I jut got another email from Netflix, and it looks like they decided not to remove profiles.

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.
We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.
-Your friends at Netflix

Maybe the petitions, complaints and bad press they were getting prompted the change of heart. I also wonder if maybe the 1-2% they quote a the only subscribers using that feature was maybe a little low. Whatever it was, thank you for listening to your customers Netflix.

I just got an e-mail from Netfix, they will be removing profiles feature. I thought it was spam at first, since why would Netflix do this? I followed the link, and found out this it wasn’t a joke, they are in fact removing profiles effective September 1st. This feature lets you set up multiple movie queues under different names. So I have a profile and my wife has a profile and we both get one DVD out of our two-DVD plan.

We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account, effective September 1, 2008.
Each additional Profile Queue will be unavailable after September 1, 2008. Before then, we recommend you consolidate any of your Profile Queues to your main account Queue or print them out.
While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
If you have any questions, please go to http://www.netflix.com/Help?p_faqid=3962 or call us anytime at 1 (888) 638-3549. We apologize for any inconvenience.

To me, removing a feature is not an “improvement,” and may prompt me to find another DVD rental service come September 1st. If you use profiles, please let Netflix know that this is a bad idea.

UPDATE: Apparently, there are a lot of (rightly) upset Netflix users out there.

• Netflix Community Blog: Profiles feature going away
• Hacking Netflix: Netflix Eliminating Account Profiles
• Digg: Netflix Eliminating Profiles
• Protest Netflix’s Cancellation of Profiles Petition
• SaveNetflixProfiles.com

Earlier this week Netflix announced a new piece of hardware, the Netflix Player by Roku. This tiny little box allows you to plug in your TV along with an internet connection (wired or wireless) to get access to all of the Watch Now movies on Netflix. Taking a look at the specs of this piece of equipment, it really doesn’t look too bad (outside of the fact that it is yet another set top box cluttering up your entertainment center). The big thing that could help this venture is more streaming content from Netflix, which seems a little lacking at the moment. Right now they claim over 10,000 movies and TV shows are available. Unfortunately most of them seem to be older content. This new player does overcome the barrier of watching movies on your TV vs. your computer screen, which they still only offer on Windows using Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player. All in all, it’s looks like a nice little device.

Given everything above, I don’t think we’ll be buying one of these. My wish came true that I mentioned at the enf of the Entertainment PC Software post. A plugin for Meedio was created to deal with Netflix. As I’ve mentioned before, we have an Entertainment PC that controls all of our media (music/video/tv/etc.). Meedio is the application we use for the main interface on that computer. An incredible plugin author (UFGrayMatter) created one that can handle all aspects of Netflix. The plugin is called MeeFlix, and works really well. We’re able to manage our Netflix Queue, and also view any of the Watch Now streaming movies right within the (remote control friendly) Meedio interface on our TV. So now our Entertainment PC does the same thing as this new Netflix Roku box and doesn’t cost $100.

Video of MeeFlix in action

Another component of the Entertainment PC has been upgraded to HD. Now that a winner has been chosen in the next-generation HD disc war, I figured it was time to make a purchase (even though it didn’t really matter with the choice I made). I bought the LG Super Multi Blue Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD-ROM drive. It will play Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and standard DVD discs as well as burn DVD’s.

The setup was pretty straight-forward. It installed like a standard DVD drive, though it was a little bit longer than most. I guess they needed to make room for those extra lasers. Once the drive was functioning, it was just a matter of getting the software to work correctly. This turned out to be more of a headache than I thought. If you don’t know anything about the new HD disc formats, they are loaded down with DRM. If you’re even thinking about playing them, you have to have a a video card AND monitor that can handle HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). According to the documentation on both my video card, (ATI Radeon HD 2400) and TV (Magnavox 37MF337B), they are HDCP compliant. Um… the new drive though differently.

The other key to this whole setup was software used to play HD content. I had been using Cyberlink PowerDVD as my DVD player in the entertainment computer, so a simple update to the newest version of that software was supposedly all I needed. Again, I was wrong. So, everything was hooked up, the software was upgraded, it’s time to fire up my Blu-ray copy of Planet Earth (thanks Netflix!), and see what happens. Once the disc is inserted, PowerDVD comes up and shows the FBI warning in beautiful HD quality, then gives me an HDCP error and says it cannot play… lovely! There is really no reason why this shouldn’t work. The (HDCP compliant) hardware and software a totally capable of playing a Blu-ray disc. Once again DRM ruins the day. I started digging around the web for fixes, and didn’t really come up with anything. What I did run across was a lovely little application called SlySoft AnyDVD that totally removed the evil DRM bit when playing HD content. I downloaded their demo and gave it a try. Sure enough, the disc played just fine. I didn’t want to have to hack this for it to work. After a little more digging, I found another update/patch for PowerDVD, that wasn’t mentioned anywhere other than a small area of their site and figured, what have I got to lose. After installing that, and disabling AnyDVD, it finally worked. It shouldn’t be this hard!

I guess the morale of the story is DRM SUCKS! It really just puts up barriers for people who want to use the technology legitimately. I’m not trying to rip HD content, I’m not trying to play illegal content from the Internet. All I wanted to do is play a Blu-ray disc on a computer and player that should be able to play it. I was finally able to get to that point (after quite a headache). And at least it’s good to know that AnyDVD is there if you need it.

This post has been sitting in my drafts for about a month now. I was lucky enough to get in on the private beta of Hulu.com not too long after they started testing. Waiting so long to write this has actually been somewhat helpful. I’ve talked with a few people about their use of Hulu (now that it is open to the public) and got some interesting insights. What exactly is Hulu.com? It is a site created by News Corp. and NBC as an answer to internet video. This past winter, NBC left iTunes as a digital distributor of its TV content, and their alternative was Hulu. At the time, Hulu hadn’t launched yet and there was a lot of skepticism on whether this non-existent internet video site put together by companies that really don’t seem to know technology was going to work out, or just fail miserably. From what I read, signs were pointing to the latter. I had my doubts as well. How were broadcast companies going surpass the likes of Apple’s iTunes or YouTube when every time you look at them, they’re flailing blindly when it comes to technology. Well, now that Hulu is open to the world, it looks like what they put together isn’t that shabby.

The first thing you notice when you pull up Hulu.com is the slick clean interface. It is easy to navigate and easy to find shows to watch. Content is the next thing you notice. They’ve got a lot of stuff up there. Not only do you have content from NBC and News Corp. (Fox), also included is Sony, MGM, and many of their sub-brands like Sci-Fi, Bravo, USA, etc. There is definitely not a lack of things to watch. I do have some questions on why they chop up seasons or chose what shows and seasons get posted. Like for the show 24 (which I don’t watch), they start with Season 1 Episodes 1-5, then they jump to season 6. From what I know about that show, you need to follow it pretty closely from episode to episode, so jumping over 5 seasons doesn’t really make sense to me. Another example of this is the show Chuck, why are you starting with episode 5? How tough would it be to start at the beginning? That show hasn’t even been on that long! Maybe this is something they’re working on. I don’t know how things work inside the TV biz, but if I get hooked on 24 and don’t have the shows in between, where do you think I might get them (*cough* P2P *cough*)? Another thing that is somewhat random about the content selection in Hulu is when exactly a new show comes to the site. From what I have seen it is kind of random when a show that aired last night on NBC can be watched on Hulu. That, along with having irregular partial seasons makes it kind of tough to get into a TV series. Maybe that’s what they’re going for with Hulu. Doing that doesn’t make it that much different from standard TV, but maybe that’s what they’re going for. “We’ll hook ‘em with Hulu and then they’ll have to come back to NBC to watch the next show in the series… mwah ha ha ha ha!”

So, content selection aside, the player interface is pretty nice. It is a flash video player so it should be cross platform. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve read it even works on Linux. The interface is intuitive and has some nice features. It does full-screen, pop-up, or in-browser viewing modes and has a little “lower lights” button that dims the rest of the page if you decided to watch it in the standard window. They even allow embedding of the video into your own website ala YouTube. In fact before the private beta was over, you could access pretty much ever video on the site from openhulu.com which was a collection of every video embedded. The video quality is pretty good. It’s better than your typical YouTube video. There is a little fuzziness or graininess at full-screen, but all in all, the quality is pretty high.

There are commercials in Hulu videos (you knew there would be). There is typically an intro “brought to you by” commercial for a few seconds when you start a video, and depending on the show, there are a couple commercials dropped throughout the video. You can skip around the show, but cannot skip a commercial break. They tell you how long a break will be with a counter at the top of the video window (letting you know how long you have to visit the kitchen). I think it definitely less obtrusive than a regular TV commercial. It sure takes up less time in a typical TV episode vs. watching it on broadcast TV.

Overall, Hulu is much better than I expected. There are still some things that get me though. The content isn’t portable. It is essentially streaming to me over the internet as I watch it. With iTunes, I could take the shows with me on an iPod or on a laptop if I didn’t have an internet connection. Hulu ties me to my internet connected computer screen. I think that is probably the biggest thing that prevents this from really taking off right now. It’s a paradigm switch to go from comfy living room setup to sitting at a computer desk, or even huddling around a laptop. I’m one of the rare people who have a computer controlling my TV, and I still haven’t pulled up Hulu on the big screen yet. I think that the reason I haven’t done that yet is there isn’t a slick remote-controllable interface for it yet. Navigating the web on a TV is tough. For this to become really on-demand TV it needs to be easy. We need some sort of Hulu set-top-box or something. So, Hulu is good… but there is definitely room for improvement. At the very least, the networks are finally seeing that people want their shows on their schedule, online, and in a convenient way. Hulu does fit that need. But how far does it go? I think most people download content illegally because it is available and easier to do it that way. Once getting legitimate content becomes easier, the need to download it illegally disappears. I think people would even be willing to pay for that content (the way iTunes does it). So I think Hulu does some of these things, but also fails at some of them, and convenience is a fine line. This effort by NBC and News Corp. is definitely a step in the right direction, and is way better than what I (and many) were expecting, but they still have a little further to go.

This is a continuation of a few older posts on the entertaiment PC.

• Adding HD to the Entertaiment PC
• Building an Entertainment PC: The Guts

Much of what I’ve done with software on this computer is based loosely on Jon’s system. The core to both of our systems is a little piece of software called Meedio Essentials… that unfortunately is no longer supported. They sold out to Yahoo back in 2006. Yahoo took the software and created Yahoo TV, which at this point in its development is an interior product. The community left over at Meedio have since spun off a new product/community called MeediOS. MeedioOS now houses many of the plugins and forums from the now defunct Meedio Essentials. So given that little history lesson on Meedio, I still use the final version of the software that was released before Yahoo got hold of it. If you really wanted to, you could still probably get your hands on a copy of it (cough p2p cough). The collection of entertainment PC software available now is actually much better than it used to be. There are quite a few options out there to chose from. There might even be something better than Meedio Essentials available now, but what I’ve got just works, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

OK, so what exactly does Meedio Essentials do? It is essentially the control to the entire entertainment pc. It hold the menus that you navigate using your remote and launches you into everything you want to do with the computer. There are serveral built in modules that I use on this system, and a lot of external programs that get launched via a command from Meedio. That’s the beauty of Meedio, it can call up just about anything on the computer and is endlessly customizable (with a little tweaking).

Photos
For photos, we use the built-in photo module in Meedio. It works like just about any photo viewer out there. You can browse photo by photo, or by collections. It includes a slideshow option and works with the remote to pull up your entire photo collection on the TV. I have Meedio pointing to a shared drive on our media server with all of our photos on it, but Meedio could just as easily point to a directory on the hard drive full of photos.

Music
As with the photo viewer, we use the built-in music player in Meedio. It is a pretty standard software music player. Also similar to the photos module, it is hooked to the media server where all of the MP3’s are hosted. It reads ID3 tags for file information, and will even take advantage of album art pulled from iTunes. You can sort by just about everything (artist, title, genre). There is also a nice full-screen visualization to throw up on the screen when you want to play a bunch of music and see something a little nicer than a list of songs running by.

DVD Playback
This is one of the areas where I have Meedio pointing to an external program. I’m currently using Zoom Player as the DVD player for the system. Meedio does have its own DVD module, but it isn’t that great. When a DVD is loaded or DVD is selected in the interface, Meedio just launches Zoom Player, and off it goes. The reason I use Zoom Player over the standard DVD module is that it has a lot more control over video settings and video acceleration. I have a video card that can handle much of the processing of playing a DVD, and handing that over to the card saves the CPU for other tasks. Plus when/if I end up getting a drive that can play HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, it will most likely need to be tweaked even more to handle the load that those formats put on the computer. It will also most likely take another software player. I believe PowerDVD Ultra is the only software HD/Blu-Ray player out there at the moment, but we’ll cross that bridge when/if we come to it.

TV/DVR
The Digital Video Recorder functionality for the entertainment PC isn’t handled by Meedio (even though Meedio does include a DVR module). I used to use SageTV for this function, but have recently switched over to BeyondTV. They both work really well in their core features (recording/playing back tv), but BeyondTV is just a cleaner interface, and has a few more bells and whistles built in where you would have to install a plugin for Sage. You can check out the features of BeyondTV at their site, or see what Jon had to say about it in his description. The things I like about BeyondTV is that it can handle HD (after the recent hardware upgrade). It also automatically creates chapter marks to skip commercials (Sage didn’t do this out of the box). I really like a new feature that was added with the most recent upgrade to version 4.7. You can set it to create an iPod compatible version of a show and it will set up an RSS feed to go with it. This allows you to point iTunes at the entertainment pc and automatically pull down video files for whatever tv series you’re currently watching (it can be all of them or just individual shows). We also have a handy plugin called BTV Podcatcher that pulls down video podcasts we subscribe to and drops them right in with our recorded TV shows. Again, the DVR area is a space where there are a lot of contenders making products, but so far BeyondTV has topped the list of products I’ve tried.

Others
There are a bunch of little odds and ends that Meedio also does well (and some things we do that aren’t part of Meedio). One of them is a weather module that gives quick access to forecasts and weather maps. Another piece of software that we’ve tied to Meedio is the Sling Box software. We use this to get our Iowa Hawkeyes football fix from AZ. Meedio just fires up the SlingPlayer software which launches full-screen and is controllable via remote control. The last “other” thing we do with the entertainment PC isn’t really worked into Meedio at this time. This could be a future project, but I’d like to be able to connect it to the Netflix “Watch Now” movies allowing us to watch streaming movies from Netflix. We do this now by firing up IE (only works with WMP and IE unfortunately) and navigating the Netflix site with our wireless mouse. It would be idea if there were some sort of remote controllable site to get to the watch now movies. I know there is a Meedio browser plugin that uses IE, but haven’t really had a chance to play with it on the Netflix site. We’ll see what happens on that front. Otherwise, that just about covers everything we use Meedio and the entertainment PC for. So far things have been working pretty well.

We got ourselves a brand new HDTV for a Christmas present this year. We’d been look at them for quite a while, and finally pulled the trigger the week before Christmas. With that purchase came some other upgrades to keep things working on our Entertainment PC (DVR, Photo Viewer, DVD Player, Sling Viewer, Super Computer). Everything worked fine without upgrades, but if we wanted to take advantage of high definition (the reason we bought the TV), we had to make a few changes.

The first issue I ran into was getting the PC to output to the new HD LCD display. That can be very interesting given that computer resolutions are different than TV resolutions. The LCD is connected to the computer with a DVI to HDMI cable. Standard resolutions from the video card weren’t cutting it so I started diving into “the google” to try and find another method of getting a custom resolution out of my video card. I ran across a great utility called PowerStrip that does this exact type of thing, only to realize that it doesn’t work with the integrated Intel graphics card I have in the computer (it came with the slim entertainment case). I then moved on to another great piece of software made specifically for the integrated Intel Graphics chipset called DTD Calculator. I got a bit further with this utility, but it still didn’t quite cut it. I was able to get the custom resolutions into the video options, but kept getting weird results whenever I tried one. The screen would get knocked to the corner and turn either green or purple. So after banging my head against a wall for a few days with that, I decided to just get a new (more powerful) video card that would help out decoding HDTV as well. I should have a new Radeon HD 2400PRO showing up in a few days. I chose this card because it was available in a low-profile card (needed to fit the case), and for the reviews it got handling HD video. It also has a straight HDMI port on it so I may be able to route audio through it as well. Hopefully this will take care of my not-quite-right resolution issues.

The other issue I ran into (and maybe more important issue) was running an HDTV signal through this thing. Now, we don’t have a ton of HD channels to chose from at the moment, but there are several (mainly local) unencrypted QAM digital signals coming through the cable line. Several of those are in HD. The capture cards that are currently in the computer are just standard definition Hauppauge Win-TV150 low profile cards. They still work and I still have cable going to them, but let’s get realistic… SD signal doesn’t look that great on an HD set. So we were still able to capture our shows and watch our captured shows, but since we were able to view HDTV we wanted to be able to capture/pause/rewind HDTV. In comes the HDHomeRun. There are a lot of digital HD Tuners to pick from, but I chose this one for several reasons. First, it allowed me to integrate the unencrypted QAM channels into the DVR software we’ve been using (BeyondTV). Second, it comes with two HD tuners built in, so it seemed a bit more future-proof than some of the single tuners I looked at. It also works a bit differently than many of the other HDTV tuners on the market. The only output it provides is an ethernet port, making it a networked HDTV solution if I should ever want to pipe tv through the house. It arrived earlier this week, and I couldn’t be happier with its performance.

The box arrived, and let me tell you, there isn’t much to this thing. The device itself is a nondescript box about the size of a small router. It has a power light and a panel with several non-labeled LED lights on the front, and a power port, ethernet port, and two coax connectors on the back. The box contains an ethernet cable, two short coax cables, a power cable, and a card that points you to their site to download software. That’s right, it doesn’t even come with a manual. I guess that makes sense since they want you to have the most up to date version of software and firmware available. I believe that the software used to run this thing is open source as well. I got everything hooked up (I just used one of the tuners) and I was off. It took a little while for the computer to recognize the box via the ethernet port (I have an open port since the computer is using wireless to connect). I ran the install app, and once it saw the HDHomeRun, the software connected to the net and automatically updated the firmware. Then it does a scan of available digital channels. It picked up the same ones that we were getting with the TV’s built-in tuner so that was good. Then you can test them by using VLC, an open source media player. The picture looked great! I believe this is how you can send HDTV over the network as well. If this thing were plugged into my router, I could fire up VLC and pull TV over a wired or wireless connection. I’ve read that even over wireless HDTV looks good. It was then on to configuring BeyondTV to pick up the HD signal. That process was a little tougher. It involved comparing the directory information available in BTV to what I was getting from the HDHomeRun and make sure everything matched up. There are even a few channels that we get, but aren’t part of the guide. That just means when we tune to those we don’t know what’s playing… which is fine. Once all that was configured the BeyondTV guide now has a new section (above all the SD channels) listing everything the all the digital signals it is pulling in. And it now does everything we were doing with standard deff signals on the HD signals. We can puase, rewind capture in HD now. I will say HD capture takes about 3 times the space that SD takes. We probably won’t be capturing a whole lot of HD shows right away. I might need to add a hard drive here pretty soon as well.

So far everything seems to be working well, minus the resolution issue on the LCD, but hopefully the new video card should take care of that. I’m pretty happy with the setup. Down the road I could see adding a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player in place of the DVD-burner I have in there now. We’ll see where the format war goes, and how the prices on drives look. Until then we’ll be seeing the world (at least the channels we get) in HD!

To get the jump on Apple, Amazon released their movie download offereing (called Unbox) just days before Apple’s announcement last week. To kick off their launch they’re offering a free download ($1.99 instant rebate) for a TV show. I decided to give the new service a try (since the first one is free). I downloaded the software and then purchased (free after rebate) my favorite episode of Firefly to try out the system. So far so good, until I decide to fire up the Unbox downloader/player and actually try to watch the video. My newly purchased show would not download. I kept getting an undescript red-colored “Unable to Download” message no matter what I tried to do. After being frustrated with the system for half a day, I decided to dump the whole thing and uninstall it from my computer. I tried using the uninstaller for the app, but it wouldn’t go away. It would just hang on a pulsing bar telling me it needed to check my account. Well, I couldn’t watch my video, and I couldn’t get rid of the software so I lowered myself to contacting Amazon support. They do have a nice system where you put in your phone neumber and they contact you - I’ll give them that. After being on the phone for 30-45 minutes with a tech suport person, they were still unable to get my video to download or remove the software from my machine. They told me they’d contact me with an update, which they did a day later. They had me remove some application settings files and then the Unbox program would uninstall correctly.

I wanted to give the Unbox service the benefit of the doubt, so I tried it again on a totally different computer on a totally different network. Guess what… the same thing happened. I couldn’t download the video, and I couldn’t remove the software. Luckily I had the secret removal instructions that Amazon gave me from the previous faulty install. I’ve since removed it from computer number 2 and thrown in the towel. I really don’t think I would have used the service (even if it had worked) because of how incredibly inflexible and locked down the whole system is, but unfortunately I didn’t even get to a point where I could evaluate it.

After doing some digging, I ran across a few articles where other folks ran into similar issues.
Amazon Unbox better left off your box - Ars Technica
BoingBoing also has a pretty scathing review that makes me glad I didn’t ever get it working.

Nice try Amazon… better luck next time.

For Jess’ graduation, I told her I’d put together an entertainment PC for her so she could Tivo (that’s a verb now) shows, organize music, watch DVD’s etc. She graduated back in May and I’ve been putting off buying the pieces until just last week when Intel dropped their processor prices. Everything showed up via UPS last Friday so I starting putting the pieces together. At this point, the computer itself is functional, but the entertainment portion still needs a good deal of tweaking. I plan updating my progress on the software side of things as they progress. I thought I’d start with laying out the hardware that went into this baby.

The Guts:
The guts are your pretty standard PC parts. I went with an Intel Pentium D 940 dual core processor. That processor was pretty much determined for me by the case that I chose (more about that later). Ram is 1Gb (512Mb x 2) DDR2 SDRAM (nothing special there). I grabbed a Maxtor 200Gb hard drive and an IO Magic DVD+-R DL burner at Staples earlier in the summer for a pretty good deal with rebates. Nothing too out of the ordinary there… just your everyday computer components.

Capture Card:
For the capture card, I went with the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 l.p. card since the Hauppauge cards are usually the most recommended TV tuner/capture cards out there. I needed the low profile (l.p.) version of the card specifically for the case (again more about that later) that I chose.

Input:
For this computer to be functional in a living room setting, I needed to find a keyboard/mouse that was wireless and wasn’t too intrusive sitting on a coffee table. I did a lot of digging and found there aren’t a whole lot of options out there for HTPC keyboard/mouse combos. I ended up going with the Microsoft Remote Keyboard/Mouse for Windows Media Center Edition. I’m not planning on running Windows MCE, but really liked the layout of this keyboard. My favorite part (and the hardest thing to find in a keyboard) is the built in mouse button in the upper right. So, this is the only thing you need sitting in front of the TV. There is no need for a wireless keyboard and a mouse. I read some reviews about the mouse button being difficult to use, but wasn’t too worried since if things worked the way they were supposed to work there wouldn’t be too much need for mouse control. I’ll admit once I got it up and running it was a little awkward at first, but after a few days I’ve got it down. I did need to download the MCE Rollup 2 to get this working in XP Pro.

The Case:
The case is the thing that makes this computer. I’ve been scouring reviews and HTPC sites all summer trying to find a nice case for this computer. There are a lot of companies out there that make HTPC cases. Some are nice, and some are just huge (definitely not something I’d want in my entertainment center)! I knew going into this that wanting a small case, might lead to sacrifices in other areas of the computer. The case I ended up going with wasn’t just a case, but a full bare bones system with a lot of bells and whistles. I chose the Aopen EPC945-m8 which turned out to be a really nice rig, though a bit of a bear to set up. The thing about the EPC945-m8 that sold me was the size and look. It really looks like it belongs in your entertainment center. It has a lot of nice features built in as well. It comes with the IR port built in (no ugly USB ports to deal with) and includes an MCE remote control. It’s got on-case controls, along with an up-front display. There is a built-in flash card reader. Also the motherboard has a good number of built-in extras as well. It’s got surround sound audio with several optical out ports (in addition to your typical mini-plug ports). It includes several options for video as well with Intel cards. These aren’t your high end gaming cards, but I have a desktop for gaming and really wasn’t planning on playing games on this machine. The included cards provide standard vga out along with a DVI port, composite RGB ports, and an s-video port. That pretty much covered everything I needed for now.

As I put this together, I took a lot of photos that are available in a Flickr set with notes associated for more information. The problems I ran into were mainly due to the small size of this case. It’s not easy to stuff so much hardware into such a little space. It all fit, but there were some pretty tight areas. The drive cage that holds the optical drive on top and the hard drive on the bottom was a bit difficult to get together. The cables (power and data) have to be stretched just right to make them reach the ports on the drives. It didn’t help matters that I had a bad hard drive to start things out and had to do an exchange to get one that worked. The included processor fan is another added bonus. It’s a heatpipe quiet fan system that is actually very quiet. You really don’t hear the thing at all. The only time I notice any real noise coming out of it is when the DVD drive is spinning and a little bit when the hd clicks. One other little issue has popped up has to do with how the machine handles video out. I started with it plugged into a standard computer monitor with the VGA port to get everything installed. Once the OS was on there, I moved it to the living room to hook it to a TV to make sure I could view it on the TV. It didn’t work at first, but all of a sudden I started getting a signal using the S-video out. Seeing that everything worked, I wanted to move it back to the monitor (since it’s a lot easier to see) to finish tweaking software etc. I couldn’t get it to move back to the VGA out. I found a little hidden entry in the FAQ that said you have to hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to swap between the video ports (which wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the somewhat lacking documentation included with the case). Outside of a few difficulties due to the case size and routing stuff around the inside, and the video out thing (which works fine now) I’m very happy with this thing.

Check out my HTPC Flickr Set for more images and information.

Software:
For the software that runs on this baby I’m still playing around with a lot of stuff. I’m planning on going with Meedio which was recently purchased by Yahoo to control the HTPC portion. I’ve got Sage TV for the Tivo-like functionality, and probably some other odds and ends to be figured out later. There is still a lot of fine tuning to do with the software before this thing is ready to roll. I’ll post again down the road a bit when I’m able to get all that worked out.

It didn’t take long for Yahoo to get their branded version of Meedio out there. They’ve called it Yahoo Go TV which adds to their Go Mobile and Go PC. I downloaded and installed Go TV and everything seemed to work pretty well. Out of the box, it doesn’t really have the Meedio feel to it though. Meedio had a lot more customization options. I haven’t had a whole lot of time to really dig into it, but from what I can tell by looking through the program files someone might be able to customize it like Meedio. In fact, some of the icons in the application directory are still the old red and yellow Meedio icons. I quickly tried dropping in a new theme and couldn’t get it to pick it up. I’m sure someone with a little more knowledge of the inner workings of Meedio shouldn’t have any problems hacking that (or any other plugins for that matter) to work.

As it stands now, it looks like Yahoo is keeping a pretty closed system. The great thing about Meedio is its incredible customization options. I’m hoping (since this is still beta) that they’ll open it up a little more and you won’t need to hack your way around to get plugins and themes to work. If not, the value of this app drops significantly.

UPDATE: It looks like folks on the old Meedio forums already have.

This past Tuesday, Yahoo! announced their purchase of technology from Meedio who make software for Entertainment Center PC’s. I’ve been eyeing Meedio for a while now and was planning on using their flagship “Meedio Essentials” application for an HTPC that I’m planning on building this summer. You may also remember some older posts about Jon’s HTPC. This is the software he uses to power his beast of a entertainment center pc (I’m hoping he’ll speak up in the comments).

This purchase could go a few different ways depending on what Yahoo! does with it. They didn’t flat out buy the company, they only bought the technology. Does this mean they’re going to integrate it into something they’re already working on? Yahoo Go has had a “Personalize Your TV” demo site up for a little while now. I can only assume that this is built with the technology they acquired from Meedio. There are still quite a few unanswered questions though. The great thing about Meedio is that is was very customizable. Hopefully Yahoo, trying to keep users inside the Yahoo network, doesn’t cripple that customization which has made Meedio a great piece of software. When Yahoo purchased Konfabulator several months ago they pretty much left it as it was and just made it available for free. With Konfabulator though, it’s more along the lines of Yahoo’s primary business - the web. Meedio doesn’t really fit into that category.

Yahoo has been moving more towards TV in the past year though. They announced a partnership with Tivo back in November allowing you to record shows on your Tivo from Yahoo TV. I wonder how this new Meedio relationship will fit into that. I think Yahoo definitely wants to get into the TV video market, I just wonder how they’re going to mesh all this stuff together, or if they’ve even thought that far ahead.

I think the best case scenario with this is Yahoo not changing much with Meedio as it stands now (maybe just throw the little “Y!” icon on there somewhere) and giving it away for free a la Konfabulator, or Google’s Picasa purchase. That way when I get to building an entertainment PC this summer there’s one piece that I won’t be paying for.

Over the past few months I’ve run across a few of these video player/aggregator applications. A couple of the better ones I’ve found have been ONTV and Democracy. Both these players are more than just video players. They both present themselves as internet television and provide a nice directory of videos all viewable right inside the application.

My favorite of the two is the Democracy player. It has the best integration of directory downlo and video. It provides 300 channels of internet video to chose from. You can set it to download the top videos in several different categories to watch whenever you get to them. It also will subscribe to RSS feeds to download your favorite video podcasts. And to save bandwidth, it integrates with BitTorrent. I like to usually have it set to download a collection of videos so I’ve got several things to watch whenever I’ve got some down time with the laptop.

This is Part of Jon’s HTPC setup. For more, see: Introduction and Table of Contents

The only negative I can think of:
Once setup, the system is very FF (Fiancé friendly); one simple remote controls everything and it’s very intuitive. However, setting it all up is a totally different story. That’s a lot of different software I mentioned above, and it can be pretty frustrating getting it all to play together in a friendly manner. Personally I (and probably a lot of people reading Scott’s webpage) really enjoy the process of making it all play nice. You end up with a really nice result with endless flexibility. However if you’re looking for something that is “plug and play” this couldn’t be any further from what you are looking for. With a TIVO you just plug it in and it works (essentially), but on the flip side your TIVO can’t control your coffee maker. ☺ Do whatever works for you.

Some positives:
Crazy good picture quality
Crazy good sound quality
Everything accessible from one location with one remote
Everything cataloged and searchable with cover/box-art
Tons of old school games with real controllers
AC3 (5.1) Music Library
Home automation integrated into Home Theater
Easy to expand and upgrade

Wow, I can’t believe how much I typed. If you made it this far I’m sorry it was so boring. Hopefully it was informative, and hopefully I just made it easier for anyone else that is interested in something similar. I know for me it’s been a huge learning process with lots and lots of failed attempts. And I’m sure I’ll learn a lot more too as it continues to expand. A “USBUIRT”, RF Distributor, and IR Repeater are on the horizon for me.

USBUIRT…
http://www.usbuirt.com/

Video Distributor…
http://www.smarthome.com/7717.HTML

IR Repeater…
http://www.smarthome.com/8220F.HTML

Thanks for reading!

This is Part of Jon’s HTPC setup. For more, see: Introduction and Table of Contents

OK, the best for last right?
This is the part that gets the biggest WOW factor from guests. The HTPC controls every single light inside and outside the house, along with several other appliances. To do this I use a very old technology called “X10” that never really caught on in the mainstream. This is good, because now you can get X10 stuff super cheap from online retailers or ebay. Essentially, the computer has a data connection to the power outlet, and then can send and receive signals through your homes power lines. Then you just attach an X10 device to whatever you want to control (a light for example) and now the computer can talk to it. It can turn it on, turn it off, dim up, dim down, whatever. About a year ago I upgraded all of our lights to X10, and installed motion sensors all over the place. Using the motion sensors the computer actually tracks where you are in the house and where you might be going next and then uses a “fuzzy logic” to turn lights on BEFORE you walk into a room and turns them off after you leave the room. At first this seems a bit like simple motion controlled lights, but it’s actually very different. Since it’s all controlled through the computer you can script all sorts of commands and actions limited only by your imagination. For example, the computer can sense when a DVD is playing and then dim all the lights in the house off. Then it might disable the living room motion detector so you don’t trigger the lights by eating pizza or rolling over on the couch. Then it might watch for motion in the dining room (in our house it’s between the living room an the kitchen/bathroom). If it sees motion in the dining room (it is assuming you are going to the restroom or getting more food) it will pause the DVD and bring up the lights to 50% in the kitchen and bathroom. Then it can watch for motion in the dining room again (it is waiting for you to go back and watch the movie again) and when it sees motion it might wait 10 seconds (for you to sit down) then dim all the lights back down, rewind the DVD 15 seconds, and then resume play on the DVD. This all just happened without you ever even touching a button; you just got up and walked to the kitchen or restroom. I don’t use that script anymore because I like to have a little more control than that, but I’ve got all sorts of scripts set up for in the morning and at night and special circumstances. It doesn’t need to all be automated either, you can install X10 switches in the wall that activate whatever you want manually. For example, in our house there are a few buttons next to the front door. If you push one of them, the living room starts blasting my theme song (Ghetto Superstar). If you push another button on the wall, the living room starts blasting my fiancé’s theme song (It’s getting hot in here). It’s really dorky, but also pretty darn cool. Another thing I have the computer doing is monitoring 4 stocks that I have. Then I have 3 candles (electronic) and a fountain hooked up to the X10, and the computer turns on/off the respective candle/fountain depending if the particular stock is up/down. I use it as a passive way to monitor my stocks everyday simply by glancing at the candles and fountain. We’ve used the X10 in the past to control the crock-pot and coffee maker as well. It’s also fun to have the ability to VNC into the computer and control the lights. Are you at work and you need to get a hold of you fiancé? Is she sleeping in the bedroom with her phone off? No problem, VNC in from work and manually flash the bedroom lights on and off over and over again until she wakes up. ☺ Again, the amount of stuff you can do with this is limited only by your imagination. The computer software I use to do this is called Housebot and it’s technically owned by Meedio, however it was actually written by a guy named Scott and was acquired by Meedio a little over a year ago. Meedio hasn’t done anything with it since the purchase (besides adding “Meedio” to the name) so I can’t really give Meedio any credit for it. The original author (Scott a.k.a. Scottbot) is a major contributor to the Meedio help forums and has been a huge help to me with some problems I’ve had along the way. Scott’s a great guy.

I would consider X10 an integral part of any HTPC just because of the automated dynamics it can add to your home theater rooms. Select “Play” on a DVD and have it lower your HDTV screen, close the blinds, start the fireplace, and lower the room temperature so your date needs to scoot closer to you on the couch (to keep warm). I don’t have all the components to do all that, but if you want to it’s all available using different X10 products.

It all sounds really flashy, but in my opinion if you have your X10 setup properly it should really not even be noticed. It should be they type of thing that you go about your everyday life without even thinking about. It just simply takes care of things for you. But that’s only my opinion. We never touch any light switches anymore.

Housebot software…
http://www.meedio.com/products/housebot/index.html

Great place to get new X10 components… (best place for used is ebay)
http://www.smarthome.com/prodindex.asp?catid=2

Powerlinc USB computer interface and W800RF32A interface… (I have way to many individual components to give links to them all. Instead I’ll just link to the 2 different computer interfaces I use)
http://www.smarthome.com/1132u.html
and…
http://www.wgldesigns.com/w800.html

Next Chapter> Wrap Up - Negatives and Positives

This is Part of Jon’s HTPC setup. For more, see: Introduction and Table of Contents

DVD Catalog:
Meedio also allows me to have a searchable catalog of all our DVD movies. You can search alphabetically, by genre, by studio, by rating, by actor, or by director. All movies have front and back cover art, a description, rating, run time, and other information. I use a piece of software called “DVD Profiler” integrated with Meedio to accomplish this. Currently it’s simply a catalog that you can search through to pick a movie; selecting the movie doesn’t actually play it on demand. However if I wanted to put my entire DVD collection on the hard drive I could then have them launch by selecting it. I just don’t have enough hard drive space to store all of our movies. Currently we just browse the catalog until we find something we are in the mood for, and then pull it our of the big DVD wallet.

DVD Profiler software…
http://www.intervocative.com/dvdpro/Info.aspx

A Quick Note On Audio:
Windows uses something called the “kmixer” for all directsound and waveout audio (pretty much 100% of the audio on a normal system). Kmixer is BAD… very bad. It forces re-samples (a.k.a. mangles) all the audio that goes through it. That means if you have a 192/24 sound card like the Audigy 2 ZS, you are not actually getting 192/24 sound. The same is also true for 44/16 CD audio. The only way to get around the Windows mangler (kmixer) is to find programs that allow you to use either an ASIO connection to your soundcard, or “Kernel Streaming”, or a SPDIF connection to your soundcard (that might look like a typo, but I’m referring to a software SPDIF connection to your soundcard, not a wired SPDIF connection from the soundcard to the receiver). How you connect the soundcard to your stereo is up to you, personally I use Monster analog connections because 192/24 won’t fit through a SPDIF cable. But regardless, in order to bypass the mangeler the connection from the software to the soundcard needs to be ASIO, SPDIF, or Kernel Streaming. Most DVD playback software has the ability to use SPDIF, so no problem for DVD’s. However it can be a bit harder to find music playback software that supports ASIO or Kernel Streaming. Luckily, Meedio supports ASIO playback, so your MP3’s, WAV’s, and CD’s will sound like they are supposed to. Another nice feature, so no worries there.

The more MP3’s you have, the bigger the need for quality organization. That means that all your ID3v2 tags need to be correct. There is simply no automated way to do this. Like I said earlier, I use EAC and LAME to rip everything. EAC has (like a lot of programs) and automated CD information finder thing, but in reality that’s only a starting point. For example, one CD might come up as “Elwood – Parlance of Our Time” and another might come up “Beatles, Abby Road”. As you can see, the titles might be correct but the formatting is different. Also, many times the track numbering is 1,2,3 on one CD and 01,02,03 on another, and 01/14, 02/14, 03/14 on yet another. So again, things don’t match. Often times the CD release date is empty or wrong, and yada yada. To make it even worse, Various Artist CD’s are a headache in themselves. I highly recommend “The Godfather” for editing your tags so everything is nice and formatted correctly. I previously used Mp3tag (for a long time), but then switched to The Godfather. It’s not as friendly to use as Mp3tag, but it’s more powerful. Regardless of what software you use, there’s no automated way to do it; it’s simply a mind numbing CD-by-CD process. However, The Godfather helps to make it as easy as it can be. A big advantage to The Godfather is that it supports custom VBScripts to help speed things up. My collection took months to make corrections and format everything. But now that they are all correct, it’s easy to maintain new CD’s as they come in. The Godfather (using a VBScript) can also be used to embed the cover art into the MP3 file. Some programs require the cover art to be embedded in order to properly view it.

Bad kmixer! Bad!… (this is just one result from a Google search)
http://www6.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=77185

Software SPDIF vs SPDIF cable discussion… (the explanation is 5 posts down)
http://www.meedio.com/forum/ptopic25667.html

EAC software…
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

LAME encoder…
http://lame.sourceforge.net/

The Godfather software… (I can’t seem to find the homepage. Here’s a screenshot)
http://www.snapfiles.com/screenshots/godfather.htm

Next Chapter> Home Automation (the best for last)