Posts Categorised: News

0VPS ServerNew VPS host

Published by & filed under News. Last updated .

So, there haven’t been many new art­icles on the site in the last 2–3 months.  Partly this is because we’ve been busy in our day jobs, but also it is because we decided it was time to move to a VPS instead of our pre­vi­ous host­ing pack­age.  So, to cut a very long story short, we’re now up and run­ning on the new host.  There is still a lot of tweak­ing and tinker­ing to do, but the site should be not­ic­ably faster thanks to vari­ous cach­ing and oth­er options we’ve been able to use with the VPS.  Once everything has settled down and is fully func­tion­al you can expect quite a few new art­icles, start­ing with a sub­stan­tial (7,000 word and grow­ing) guide to how to set up a VPS!

In the mean­time, if you find any broken func­tion­al­ity please let us know with a com­ment, e‑mail or mes­sage via social net­work. You can also see more details on the changes we’ve been mak­ing on our [int­link id=“2807” type=“page”]site updates log[/intlink].

Cheers, Jon

0VLC logoPlaying BluRays with VLC

Posted by & filed under 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.

0DIYMediaHome is now available on social media

Published by & filed under News. Last updated .

Fol­low­ing the recent restyl­ing of DIY Media Home we have been work­ing on con­nect­ing to the lead­ing social media sites. We can now be found on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google+. Our new con­tent will auto­mat­ic­ally be shared to these 3 lead­ing social plat­forms so you can fol­low us through these as well as through the exist­ing RSS Feeds or e‑mail.

0Haali Matroska logoHaali Media Splitter: Official Site Down

Published by & filed under Codecs, News. Last updated .

HTPC related sites and resources seem to be drop­ping like flies at the moment.  First [int­link id=“1918” type=“post”]Media Cen­ter Stu­dio disappeared[/intlink], then [int­link id=“2141” type=“post”]TheHTPC.net developed problems[/intlink], 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 [int­link id=“741” type=“page”]downloads[/intlink] page.  Lets hope that this is the last in the recent series of HTPC related losses.

0MCEBuddy LogoMCEBuddy — v2 Beta 14

Published by & filed under Misc Media Software, News. Last updated .

MCE­Buddy 2 Beta 14 has been released.  It’s the first release in a long time that is a com­plete pro­gram.  It also includes offi­cial x64 sup­port.  There are still some major issues remain­ing, but with­in those lim­its it should be an excel­lent solu­tion for con­vert­ing wtv files and strip­ping adverts from them.

0Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case LogoComparison of HTPC GPU’s

Published by & filed under Media PC Hardware, News. Last updated .

Anandtech has an excel­lent art­icle com­par­ing 4 bot­tom end GPU’s for HTPC’s.  The art­icle is extens­ive and does a good job of explain­ing issues of fram­er­ate tim­ing, cadence detec­tion, tele­cin­ing and pull­down as well as com­par­ing the 4 GPU’s.  As we don’t believe in rein­vent­ing the wheel — we recom­mend any­one build­ing a HTPC setup read the art­icle before set­ting out.