Articles by Jon Scaife - DIY Media Home

0Backing up or copying the winamp media library database

Posted 27^th december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Misc Software.

I use Winamp on multiple PCs — even though it is old I really like the interface, the media library system, and the milkdrop 2 visualisations. The easiest way to maintain these various installations is to copy the database between the machines. This is actually surprisingly easy to accomplish
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0 Fixed: DVBLink MCE Client first tune fail

Gepubliceerd 27^th december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Windows Media Center. Laatst bijgewerkt 11th March 2015.

One of my many HTPC clients has had a strange problem — the first time it is tuned into a channel it fails with the common (and meaningless) Play Ready error. Changing channel once always seems to bring it back to life however. After much digging around I finally found the very straightforward solution
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0 Enable access to the c$ share on Windows 7 and newer

Posted 27^th december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Windows.

I have a range of HTPCs running windows around the house, which I largely administer via remote desktop. Occasionally it is useful to access the root of the C drive remotely. Windows has always catered for this by creating some default administrative shares, which are hidden. The C drive is accessed via \\remote-pc\c$ for example. In windows 7 I found I wasn’t able to access these shares by default as they have been restricted (understandably). I needed a way to make them accessible again.
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1 Fixed: Media Center PC wakes in wrong resolution

Posted 25^th december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Windows.

Since I upgraded my HTPC to an AMD A5400 series (from the old E350) I have had a problem where on wake from sleep the resolution would be set wrong (1024×768 I think) instead of the full 1920×1080 that the TV supports. Exiting media center would trigger a resolution correction and then media center could be reloaded without issue. This was not satisfactory as a solution.
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0 Cloning a system disk

Gepubliceerd 24^th december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Storage. Laatst bijgewerkt 23rd September 2018.

The next job on my festive technical support rounds was to upgrade my old man’s laptop HDD to a new SSD. In the past such upgrades have usually involved other components and necessitated a fresh install of windows, but with this upgrade being just one component, to a Windows 7 PC, I decided time was ripe for a fresh investigation of the possibility of cloning the old drive onto the new
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0 Fixed: DVBLink media center playready message

Gepubliceerd 23^rd december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Windows Media Center. Laatst bijgewerkt 11th March 2015.

I’ve been using DVBLink to share TV around my home for several years. Of all the issues with it, the most dreaded is the “Play Ready” error on Windows Media Center clients. The problem is this error message is meaningless — it is generated by Media Center, and just means it can’t get a signal from the tuner. The failure could be anywhere behind the scenes. Recently my 2 main clients started throwing this error completely out of the blue.
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0 How to avoid a domain name hijacking

Posted 23^rd december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Web Technologies.

Like many other people I own several domain names, and use the free version of google apps to manage the e‑mail for them. A few months ago I read a tale of woe by Naoki Hiroshima, who had lost control of his valuable @N twitter username thanks to a domain name theft.
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0 Karoo ADSL settings

Posted 23^rd december 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Web Technologies.

Having completed the migration of the site to the new server, and with the festive season upon us, I’m back being the family technical support. First challenge of this year was to restore service to my grandfathers broadband which hasn’t been working since he mistakenly pressed the reset button on his wireless router.
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0 Play BluRays and DVD’s in MediaCenter with MPC-HC

Gepubliceerd 12^th September 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Windows Media Center. Laatst bijgewerkt 22nd December 2014.

I’ve long run Windows Media Center on my HTPCs in combination with DVBLink and MediaBrowser. However, recently we have been watching more physical disks than in the past, and I have found various issues with Media Center. Usually I have MPC-HC configured as an external player, but doing this for physical disks proved less than simple. Eventually however, I have managed to get it working flawlessly.

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0 Fix grey letterbox bars on LG Plasma TV

Posted 29^th January 2014 door Jon Scaife & gearchiveerd onder Displays.

I have an LG Plasma TV as part of my main HTPC setup. Although I calibrated it (and turned off things like dynamic contrast) when I first got it, I have always had an issue with the letterbox bars (e.g. on 2.4:1 ratio films) looking grey — i.e. being lighter than the darkest parts of the film. I googled to try to find a solution but was eventually convinced by repeated forums that it was just my perception and eventually gave up.