By that I mean open two explorer windows next to each other, one with the source directory, the other with the target directory and simple drag the files/folders from the source to the target.

Seemed to work for me when all else failed (mind you, up to them I did toggle UAC back on — some have said switching it on or off, basically reverse what you have — and I also made myself the owner with Full Control of the folder, these may also have played a part).

My Build

My HTPC consists of:

I have left out the £37 for AnyDVD as unnecessary and the prices don’t include any postage I might have paid.

That’s a fairly pricey build (cheaper than some I’ve seen, and probably cheaper/better than a bought model).

A Cheaper Alternative

So I’ve been hunting around for a cheaper set of components. Some have come down since I bought them, some have gone up, but by trawling the forums and various online PC parts stores, here’s my suggestions:

This doesn’t include any postage costs.

For that you should get a reasonably low power machine, capable of 1080p playback (you can add a Blu-ray drive should you wish) and with capacity to be upgraded later. It uses onboard sound (5.1) and graphics (HDMI).

Some alternatives were the Antec Minuet 350 case (£79.98 from Ebuyer), but it only supports half-height cards I think, which rules out the TV tuner, and it’s not as well designed as the 2480. I have left out a CPU cooler, the CPU will come with one, it’s fairly quiet from what I understand as the CPU is low power, possibly an after-market one may be needed (for example, Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP, £13.77 from Scan). I haven’t included OS, at the moment I would load Windows 7 release candidate on it for free (until July 2010), otherwise you’re looking at £60-90 more for Vista. Obviously any parts you can reuse help the cause.

In the future it may be the likes of a dual-core Atom with Nvidia ION will do the job, although I’m still not convinced they’re quite up to the job of acting as a full PVR (most don’t have the PCI slots for expansion and I’m not too keen on the USB tuners).

I found Theydon Bois’ build over at the AVForums (which is a great resource by the way) and some of the screenshots were awesome. I set about trying to recreate it on my PC. I downloaded the updated version of MediaPortal and played around but it just didn’t work well enough for me.

I mentioned in my previous write-up that I liked Vista Media Center. It had a slick interface and just worked, rather than requiring lots of setup and tinkering like MediaPortal. When I saw what you could do to Vista Media Center with MediaBrowser I was sold. The problem was, my hardware wouldn’t support Vista. I tried downloading the (new at the time) beta of Windows 7 as this was supposed to be much less resource hungry, but I wasn’t able to install it. I was going to buy a small off-the-shelf PC, but I couldn’t find one that had the specs I wanted at the right price, so I bit the bullet and upgraded.

New Hardware

I spent a lot of time reading around for suggested hardware and in the end I chose:

• Motherboard (Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H - £67.98)
• RAM (2 * 1Gb Crucial Ballistix 240pin PC2-8500 - £26.70)
• Processor (AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e - £52.83)
• CPU Cooler (Scythe Mini Ninja - £36.09)
• Hard Disk (Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB - £79.41)

Total: £263.01

I bought all this from Dabs.com, being the cheapest supplier for most if not all the parts.

Existing Hardware

From the existing parts I reused the following:

• TV Tuner (Hauppauge Nova T 500 Dual Tuner - £49.99)
• Remote (Microsoft MCE 2005 Remote and IR receiver - £19.96)
• Wireless Keyboard (Microsoft IR Media Keyboard - £23.48)
• HTPC case (to fit ATX mobo) - Silverstone LC17 - £65.67
• Case fans, one 92mm Antec TriCool, one 80mm Antec TriCool - £3.87 + £3.99 (didn’t need the 80mm)
• AnyDVD €49/£37
• Fanless PSU - Silverstone ST30NF £71.09
• 2 * Zalman Fanmate 2 fan controllers for case fans - £3.99 ea

The total for which was £283.03. Combined total of £546.04

The Upgrade

The motherboard was mentioned in a lot of HTPC builds and has a good rep (and should be capable of HD playback if I decide to buy a Blu-ray player or download HD content). The RAM is faster than the standard stuff I was going to buy, but it was cheaper for this from Dabs than the standard stuff direct from Crucial (go figure). I like Crucial RAM, it’s usually a good price and I’ve never had any fail on me. The processor is a 2.6Ghz 64-bit dual core beasty, but I was mainly interested in the low power consumption compared to other processors (45 Watts), for a machine that was going to be on a lot it’s important. Likewise the WD Caviar Green, low power and a good rep. Again, I have had lots of experience with Western Digital drives, all good, and the Samsung Spinpoints, the other drive in contention as they’re also supposed to be very quiet, had some reports of failures, too many to make me happy. Scythe CPU coolers have a great rep, I couldn’t fit the full-sized Ninja into my box (despite it being huge), so went with the Mini, which I’m running fanless (they are two case fans right beside it).

Installation went smoothly and I was soon ready to install the OS.

Additional Hardware

I found that, by the time I moved all my recorded TV and ripped DVDs onto the main disk I was out of space. I also found that playing DVDs back on the old ROM drive I had was very noisy, so I later bought:

• Second Western Digital Caviar AV Green Power 1TB (£77.04)
• Pioneer DVR-116DBK 20x DVDRW Black (£20.64)

These were from Novatech.

Playing back DVDs from the disc was still loud, not so bad though. I don’t usually bother now, I just rip it to HDD and play it from there. So build costs went up to £643.72.

Software

I also bought a copy of Vista Home Premium (32-bit Upgrade) at a cost of £65.52. Taking the build costs to £709.24. This meant I got Vista Media Center though. As I had an upgrade it was a bit of a pain as I had to install XP first (later I found there’s a way around this, but too late!). Installation went smoothly, VMC picked up my tuners no problem and I was soon watching TV.

I spent a lot of time transcoding my .rec files to mpeg-2 using the batch process in VideoReDo and then transferred everything onto may main machine (well, an external HDD at a time, which is when I spotted I was running out of space and bought a second drive).

I also installed iTunes as I use it on my PC to listen to and buy music as well as the odd TV show. I setup a back-up process to copy everything over to the media centre PC and I now have two iTunes installations that work perfectly. I went this way because it meant not having to have my other PC to play back any of the media and, as a nice side effect, I get a complete back-up too.

I have another process that does the same for my images, so I can show them to people in the lounge on the TV should I wish to.

My motherboard does support ‘Just a Bunch of Disks’ (JBOD), which is similar to RAID 0, without the problem of one disk failure taking out all of your data. Unfortunately, despite vain attempts, I think I needed to set this up before I put data on my first drive (the disks need to be formatted together). Thankfully Media Browser let’s you create a file that tells it to read multiple folders, even on different disks, appear as one in the UI and I just moved my TV recording folder to the second disk, you can then set this in Media Center.

I also installed a pack of codecs to help me support playback of a variety of formats. Most of mine were MPEG-2, but there were a few odd ones too. And I was tempted to squeeze some down using xVid or DivX, but decided buying additional storage space was cheaper than spending my time compressing my videos.

Something else to bear in mind, I originally had problems playing back DVD rips with Dolby Digital surround sound, the reason for this was although my TV had some sort of fake Dolby Digital support, it wasn’t right. My sound options (the Supported Formats tab on the properties of the playback device) had Dolby Digital ticked, just uncheck whichever options your TV/amp/receiver doesn’t support and DTS and Dolby Digital and the system will probably pass the AC3 audio straight through and solve it (you may need to switch pass-through on in the options of the code pack for ffdshow).

Vista Media Center Mods

I found a ton of add-ons for Media Center, but I only really use and care about one: Media Browser (formerly Video Browser). I also changed the theme, I think to the Vista Ultimate theme from here. Certainly it’s a black theme anyway. Having had mine suddenly revert back to the default theme, which is ugly, and find that the black theme I mentioned is better, but still ugly, I tracked down my theme to the Back in Black theme. I didn’t install mine using the dll though. I used an app called MediaCenterFX, which seems to be very hard to find, so I’ve stuck a copy of the version I us up here. I have also uploaded a copy of the theme file for Back in Black.

Media Browser Movies Coverflow

Media Browser Movie Detail

Media Browser TV Shows

Click for larger version of images

As you can see, the reason for using it is because it makes Media Center look awesome. Seriously, this adds the wow factor, it’s great showing it to people when they visit. It’s very customisable too, check out the gallery and this thread in the forums for more screenshots.

For metadata I found I had to use a combination of Media Browser (which will do most), Media Scout (again, did most of the rest) and Salami’s Movie Organizer, which I found the best and easiest, but it did less bulk than the others.

Another essential add-on is Lifextender, which automatically monitors your recorded TV folder and processes the files to remove adverts. It’s not perfect, sometimes it doesn’t get them all, sometimes it shaves a bit off the programmes, but generally it’s very good and saves a lot of the hassle of fast forwarding (something I don’t find too great in Media Center, preferring the 30 second skip instead).

I use a couple of other plugins, though most I rarely use, for things like YouTube, you can use Yougle, but I’ve found it’s easier to just use the browser.

Conclusion

Having just totalled up the cost of the build I probably could have bought a machine for about that sort of money. To be honest though, they wouldn’t have matched my spec for that price. I have a machine with 2Tb of storage, most off-the-shelf models were 500Gb, or a lot pricier for up to 1Tb, and dual tuners (most are single). I also have a machine which is silent most of the time (I get a strange high pitch whine after it’s been on for a while, something to investigate, I suspect it’s either the PSU or one of the HDDs). Plus I have more expansion options (I suspect I’ll need another drive at some point, hardly any of the my movie collection has been digitised, that’s going to take a lot more than 2Tb, probably more like double figures, and that’s before HD content).

On the downside, having just run a Watt meter by it, the machine uses 4W in sleep (not bad), but idles at 80-85W and tops out at about 105W when recording and playing back multiple content. That’s much better than my desktop machine, which uses about 180W at idle and over 200W when in use, but it’s still higher than I’d like it to be. I may investigate a mini-itx system next, the new dual-core Atom’s with Nvidia’s ION look pretty nice, should run Windows 7 OK, can do HD playback and use less power.

That said, I’m very happy with the system, I’ve had a couple of people interested in building one and it generally runs very well. I occassionally need to reboot it, but usually it just sleeps and wakes fine, it runs 1080p content OK and being able to access my music and the internet have proved useful, especially as my main machine takes so long to load, this HTPC is out of sleep and usable in about 5 seconds. I’m very happy with Vista Media Center too, it works well, has proved stable and is nicely customisable. It reliably records things and the huge amount of stage means I don’t have to worry about running out, plus I can easily watch content from my other machine with the need to convert it. I definitely recommend using a PC this way, even if you buy one.

In the end, the comments from this forum post helped me, essentially I went with:

• WAN connection type: Dynamic/Fixed IP (1483 Bridge)
• IP asigned by ISP: yes
• VPI: 0 and VCI: 101
• Encapsulation: LLC

This doesn’t require a username and password and connected OK.

Note: You may need to leave it 20/40 mins for the DHCP lease to run out (if you have just switched from another router that was connected) and assign an IP address, but I didn’t.

DOWNLOAD

Reinstall Your OS

First off, it’s a good idea to start with a clean slate, over time you end up with all sorts of junk running on your machine, plus the debris of old or uninstalled applications. Wiping the slate clean is always a good idea.

Use the Correct Drivers

This may sound a little odd, but most of the time spent on loading the OS is drivers, having the correct ones for your hardware, even upgrading to the latest ones, can have an impact of how quickly the machine boots.

Check Your Device Boot Order

If you look in your BIOS (which you can usually get to by hitting Delete or F2 during boot), you will generally find a section listing the preferred boot order. This always used to be floppy disk drive, hard drive, CD-ROM, although few machines have a floppy drive any more. Check that hard drive is the first boot device.

Switch Off Auto-Discovery of Drives

Another setting in the BIOS will show you your drives (hard and optical). This is often set to auto-discover, use this to discover the drive in the BIOS and then set the drives as they are (remember to change it if you install a new drive), this will shave the time it takes to interrogate the drives.

Switch Off Automatic Memory Checks

As RAM is more robust these days, and there’s more of it, most machines seem to have abandoned the old memory checks, but if your machine is still doing this, disable it in the BIOS.

Pick a Simpler Theme

Each version of Windows is designed to look better, but all those extra gradients and shadows take time and effort to render, switch to the classic theme which is a lot less graphic intensive. To do that:

1. Right-click anywhere on the desktop and select Properties.

2. In the Display Properties box, go to the Themes tab and pick Windows Classic from the dropdown

3. Click OK.

Adjust XP for Best Performance

From a video by Jimmy Ruska:

Jimmy covers a number of tips in this video, first up is simply selecting XP’s built-in performance option.

Remove Unnecessary Windows Components

Windows installs a ton of applications and utilities you probably don’t want and will never use, to remove these:

1. Go to the Control Panel and select Add/Remove Programs

2. In the box that appears, select Add/Remove Windows Components

3. Untick the boxes of anything you don’t want or need (click on the item to see a description of what it is). If the Details box becomes available when you select and item, click it to see a sub-list of programs/services to see there is nothing you wish to keep.

4. Click Next

5. Click Finish

Disable the Indexing Services

From fastwindows.blogspot.com:

Indexing Services is a small little program that uses large amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexes and updates lists of all the files that are on your computer. It does this so that when you do a search for something on your computer, it will search faster by scanning the index lists. If you don’t search your computer often, or even if you do search often, this system service is completely unnecessary. To disable do the following:

1. Go to Start
2. Click Settings
3. Click Control Panel
4. Double-click Add/Remove Programs
5. Click the Add/Remove Window Components
6. Uncheck the Indexing services
7. Click Next

Speed-Up Folder Browsing

From fastwindows.blogspot.com:

You may have noticed that everytime you open my computer to browse folders that there is a slight delay. This is because Windows XP automatically searches for network files and printers everytime you open Windows Explorer. To fix this and to increase browsing significantly:

1. Open My Computer
2. Click on Tools menu
3. Click on Folder Options
4. Click on the View tab.
5. Uncheck the Automatically search for network folders and printers check box
6. Click Apply
7. Click Ok
8. Reboot your computer

Speed-Up Folder Access

From fastwindows.blogspot.com:

If you have a lot of folders and subdirectories on your computer, when you access a directory XP wastes a lot of time updating the time stamp showing the last access time for that directory and for ALL sub directories. To stop XP doing this you need to edit the registry. If you are uncomfortable doing this then please do not attempt.

1. Go to Start and then Run and type “regedit”
2. Click through the file system until you get to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem”
3. Right-click in a blank area of the window on the right and select ‘DWORD Value’
4. Create a new DWORD Value called ‘NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate’
5. Then Right click on the new value and select ‘Modify’
6. Change the Value Data to ‘1′
7. Click ‘OK’

Make Menus Load Faster

From fastwindows.blogspot.com:

This is one of my favourite tweaks as it makes a huge difference to how fast your machine will ‘feel’. What this tweak does is remove the slight delay between clicking on a menu and XP displaying the menu.

1. Go to Start then Run
2. Type ‘Regedit’ then click ‘Ok’
3. Find “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\”
4. Select “MenuShowDelay”
5. Right click and select “Modify’
6. Reduce the number to around “100?
7. This is the delay time before a menu is opened. You can set it to “0? but it can make windows really hard to use as menus will open if you just look at them - well move your mouse over them anyway. I tend to go for anywhere between 50-150 depending on my mood

Improve Swapfile Performance

From fastwindows.blogspot.com:

If you have more than 256MB of RAM this tweak will considerably improve your performance. It basically makes sure that your PC uses every last drop of memory (faster than swap file) before it starts using the swap file.

1. Go to Start then Run
2. Type “msconfig.exe” then ok
3. Click on the System.ini tab
4. Expand the 386enh tab by clicking on the plus sign
5. Click on new then in the blank box type”ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1?
6. Click OK
7. Restart PC

Disable Any Unnecessary Start-Up Programs

From a video by Jimmy Ruska:

Some applications automatically add themselves to the start-up list, sometimes by putting themselves into the “Startup” folder, which you can find on your Start Menu, simply delete the programs from the folder to stop them executing. Some applications add themselves at a lower level. Jimmy covers how to remove these using a built-in windows app called MSConfig in his second tip (and how to look-up what any unknown apps on Google).

Disable Any Unnecessary Services

From a video by Jimmy Ruska:

Some applications and hardware automatically adds services to your computer which start with the computer, Windows also includes and enables a lot of services by default, many of which you don’t need. You can disable these using the previous mentioned MSConfig, or if you type services.msc into the Run command it will bring up the Services module and allow you to set their status and see a bit more about them. I found Beemer World’s Optimize XP Services article useful to see what I should keep and what I could disable.

Disable Hardware Before You Shutdown

Some hardware runs a number of checks when you are loading, I found that disabling my wireless card before I shutdown meant I started up around seven seconds faster.

Applications

A useful application for identifying what is causing delays in your boot process is BootVis.

Once you have your machine booting quicker, you can improve the day-to-day handling by running lighter versions of popular applications, like Foxit PDF Reader, instead of Adobe’s 100Mb+ Acrobat Reader. You can find a good list of these apps over at mattbthompson.blogspot.com.

Hardware Round-up and Costs

A quick run through of the final hardware setup (new items in bold):

• ATX motherboard (Asus A7N8X-X Socket A/462 - £54 back in 2003)
• Sound card (from an even older machine)
• Processor (AMD “Barton” Athlon XP 2500+ 1.8Ghz - £66 back in 2003)
• RAM (512Mb Crucial 184-pin DIMM - £54 back in 2003)
• Graphics card (Asus Nvidia FX 6200 with TV-out - £24.67)
• TV Tuner (Hauppauge Nova T 500 Dual Tuner - £49.99)
• Remote (Microsoft MCE 2005 Remote and IR receiver - £19.96)
• Wireless Keyboard (Microsoft IR Media Keyboard - £23.48)
• DVI cable (£2.49)
• HTPC case (to fit ATX mobo) - Silverstone LC17 - £65.67
• Quiet CPU fan - Zalman CNPS7000B-CU - £17.63
• Large HDD - WD Caviar 400Gb - £54.64
• Case fans, one 92mm Antec TriCool, one 80mm Antec TriCool - £3.87 + £3.99 (didn’t need the 80mm)
• AnyDVD €49/£37
• Fanless PSU - Silverstone ST30NF £71.09
• ATX 24-pin to 20-pin converter cable £0.99
• 2 * Zalman Fanmate 2 fan controllers for case fans - 3.99 ea

Total spent (not including original hardware): £383.46 (plus postage, so probably around £420)

Suppliers Round-up

A quick round-up of the suppliers I used and how I found them.

Ebuyer - cheap prices, good service.

Amazon - not much needed to say, not always the cheapest, good service

Overclockers - I’ve used them before, cheap and great service.

Cablestar - a company I found which also sells on eBay, I have bought several sorts of cables from them, they have a good range a great prices

After Hours - they were the cheapest for my case, but aside from confirming my order I didn’t hear anything from them for a week, I had seen a couple of negative reviews and when I first contacted them I didn’t hear anything back, only when I requested to cancel my order did they respond, then I got my delivery confirmed.

Novatech - not the cheapest on many parts, but good service and quick delivery.

Micro Direct - cheapest place I found my fanless PSU, fast delivery, no problems (no confirmation it had been sent though).

Quiet PC - again, not the cheapest, although they stock a range of parts few other equal, good service.

Images

Conclusion

I was looking for a PVR which would give me expandability and easier access to my content, all in one place. It also had to match up to a shop bought PVR, it had to be easy to use, reliable, not draw too much power and, above all, be silent in operation. I’m reasonably happy. The machine still isn’t silent, with the CPU cooler and HDD still generating a bit of noise, and a fair racket when playing DVDs, but as the machine is located at my head height and about three feet from me that’s understandable, if it were in a normal living room environment you would have trouble telling it was on. I don’t find the software particularly easy to use, neither GB-PVR or Media Portal hit the mark for me and the pay-for packages lacked Freeview support (yes, there is a world outside the US). I’m also at a loss as to how I get the machine to sleep, then wake up if it’s set to record as a paid device would.

The package that started me thinking about building an HTPC again was Vista’s Media Centre, and the two packages I tried didn’t measure up. For example, when I installed a USB TV card Vista Media Centre automatically found it, downloaded TV channels and set it up, why don’t all of the packages work this way (I’m asking a lot I know)? Plus it has an in-built burn feature (not that I’ve tested it) for getting shows onto DVD.

Looking back at the hardware, I’m only disappointed by two parts: the keyboard, I’m not massively impressed, it works, but is less than ideal, the mouse takes a lot of getting used to and, in reality, getting a keyboard out all the time is awkward. A regular bluetooth or RF one would probably be better than IR. It was cheap and it does do the job though. The other part is the case. Don’t get me wrong, the case if well-built and works well, but it’s massive and is, therefore, somewhat ungainly. I think the disappointment was because I saw my built PVR as being the same size as a normal PVR, DVD player, etc. I’m happy enough to hang on to it though.

I did end up buying a lot more hardware than I thought, and spending a lot more money on the project. Looking back I could have bought a pre-built media centre solution for not much more and a PVR for much less, although finding a PVR that saved into a format I could easily burn may have been hard, plus I can play any media format and access the internet all from one machine. I am considering replacing the remaining original components a building a machine capable of running Vista and using Media Centre, although that would probably mean replacing the CPU cooler and graphics card as well.

The Software

I started by installing a copy of XP Pro I had lying around, once that was running I set about the PVR software.

I initially installed GB-PVR. It’s not open source, but is free, and seems to have a lot of support. It is actually designed as two pieces of software, a back-end recorder/scheduler and a front-end for controlling it and playback, they can be run on the same or separate machines (so you could have a media server somewhere running all the time and something like a Hauppauge MediaMVP controlling it, which GB-PVR has good support for). I had checked the transmitter used on my PVR so I could pick the TV transmitter to use and got on with setting up GB-PVR.

I have to say that it was far from the most intuitive setup I have ever done, and don’t get me wrong, I’m good with computers, well into expert, which means this would probably be bewildering for normal users. It found my hardware without issue, but whenever I tried to search for channels it found nothing. I checked everything twice, spent a long time using Google and hunting forums, no joy. I gave up and installed Media Portal.

I liked Media Portal better from the start and it was a bit easier to get my head around. Still no joy finding channels though. I installed the WinTV software that came the TV card and it found channels. So, no problem with the reception or hardware. I spent a long time searching online for help and in the end I found out about ScanChannelsBDA_UK (I have mirrored a copy here as I had to sign up to download a copy, the only place I found it online). That found channels, and from which transmitter it found them, turns out I was using the wrong one. Back into GB-PVR and it found the channels. I tried in Media Portal, still no joy. So I finished setting up GB-PVR and it was all working. I had to install a copy of PowerDVD I had lying around to get MPEG2 encoders/decoders though.

After a brief use I wasn’t happy with it. The TV picture seemed to jerk, like it was dropping frames, which made it difficult to watch. More than that though, the interface felt old and ugly, clunky to use. I thought I’d give Media Portal another try. I figured I would uninstall GB-PVR as it may be conflicting, I was right, that sorted the problem and I was OK to set Media Portal up. I was much happier with it from the start, still a few weird things in the interface, but it looked nicer and seemed to work better.

I spent the first week tweaking and changing settings. Initially I had a problem that the sound went weird when I tried to record, which I tracked down to the MPEG encoder I had chosen (Media Portal comes with some encoders and decoders, unlike GB-PVR). I added a plugin to launch external applications and added IE so you could easily launch a browser and surf the net. I also enabled the My Burner plugin so I could, I hoped, burn saved files straight to DVD (as I mentioned, part of my reason for disliking me current PVR was the work involved in doing this).

I played around with it for a few days, got it picking up my photos, music and ripped DVDs from the NAS, checked it was recording programmes, setup my Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) using XMLTV GUI (incidentally, easier to set this up to put the file, called tvguide.xml into the xmltv folder in the Media Portal programme folder). Setting up the TV channels and then matching them to the EPG was the most laborious process though. I also managed to get hold of some custom channel icons so many of my channels had the channel logos, making them easier to identify.

I installed a copy of SpeedFan to help control my fan speeds, which did make a difference in noise, but as I only had a CPU fan that could be controlled it meant the heat immediately rocketed up, it showed me it was possible though. I also noticed that my optical DVD ROM was way too loud when playing back (optical drives try and spin flat-out all the time, in reality anything over about 1.5x is wasted on playback). Media Portal does come with an option to control the spin speed of a drive, but it didn’t seem to work, although I have an old drive so it may work with newer ones. After much hunting I grabbed a trial copy of AnyDVD, which had the added benefit of making the drive region free and removing those seriously annoying piracy warnings you can’t skip.

I was happy that my hardware was capable of running the software and acting as a PVR, so I decided it was time to make it look and act more like a PVR than a PC.

Adding Hardware

First off was to find a case. I had a full-size ATX motherboard, so that limited my options, getting a sleek slimline case was out of the question, which was probably a good thing anyway, as I believe the old Athlons run very hot, so it would give more room for air circulation. The old machine survived using only three fans: one in the PSU, one on the graphics card and a CPU cooler, no case fans. I’d swapped the graphics card for a passively cooled one, putting the heat in the case up. There aren’t too many HTPC case manufacturers. The most popular seem to be Zalman, Antec and Silverstone. I liked the look, and the price, of the Silverstone LC13 or the Silverstone LC17. In the end I went for the latter, but it was fairly hard to find for sale in the UK. The LC17 is a huge case, with room for two optical drives stacked on top of each other, up to 6 3.5″ drives, a full-size PSU and a full-size ATX board, plus cooling fans.

Checking my old machine I identified the noisiest elements, which seemed to be overwhelmingly the CPU fan (with the graphics card fan gone, which was far noisier). For a replacement I looked for a Zalman flower, which seem to get great reviews and comes with a fan controller, although I was planning on using SpeedFan anyway. There are actually a variety of different models. I settled on the CNPS7000B-CU, fairly cheap, supports a range of CPUs (including the Socket A/462 my Athlon XP uses) and comes with all the mounting brackets.

I knew I needed a larger hard drive to store the recorded shows on. The board was only capable of PATA (parallel ATA) connections, which limited my choice. After much hunting and reading many reviews I settled on a 400Gb Western Digital Caviar.

Lastly I grabbed a few case fans, one 80mm and one 92mm, both Antec TriCools, which are bearing fans, so quiet, and come with three-setting fan controllers built in. The LC17 also comes with two 80mm fans mounted in the case.

The case was the last to arrive, but it was a fairly simple process to transfer all my components over. The CPU cooler just fit without touching the case, meaning the case fan I was going to mount there wouldn’t go. I mounted the 92mm fan, on it’s lowest setting (where it’s silent) to the front of the middle 3.5″ mounting rail. In the end I left the two Silverstone fans where they were, I only connected one, to a motherboard fan slot, thinking it would be controlled by SpeedFan.

I fitted both the HDDs, figuring to use the original 40 Gb as the OS/system disk and the new one for storage. I attached the CPU cooler directly to the motherboard, not using it’s fan controller.

When I fired up the machine I was expecting whisper-quiet. That’s not what I got. I spent some time starting and stopping the machine to find the noisy components. There seemed to be three culprits: the original 40 Gb HDD, the CPU fan and the two Silverstone case fans. I removed the IBM HDD, it was an old 7,200 RPM drive, hardly surprising it was noisy, then found that the WD drive was mounted using the wrong size screws, so it still had movement, I found the correct screws and bolted it in tight.

I attached the fan controller that came with the CPU cooler and set that to about as low as it would go, I also ordered a couple of Zalman Fanmate 2 controllers (which is what came with the CPU) for the case fans, and again, set them low (the noise from the case fans was more due to the amount of air they were shifting than any noise from the fans).

It meant reinstalling the OS and setting up all the software again, luckily I found out how to backup the Media Portal settings. After a few days waiting for parts and then several hours reinstalling everything I was back in business, but the machine was still too noisy (my aim was a machine you could barely hear when it was running). I checked the case again, the HDD was making a noise, where it was quiet/silent before. I figured my bolting down the drive hadn’t helped, so switched the screws back, giving the drive some play, and that dropped the noise.

As a side note, from what I read the quietest drives are 2.5″ laptop drives, mounted on rubber bungies to stop vibrations being transmitted into the case. This was designed as a low-cost project, so I didn’t want the premium of a 2.5″ drive.

It still wasn’t quiet enough for me though, there was still too much noise, enough that my ears gave a sigh of relief when I turned the machine off. Hunting through the case I found three sources: the CPU cooler, although quiet, was still not silent; the HDD was making some noise, though not much and the PSU, although quiet, was far from silent. I decided I could live with the first two. The PSU was an old one I had left over, although supposedly silent, it blatantly wasn’t. I hunted around and there were plenty of options for a ’semi-passive’ PSU (which means it runs fanless below a certain temperature, above that a big fan cuts in, typically bigger than 80mm so it can turn slow). I didn’t want semi-passive, that still left the possibility for noise, I wanted silent, which meant fanless. I had the case cooling to cope with the extra heat and the LC17 case has the PSU on it’s own, away from everything else, with a vent straight out of the case.

There aren’t many fanless PSUs, certainly not many at reasonable cost (and forget it if you have a powerful system, mine was all running from a 300w PSU). Many of those mentioned over at SilentPCReview.com just could not be found for sale. In the end I managed to get my hands on a Silverstone ST30NF, figuring it would go well with the case.

The presented a different problem, however, it comes with a 24-pin ATX cable, my board is an old one with a 20-pin socket, which meant buying a converter cable (24-pins are basically 20-pin adapters, with an additional four pins bolted on the side, many PSU manufacturers allow them to be detached, or let them hang separate so you can plug them in or not depending on your board).

You can find part three here

1. I keep filling up the hard disk

2. Even though I export the files, they take so long to convert and burn to DVD I rarely bother, so I have GBs of external HDD space taken up storing programmes I may burn to DVD at some point

I also have a NAS (network attached storage) with some ripped DVDs, my photos and music on which no one else can really access, so I was thinking of creating/buying something to allow the rest of the family access these things from the TV. As I realised my problems and the device I was thinking of could both be solved by a media centre PC I started researching the options.

I had an old PC lying around anyway, and getting rid of old PCs is always a chore (for my last two I contacted a local IT charity that specialises in taking old hardware and re-using it, but never heard back from them, in the end they went to a friend’s son), so it seemed to make sense to convert it. I was aiming to make this on the cheap, to show you didn’t need a top-notch machine, to test the concept ahead of possibly building a top-of-the-line machine using all-new parts. My initial research suggested it was probably powerful enough, despite it’s age. Part of this desire to build a media centre PC (or an HTPC as they’re more commonly known, which stands for Home Theatre PC) was having not long had a copy of Vista which comes with Vista Media Centre (on Home Premium and Ultimate only). It was a great app and whet my appetite, although I knew Vista would not run on my old machine, so I went looking for alternatives.

As it turns out, there are plenty of media centre apps out there, some free and some commercial. Early on I decided I wanted to stick with Windows, as much as I have have heard good things about MythTV, I just wanted ready to spend time learning a new OS and run Linux. I was fine with buying some software, I figured it would be better quality. So my research led me to the likes of BeyondTV and SageTV, as well as free software like GB-PVR and Media Portal. At this point I came across a realisation, while I had read a lot of sites, forums, posts and blogs regarding what people had done with their media centres and what they recommended, they were overwhelmingly US-centric and dealt with analogue TV. Being based in the UK, naturally I wanted Freeview (free to air digital TV), which very few of the projects I saw did, so the cards they used and, as it turned out, most of the software, did not mention or support digital cards. The good news is that both of the free options did, so I was down to GB-PVR and Media Portal for the software.

Initial Setup and Testing

I figured I’d start simple to test the water, keep most of the existing hardware and just supplement it with require components so I could see if the project was feasible. The hardware I started with was:

• Generic tower case
• ATX motherboard (Asus A7N8X-X Socket A/462 - £54 back in 2003)
• Quiet PSU (Zalman ZM300A-APF - £47 back in 2003)
• Sound card (from an even older machine)
• Processor (AMD “Barton” Athlon XP 2500+ 1.8Ghz - £66 back in 2003)
• RAM (512Mb Crucial 184-pin DIMM - £54 back in 2003)
• IBM Deskstar HDD (40Gb)

Checking the tuner card compatibility of both bits of software I settled on a Hauppauge Nova T 500 Dual Tuner (partly as Hauppauge seems to be used for many HTPC projects), to give me the option of recording two channels as with my existing PVR, I figured I could always add more later should I wish (most media centre software will support a number of cards, 11 is the highest number in any project I saw). The other benefit is this offer two tuners on one card, which means only one aerial lead and one PCI slot used. Freeview has the benefit of being transmitted in MPEG2, the same format used on DVDs, and the format most TV cards record in, so it saves having expensive hardware and load on the machine encoding the TV signals.

Next I needed a new graphics card as my existing one didn’t have a TV out. I figured I’d output to an HD TV, so something capable of supporting 720p or higher, with a DVI or HDMI output. I didn’t need anything too fancy, it wasn’t for games, so I settled on an XFX Geforce FX5700 Ultra 128MB with a DVI out as a cheap, capable card. Unfortunately, that went out of stock, so I changed to an Asus Nvidia FX 6200 (Nvidia seemed to edge out the ATI’s for cost and performance, plus my options were limited as I needed an AGP card).

I also wanted a remote and a wireless keyboard as I wanted this to be used by the family and they would want a remote. They keyboard would mean we could surf the internet or whatever from the couch too. I opted for the Microsoft MCE 2005 Remote and IR receiver, partly as it was quite cheap, partly because I figured it would have good support (both of the packages I would be using support it) and a Microsoft IR Media Keyboard, which makes use of the same IR receiver and looks pretty good, again, good value too. Worth noting is that the TV card came with a remote, which is also supported by both bits of software.

When they arrived I started putting it all together and that’s when the fun began.

Find part 2 here and part three here.

It’s a good set and they work well (although the headset can be uncomfortable for long use if you don’t get it sitting just right). I also got an iPod remote with built-in radio though and have been finding the radio better to listen to. The problem is you can’t use the bluetooth transmitter and the radio remote at the same time as they both use the iPod dock connector on the bottom. So, I decided to try and find a bluetooth transmitter than would work through a standard 3.5mm headphone socket, I have a pair of wireless RF headphones that do this, so it seemed likely. Well, there aren’t many on the market, but I eventually settled on the Jabra A120s as they were a company I knew (better known for bluetooth phone headsets) and I had seen a comment they worked with the S9s. I also ordered a Jabra BT320s, a bluetooth headphone set which allows you to use any ordinary set of heaphones, partly because it was on a deal if I bought both, partly because I figured if the A120s didn’t work with my S9 I could use it with this and partly because it meant I could use any set of headphones wirelessly.

When the A120s arrived I followed the instructions and tried to pair with my S9 headset, no joy, it just wouldn’t find it. The next day my BT320s arrived, I tried pairing with that, still no joy. I was hectic for a few days so waited for the weekend to try again. Reading the light sequences it appeared the A120s started searching, didn’t find my headphones, but paired with something. I spent an age downloading various bits of bluetooth sniffing software to try and see what it connected to, with no joy. I checked all the bluetooth devices in the house, they could see it, but were not paired with it (I figured something might be hijacking it). So, over to the Jabra support site to check up on the options, nothing in the FAQs, but I found a pairing guide for these two products. Well, that suggested a different way to pair, the manual suggests you press the on button for 1 second to get it to start flashing, this means it’s in pairing mode, these instructions say hold it until the light goes to solid blue (which indicates manual pairing mode according to the manual), but the guide mentions something about a code, how do you type that in on something with no number keys? I tried pressing the on/talk button four times, no joy. Even when I left it alone it would not pair and eventually one or other device would get bored and stop looking. I also tried the BT320s with the Motorola D650, but same result. They worked fine with my phone and PC though. In the end I even sent a support request to Jabra about it, something I don’t normally bother doing because experience has taught me most company’s take longer than an ice age to reply, if they do at all, and you end up dealing with some muppet who is about as useful as a chocolate teapot and never helps fix the problem.

There is a firmware update listed on the BT320s support page, I figured it was worth a go, but you need to connect it to a PC via USB and they use a micro USB port (which no one uses!) and finding a cable to buy was next to impossible. Searching for the cable I stumbled across two different sites with the same suggestion: plug the BT320s into it’s charger, three times, for 4 seconds each time. This was about switching on certain functionality in the BT320s, I thought it was worth a try, I then followed the earlier instruction about switching it into manual pairing and voila, it worked! I then tried it with the D650 and that also worked.

I still couldn’t get my S9 headset working, but I figured that was better than nothing, at least I could now use it. So I figured I’d write this up so if you’re having problems with the BT320s, try plugging it in three times for four seconds and hopefully that’ll sort your problems, a weird fix, but it works!