0 Blackgold BGT3600

Published on 14^th February 2012 by Jon Scaife in Media PC Hardware.

I’ve recently moved house, but now that I’ve restored internet access (always the first priority) I’ve been tasked with fully sorting out TV in the house. The previous setup isn’t bad – with a Media Server (including TV cards) tucked away, and a HTPC in the lounge. These both run Media Center and DVBLink. This way I can also get TV on my desktop PC and laptop. In the near future I’ll be building another HTPC for the bedroom TV so we can watch recorded programmes in bed. All these potential recordings and watching are beyond the capability of my current tuner setup – a BlackGold BGT3620 and a Compro S350. (more…)

0 Decoding Interlaced VC-1 with DXVA

Published on 3^rd February 2012 by Jon Scaife in Codecs.

A couple of days ago version 1.6 of Media Player Classic – Home Cinema was released. Although I don’t use MPC-HC, I do keep an eye on the releases as it can be a useful back-up when a file wont play. It’s been quite a long time since the last official release so I had a quick scan of the changelog and one thing immediately leaped at me: “VC-1 DXVA Decoder now decodes VC-1 interlaced material”. Until now there has been no open source x64 codec that will decode interlaced VC-1. Finally having this available completes coverage for all the media files I have ever tried to play. Hopefully this will also get added to ffdshow tryouts and LAV Video in the near future.

0 Playing BluRays with VLC

Published on 26^th January 2012 by Jon Scaife in News.

There have been a couple of interesting articles on Anandtech in the last couple of days. First was a review of a cheap CEC device by Pulse-Eight which hopefully signals the arrival of more choice for HTPC remote controls. Of greater interest is the news of a “hack” for VLC which enables the play-back of commercial (encrypted) BluRays. Nightly builds of VLC since 1.2 include support for BluRay playback. All you need for it to fully function is an AACS keys database, a quick google should provide one.

2 Rich Snippets Code for Thesis Theme

Published on 22^nd January 2012 by Jon Scaife in Web Technologies.

In response to a query by Darko Kovancives on my previous article about fixing Rich Snippets code for the Mystique theme we have resolved the same issues with the Thesis theme. Details of the changes required are below. (more…)

0 Haali Media Splitter: Official Site Down

Published on 15^th January 2012 by Jon Scaife in Codecs, News. Updated 17^th January 2012.

HTPC related sites and resources seem to be dropping like flies at the moment. First Media Center Studio disappeared, then TheHTPC.net developed problems, and now the official site for Haali Media Splitter is down. Fortunately the media splitter can still be downloaded from lots of other sites, and we will keep a mirror here in case other sites drop it. There are also alternatives, including the MPC-HC standalone codecs and LAV. Links to these are available on our downloads page. Lets hope that this is the last in the recent series of HTPC related losses.

0 Release: Media Browser 2.5.2 (Apollo)

Published on 15^th January 2012 by Jon Scaife in Media Browser, News. Updated 17^th January 2012.

Today Media Browser 2.5.2 codename Apollo was released.

The main new feature is the support for 3D movies. Otherwise this update doesn’t bring as many changes as some previous releases, but it is worth noting that Windows Vista is no longer supported.
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0 BrazosTweaker: AMD Brazos E350 tweaker

Published on 11^th January 2012 by Jon Scaife in Media PC Hardware. Updated 17^th January 2012.

As regular readers will know, my main HTPC is currently based on an AMD Brazos E350. I’d like to say a quick thanks to SemiAccurate for their recent article highlighting the excellent BrazosTweaker by Sven Wittek. This tool (and its sibling FusionTweaker) enable the tweaking of P-States (the voltage in low power mode) of Brazos and Llano chips, just like K10Stat, PhenomMsrTweaker, RMClock, CrystalCPUID and others have done in the past. To quote SemiAccurate, “the main purpose of both these tools is to modify the voltages and clock dividers of the built-in P-States on these chips.”

The FusionTweaker utility is still somewhat buggy by all reports, but BrazosTweaker seems reliable to me. I highly recommend reading the SemiAccurate article and then grabbing the tool if you have a Brazos HPTC, or laptop.

0 Microsoft Storage Spaces: Virtual RAID for Windows 8?

Published on 6^th January 2012 by Jon Scaife in Storage. Updated 17^th January 2012.

Microsoft’s Steve Sinofsky has written a detailed article about a genuinely exciting new feature of Windows 8 – Storage Spaces. I won’t repeat the details here, for those you can go straight to the horses mouth. However I will point out a key line from a home media server point of view: “There’s another resiliency attribute, called parity, which directs Storage Spaces to store some redundancy information alongside user data contained within the space, thereby enabling automatic data reconstruction in the event of physical disk failure.” To me, this sounds a LOT like a software RAID5 similar to that provided by UnRAID. Until Windows 8 is released and the technology is fully reviewed the details are of course somewhat speculative, but my reading of the article leads me to believe that Storage Spaces will enable the striping of disks, with a parity in the event of single disk failure. Further, it is reasonable to assume that this system will work with standard non-enterprise drives without suffering any compatibility issues. Finally, it is reasonable to assume that Storage Spaces will offer some of the performance benefits of hardware raid-5 too. If you have a home server with a lot of media and you want some redundancy, without huge cost, then this technology sounds like it might be the perfect solution. Thanks Microsoft!

7 Fix Windows Update or Service Pack error 80073712

Published on 29^th December 2011 by Jon Scaife in Windows. Updated 17^th January 2012.

It’s that time of year again, and as always, when I visit the family over xmas there are various PC issues to resolve. This year there were blessedly few issues, but there was 1 problem that it took me quite a while to track down and resolve. One of the families PCs was failing to install Windows 7 service pack 1. It’s a fairly new PC and came with an OEM install of Windows 7 x64 Home Premium, all legit and activated. It also has up-to-date anti-virus protection, and other than the SP1 install problems it seemed to be in excellent working order. (more…)