.



16. Place the Windows 7 DVD into the optical drive, save the BIOS changes and tell BIOS boot the DVD.


17. When the language page, pick the appropriate values and click the Next button. (It is very cool that the Air Mouse works here.)


18. When you reach Which type of installation do you want?, click Custom (advanced).


19. At Where do you want to install Windows?, select Drive options (advanced). Click Disk 0 Partition 1. This should have a Type of System. Click Delete. Click New to create the new OS partition. Select the new partition and click Format.


20. Insert the USB drive in the machine and click Load Driver.


21. Press the Browse button and navigate to the directory containing the AHCI driver. Press OK and then Next.



Seems like the rest of the installation was straight-forward, so I'm going skip ahead to more interesting stuff.



22. During installation, if you are asked to select a wireless network, skip it unless you have the security key handy.


23. As soon as Windows 7 finishes installing itself, open the Control Panel, click on Network and Internet and finish setting up the networking, if necessary. I had to turn off the router connected to the NAS to be able to connect to the Internet through the wireless connection.


24. Return to the Control Panel and select System and Security. Click on Windows Update and apply all of the latest updates.


25. Install the media containing your driver downloads and copy them to the Downloads directory.


26. Unpack and install motherboard_driver_audio_realtek_azalia-ati.


27. Unpack and install motherboard_driver_chipset_amd_7series_v2.0_win7_64.


28. Unpack and install motherboard_driver_lan_realtek_811_w7.


29. Next, run 10-7_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_enu. This will create a C:\ATI\Support\10-7_vista_win7_66_dd_ccc_enu directory. I think it automatically starts the install. If not, run the setup program to install the latest ATI drivers. (motherboard_driver_chipset_amd_7series_v2.0_win7_64 will have already installed some of them, this will install the latest.)


30. Finally, if you did not map a drive letter to the partition containing your SageTV programs, return to the Control Panel and select System and Security and then, under Administrative Tools, select Create and format hard disk partitions. You will see that that Windows 7 has already assigned a drive to your programs partition. Right click on it and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.... Select on the drive letter and then click Remove. Right click (again) on your media partition and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.... In the dialog box, select the Mount in the following empty NTFS folder radio button and the click Browse. Use the New Folder button to create an empty folder for the partition. (I created C:\Volumes\Media.) Select the empty folder and press OK and then OK. (If you wish at this point you may reletter your DVD drive.)

We are now ready to install SageTV, but I'll leave that for another post, as this one is massive enough.

BIOS follies

One of the projects that I wanted to accomplish with the DVR this summer was to install the fabled Windows 7 on it. I acquired an OEM copy from Newegg, and I proceeded to install. (Oddly, the full Windows 7 install media was cheaper than the upgrade from Vista media.) The install went fairly well, and then I discoverer that there was a new BIOS for the motherboard, so I decided to upgrade it too. Sadly, that was the wrong order to do it in.

The first problem after installing the F8 BIOS was that when I booted the machine, a message would appear on the screen only long enough for me to read about a quarter of it. And there didn't seem to be a way to halt the count down to reboot. The message seemed to say that my SATA drive was being accessed using a IDE emulation, and it asked if I wanted to use the native AHCI instead. (AHCI, stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface.) I figured, "Why not?", even though I didn't completely understand the question. (How could I? I didn't really get to thoroughly read the message.) But I told it Yes after an couple of failed attempts to read the entire message. (Note to self, use a camera next time!) The system looked like it was going to boot, and then rebooted itself, with Window reporting that it was unable to boot would I like to repair it. I told it to go ahead, but it couldn't find anything wrong. Finally, it put up a message saying that if I changed any hardware recently, to remove them. So, I booted to the BIOS and changed the hard drive support back to IDE and Windows rebooted properly this time.

I found some references to this problem on the web, and there were solution from some people who claimed that if a certain registry entry was changed from one value to another, it would enable the Microsoft AHCI support. I found this entry in the Windows 7 registry and was about to change it, when I found that the "from" value didn't match the entry in the Windows 7 registry in the forum message, so I was loath to change it. I decided that I didn't have that much time invested in the Windows 7 install and I would try it again with the proper setting in the BIOS. I will describe that process in a future blog, but during it, I discovered a couple of other presents that the BIOS update gave.

The first was that it re-enabled the floppy drive and made it the first boot device, with the hard drive the second and the CD-ROM the third. Someone on the web said that after they switched the BIOS into AHCI mode, the installation DVD-ROM could no longer be booted from the CD-ROM and they had to complete the install in IDE emulation mode and then try to switch the OS into AHCI mode later. I wonder if they just didn't realize that they needed to remove the floppy from the first boot position, and put the CD-ROM drive in its place.

The second problem was that the BIOS switched the on board VGA output to D-SUB/DVI. This didn't cause a problem for the installation, however later my machine had no sound, and when I tried to enable the HDMI Audio output, I was told that it wasn't connected. I even checked the HDMI cable to see if it had come loose. Nope, it was solid. I finally remembered that before I upgraded the BIOS, Windows 7 had audio, so I went back to the BIOS setup and found the Onboard VGA output connect set back into the default setting of D-SUB/DVI, and, of course, DVI has no audio component. So, the lesson to take away from this is to always refer back to Press Del for Setup after flashing the BIOS and put the BIOS back into its proper settings.

Next, I'll describe the process of installing Window 7.

Virus Scanner Irritations

So, I haven't been blogging much about my HTPC for the past year because it has been working very well and I haven't wanted to fiddle with it during the television season. However, I did run into a few issues during the year. The most annoying one was that I would have 30 seconds or so just disappear out of the program that I was watching. I was blaming the cable in my house when I realized that it happened at exactly the same time in two programs that were being recorded simultaneously. It could still be the cable, but it occurred to me that it could also be the McAfee virus scanner. The 2010 version of McAfee is much better than the 2009 version, but the 2009 version had a nasty habit of locking up the machine up for a significant period of time while it decompressed the download and installed it. I guess it was freezing any viruses on the machine and keeping them from corrupting the download, but it could also be preventing SageTV from reading the video capture card.

Fortunately, there was an easy answer: I configured McAfee to download the daily updates, but not install them without my permission. After I did that, the mysterious gaps in the programs all put stopped. There were still some times when there were gaps in the program, but I'm thinking that they were a corrupted signal. In the gaps with the virus scan, the SageTV progress bar showed a large red area at the point where the gap occurred. However the remaining gaps, there was not a red area. The viewer would just jump from one time in the program to the next. If I paused the program and repositioned it into the gap, I can still hear the program, although it is usually garbled, and the picture is frozen for a few seconds and then jumps to another frozen image. I do not know what causes this, but it could just be an issue at the cable company, or the qualify of the cable within my house. However, I digress, back to virus scanner.

One of the annoying things about the virus scanner is that it insists on running a full system scan while I'm watching a program. It's not that this impacts performance, but it seems to me that the machine should run them in the middle of the night. Sadly, while you can set up McAfee to run the scan during the middle of the night, it will only do it if the machine is actually powered on. McAfee won't do what SageTV does and turn the machine on to run the scan. I posted this to the McAfee customer forum and got the suggestion to set up a scheduled task to turn the machine on. So, I tried this and while it worked wonderfully to turn the machine on, McAfee still didn't run the scan. Looking at the Vista system log, it looked like the machine turned on at the right time and then, 5 minutes later, it turned itself off, before McAfee decided that it was OK to begin the scan. I don't know why the machine was turned off, because the power configuration was that the machine needed to be idle for 2 hours before it would power down. My guess is that SageTV was shutting it down, although I have no proof that. I know that SageTV will power on the machine in the middle of the night to download the latest schedule. Perhaps it takes the opportunity of my scheduled task to perform its downloads, waits 5 minutes to see if something interesting is going to happen, and then decides to shutdown the machine when it appears to be idle. Sigh.

So, I kludged it. I just scheduled SageTV to record for 2 hours at the same time as the virus scan. When I do that, 3 minutes into the program, the virus scan starts, and an hour and a half later, it completes. When I get a chance, I just discard the 2 hours of infomercials, a satisfying side benefit.

What I really want however, is to be able to schedule the update downloads in the middle of the night too. I can create a scheduled task to wake the machine and actually start McAfee's GUI. When I do this through Windows, the mcagent.exe program has an argument /desktopicon. I'm not sure where why Windows decided to apply this argument, but if mcagent also had an /update and /scan options that would force an update and a scan, then I could set up scheduled tasks to force it to do my bidding. I'll continue to investigate this possibility, but for now, I'll live with deleting infomercials.

DAMN YOU MPEG-2!

So, it turns out that the main reason that I can not find a DVD Decoder is because the algorithm for the MPEG-2 decoding is licensed. According to this Wikipedia article:

Approximately 640 patents worldwide make up the "essential" patents surrounding MPEG-2. These are held by over 20 corporations and one university. Where software patentability is upheld, the use of MPEG-2 requires the payment of licensing fees to the patent holders. The patent pool is managed and administered by MPEG Licensing Authority, a private organization. Other patents are licensed by Audio MPEG, Inc. The development of the standard itself took less time than the patent negotiations.

This essentially means that no one is allowed to create a free MPEG-2 decoder. You will find on the web that there are a lot of CODEC packs out there that say that they handle most of the DVD formats. What they neglect to tell you is that they don't handle the most important one: MPEG-2.

There is a utility that one can download from Microsoft called DECCHECK, that allows you to see what MPEG-2 are installed on a machine. It claims to be for XP, but it also appears to work on Vista. When I look on my HTPC, I see several MPEG-2 decoders on the machine already, including one for Sage. I think that the reason that these aren't working is that they are either 32-bit decoders, or they were designed for XP, because Vista changed how all of this works (of course).

What I think irritates me the most about all of this is that I've already have a very power MPEG-2 decoder built into the 780G graphics chip. All that is needed is a DirectShow decoder filter. This filter does not actually do any work, thus it doesn't need to be licensed. It just passes the stream to the 780G to do the heavy lifting. There is such a decoder filter at SourceForge. Of course, it doesn't work on my machine, probably because of the Vista 64-bit issue.

In some ways, I accidentally shot myself in the foot here because the Home and Ultimate editions of Vista already have a DVD Decoder that ships with them. I, of course, had to buy Business. I have also read that Windows 7 is going to ship with a DVD Decoder in all editions, but I was not willing to wait for that.

There are a lot of Windows Media Player add-ons out there that you can buy that support the MPEG-2 format, but they can only be used by Windows Media Player and many don't support Vista. I purchased and installed the one from Cyberlink because it had a Vista version, and I was hoping that it would be installed as a common CODEC for all media players but, sadly, it wasn't. However, I discovered that SageTV has a setup option for DVD Decoder Filter where I could change it to Microsoft MPEG-2 Video Decoder. This almost works perfectly except that the DVD menus don't work with the remote's arrow keys and the hot spots don't light up when they are hovered over with the mouse cursor. However, hover over a hot spot with the mouse cursor, click and, presto, the menu option is selected and the movie, she plays! Whew! The good news is that Windows Media Player is also able to play DVD's now, although the upscaling is not very good.

So, I'm thinking that I can put this one in the bag, although the lack of the arrow keys working on DVD's is going to make finding Easter eggs harder. Perhaps getting PowerDVD was the right answer after all. Perhaps I shouldn't have went with 64-bit Vista. I've heard good things about Windows 7 and 64-bit CPU's are becoming common place. As consumers, we need to keep pressure on the software vendors to move their applications over to 64-bit CPUs. The conversion is not nearly as painful as the conversion from 16-bits to 32-bits. (For the sake of full disclosure, my own company's software hasn't been converted to 64-bits, and the customers are starting to get really angry.)

So, what's next for my HTPC? I'd like to be able to burn DVD's on it, so I guess that I'll tackle that next. How hard can it be? (HAH!)

On Display Drivers

Before I launched into finally trying to solve the DVD Decoder issue, I wanted to clear up an annoying message that appeared whenever I rebooted the machine. It was a message indicating the Windows Defender failed to start. This started happening around the time I installed McAfee, and I believe that McAfee disabled the Windows Defender service, but failed to disable its Notification Area icon. (Or perhaps I did it. I can't remember.) There was nothing in the Startup folder on the Start menu that started this icon's program, so I ran a program called msconfig, found the Windows Defender program and disabled it. Windows Defender is a Spyware detection program and McAfee already does that, so there's no sense in having two of these running.

After I did this, I opened the ATI Catalyst Control Center and selected, Check For Driver Updates. I had noticed earlier in the week that there looked like there were some recent updates for the graphics chip, and I was hoping that perhaps there might be a DVD Decoder hiding in there was well. Clicking on Check For Driver Updates took me to the ATI website where I had to figure out where they had hidden the display drivers for my system. First I had to tell it that I was running 64-bit Vista, then I had to tell it that I my product line was Integrated/Motherboard, and then I could select Radeon HD 3200. (The Integrated/Motherboard thing really confused me. I think that during the initial installation of software I tried to upgrade the drivers and gave up when I couldn't find Radeon HD 3200 in the Radeon product line.) Once I got to the right download page, I discovered that not only did they have updated display drivers, but they had an update to the south bridge chip set too. Plus they had a download for something called HydraVision. (Much Excitement!)

So, I downloaded and installed everything. The installation of the south bridge drivers caused a hiccup in the Gyration USB transmitter, but unplugging it and plugging it back in fixed that. Then I tried playing a DVD using SageTV and, sadly, got the same results. HyrdaVision looks like something that lets you divide the screen into multiple display regions. This is something more than just a new way to create windows, for it looks like you can have multiple desktops and can switch quickly between each of them. Interesting, but not very helpful, so I disabled it.

So, I'm back to looking for a DVD Decoder. It looks like Nvidia supplies one, so I was hoping that ATI did as well.

Remote disappointments

One more blog entry on remotes and then I'll move on.

My friend Steve took the Hauppauge remote that Judy gave me to his place and tried it out with a learning remote. He was able to report that the remote was generating a signal, so I'm assuming that it is functioning properly. He also took home the sensor that Judy gave me, but didn't have a equivalent system to try it in, so we don't know if that is working properly or not. My guess is that it is fine. It is my educated guess that the reason that I couldn't get the Hauppauge remote to function with the HTPC is that the Hauppauge software doesn't work properly with Vista or 64-bits or both. Whenever I opened the Hauppauge IR notification icon in the Windows Notification Area, I got a large mostly empty dialog box with one button. (I think that it said Close.) Anyway, I've uninstalled the Hauppauge IR program and moved on.

I went through the process of trying to program my new Air Remote to replace my TV's remote and that was pretty discouraging. There are quite a few remote codes for my TV and I tried them all, several times. I found a few that sort of worked, but of those, all of them could turn the TV off, but none of them could turn the set back on? (Huh?) I then tried to program the remote to learn the power button, but the Air Remote kept reporting that the learn mode timed out. I spent enough time on this to verify that I hadn't made any mistakes, and then I gave up. (I've never seen a universal remote that worked, and I guess I'm not terribly surprised by this one. Perhaps it will do a better job on my stereo or cable box.)

I agree with Steve on this subject: Bluetooth should be established as the common communication mechanism for all remotes, and a standard Bluetooth service should be established for remote controls. (There may be one already. I went to www.bluetooth.com, but that website is long on fluff and short on content. However, there is a promising article at www.bluetomorrow.com.

Remote Options

I'm closing in on the solution to the DVD CODEC solution, but today a solution to the remote keyboard and mouse presented itself, and I decided to solve that issue instead.

After weeks of operating the machine using a keyboard and mouse connected to it, and sitting way too close to a HDTV, I decided that I really needed wireless keyboard and mouse, was well as an infrared remote. I could have had this already, and pretty cheaply, except that I didn't really want a mouse. I wanted a trackball or touchpad built into the keyboard. I could find a few of those, but they were all very expensive. So, I saw today that my local electronics store (OK, OK, it's Fry's) had an Air Mouse and keyboard combo on sale for around $60 (after mail-in rebate). So, I stopped by after work and found that, not only did they have an Air Mouse and keyboard combination available, but they had an Air Remote and keyboard combination as well, although it wasn't marked as having a mail-in rebate.

I toyed with getting this really cute keyboard and mousepad combination that was about $130. It had a small QWERTY keyboard in a clam shell case. (Sorry, but I don't remember the name of the manufacturer.) It used Blue Tooth to communicate with the computer and it had built-in rechargeable batteries. I really liked it, but it was just not practical to do any touch typing on it, so I set it aside. Then, I had to choose between the two Air products.

So, what are these Air products? They have a sensor (perhaps a gyroscope) in them and, as you move device through the air, they sense the movement, wirelessly communicate it to the computer, and the mouse cursor moves on the screen. Judy told me about them when I was trying pick components for the HTPC. I decided against it at that time because of the expense, but sitting too close to the screen for a month has changed my mind about that.

So, after some dithering, I decided to pay extra for the Air Remote and keyboard combo, because I was tired of not having a working remote and the Air Remote also has infrared transmitter in it. Its box says that it can control many different devices. After years of having to stop and think before I pick up a remote, that sounded very attractive. When I got up to the register, surprise, the $50 mail-in rebate applied to the Air Remote keyboard combo as well.

Installing the mouse and keyboard was a cinch and, except for having to reach for the remote when I want to move the mouse, it is all pretty natural. My biggest problem now is that the text in the multi-line edit box for this blog is hard to read across the room. (I'll play some more with the font size later.)

Anyway, the Air Remote controls SageTV very well, although I haven't tried any other devices. The keyboard gets hung up some times and the typed characters don't appear on the screen, although it looks like they are being transmitted (according to the status light). Usually moving the mouse with the Air Remote fixes it.

So, now I just have to solve the DVD CODEC problem.

More CODEC follies

The guy from SageTV seemed rather incredulous that the DVD drive didn't come with a DVD codec. I believe that his words were "I've never heard of such a thing." Then he suggested that I go to the Optical Drive's manufacturer's website and see if there wasn't a download for it.

So, I went to the LG site and didn't find a codec, but I did find a knowledge base article that said:

First, make sure you have proper software installed to view a DVD movie. DVDs require DVD software in order to play DVD Movies. LG bundles PowerDVD by Cyberlink with its drives. We do not offer it for download. A full version of the software can be found at www.gocyberlink.com (Also available in stores)

I wrote LG and explained that I was having the same problem and that PowerDVD is not installed with the LG DVD-RW drive that I bought from them, only PowerProducer and CyberLink DVD Suite.

So, I went in search of a DVD codec. It is not that I dislike PowerDVD, I just don't think that I want to pay for two DVD players, when SageTV will do the job.

The first thing that I did was to install McAfee on the HTPC. You never know where some software has been.

I then searched for DVD codec in Google, but I didn't find anything that excited me. I wound up at one site called freewarecentral.net and tried to download xVid, but McAfee started complaining about detecting a potentially unwanted program named Artemis!06EBEBB5771B and Firefox said that I was opening a file from prompt.zangocash.com. I told McAfee to remove the Artemis program and Firefox to cancel the opening the file from the suspiciously named website. (As I said, you've never know where some software has been.)

Finally, I ended up at Uberdownloads.com and I downloaded and installed VLC Media Player. It is an open source player that Uwe mentioned as being versatile. I was able to play some media files that he had given me last week. But, I still can't play a DVD. SIGH.

I went ahead and purchased SageTV, but I still don't have a DVD codec. SIGH.

An Answer From SageTV about the DVD CODEC

So, I wrote SageTV about not being able to play a DVD, and here is what they wrote back:

Sage doesn't install a DVD decoder. Usually if you have a DVD drive, you typically get the software to play DVD's (like PowerDVD that includes the Cyberlink decoder).

They then told me how to get the Nvidia decoder for DVD.

Well, that's just ducky. My DVD drive came with Cyberlink software for creating DVD's but not playing them. It is true that I didn't install the Nero software that came with the drive, but when I installed it, I got the same result.

I guess I can see why SageTV assumes that the DVD drive would install the DVD CODEC, so I'm not sure who to be annoyed with at the moment. I just wish that, if they are going to have a Media Center option that has a Play a DVD suboption, that they would supply the important pieces of software necessary to make that happen.

So, I'm still meditating on how I want to fix this.

DVD Woes

Now that I have this nifty HTPC set up as a DVR, there's almost nothing on TV worth recording. So I decided to pull out a DVD and tried to watch it. First I tried using SageTV, but it gave me a strange message: "There was a DVD Error in playback. Details: sage.PlaybackException: ERROR (-8, 0x2): There is a problem playing the DVD content due to Macrovision or CSS." (An error message only a programmer could love.)

Then I tried with Windows Media Player, but it gave me a message on the opposite end of details, but not any more helpful: "Windows Media Player cannot play DVD video. You might need to adjust your Windows display settings. Open display settings in Control Panel, and then try lowering your screen resolution and color quality settings." I tried that and it didn't help.

Finally, I tried to play it with WinTV, which gamely gave it a try. The audio was great, but the video was a mess.

I talked with my friend Uwe about this. He had already given me a set of video files to try watching on a DVD and I didn't have any luck with them either, but they were in some fancy formats and we were doubtful I had the right software from the start. However, I really thought that a standard DVD would play. So Uwe suggested that I download the trial version of Cyberlink's PowerDVD and try that. I did and it was able to play the DVD. The funny thing was that, magically, so was SageTV. (However, Media Player was still complaining about the screen resolution.) SageTV working told me that the machine was missing a CODEC for DVD.

CODEC is merely a combination of the two words COmpression and DECompression, as MODEM is MOdulate and DEModulate. Where as a MODEM takes a digital signal, converts it to analog for transmission over a phone line, and then converts it back to digital, a CODEC takes an analog source, converts compresses it for transmission (or storage), and then decompresses it for playback. Originally, a CODEC was a piece of hardware like a MODEM, but these days it also can be a piece of software that is used for decompression of various audio and video formats. This functionality must be built into Windows at some level, since SageTV was able to make use of the CODEC that was installed by PowerDVD.

My guess is that SageTV did not install the CODEC either because I installed a trial version, or they want me to purchase a more expensive version with more media format support (CODECs). Either way, I'm not sure that I want to have both PowerDVD and SageTV installed, so I uninstalled PowerDVD and, as I hoped, SageTV stopped being able to play DVDs.

I will have to meditate on what is the best solution for this problem, but at least I know what the problem is. (As oppose to the remote control issue, where I'm still clueless.)