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In: Home Theater, Reviews
With: 2 Comments

I just unboxed and installed my Vudu XL evaluation unit, connected it to the flat panel TV in my family room, and started played around with it.  Here are my initial thoughts: This is a very nice looking set top box; possibly the most attractive design I’ve seen, with lots of glossy, high-quality plastic. The bottom of the unit even has a nice textured pattern on it. It’s unexpectedly heavy.  This is not a thin sheet metal enclosure with a tiny circuit board inside.  It feels solid, dense, and well constructed. It passed my easy of installation test: I didn’t need to consult the installRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 11 Comments

I installed the Windows 7 beta (32-bit) on my wife’s MSI Wind netbook with great success.  In fact, it was flawless.  So I decided to give it a try on the second Media Center computer (HTPC) that I just finished building using the 64-bit version.  My results were as positive this time.  Here a summary of why Win7 Beta didn’t work for me on my HTPC: Drivers. The drivers for the motherboard (Nvidia 9400) wouldn’t install from Windows Update and were over a month old.  (At least I was able to install the latest drivers on the Nvidia website.) Lockups. The PC locked up twiceRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 8 Comments

To get the best video quality playback possible for movies in a home theater, it’s necessary for the refresh rate of the source component to match the refresh rate of the display. One of the most common problems stems from the fact that most movies are 24 frames per second while most televisions are 60 frames per second (approximately.)  It’s not a simple mathematical conversion to get 24 fps to scale to 60 fps. There are processing fixes (reverse telecine) to overcome this problem, but the frame rate of the source material must be properly detected and the proper correction applied. The best solution isRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 4 Comments

Note to readers: this information was current as of early 2010. Since then, ATI, Intel, and Nvidia have all released video/audio solutions to allow bitstreaming of the original Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio streams with the use of playback software such as Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre. The below content, from early 2010, is for historical reference only. If you’re a home theater enthusiast, you want the highest-quality audio and video possible, and that means Blu-ray with lossless audio (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio) and the best video compression codec (VC-1 or MPEG-4 H.264 AVC HP.) Most people would choose a Sony PlayStation 3 orRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 0 Comments

For me, Brian Binnerup’s My Movies plugin is the most important function of Vista Media Center. It’s so useful that I want it to be the default start page every time I turn-on my Vista Media Center PC. I couldn’t figure out how to do that, and this I came across this post on TheGreenButton forums. Here are the details on launching a Media Center plug-in from via the startup folder or from a key on your remote control. Associate Media Center Plug ins with the Media Center Application: Open My Computer or Explorer and navigate to: C:Program FilesMCEMy Movies Right click on the fileRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 0 Comments

I haven’t found a better solution than Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition for playing movies / videos in my home theater. I’m getting ready to upgrade my Home Theater PC from MCE 2005 to Windows Vista. While this is still my plan, it looks like there may finally be a viable non-Microsoft alternative: Linux MCE. I’m running Ubuntu on my desktop PC / file server, I’ll give this a try and see how close it is to Windows on features, ease-of-use, and reliability. Because of the Digg effect, it appears the linuxmce.com site is temporarily down; if so, the home page can be accessed throughRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 0 Comments

I use Windows Media Center 2005 to play back video over my network. Mostly I play the original VOB (mpeg) files from DVDs. But occasionally I have an Xvid file AVI file. It will play if FFDshow is installed, but there is no way to fast forward or rewind and there is no support for “post processing” – which can greatly improve image quality. I found out about a plug-in for Windows Vista Media Center that apparently solves these problems and add even more features, such as support for MKV files (the replacement for AVI), subtitles, and bookmarks. I’d be even happier if it supportedRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 102 Comments

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve build a media server to store all of my music and movies for playback throughout my house. I decided to store everything the original, lossless format. This means that music is stored at full CD bit rate, and more significantly, movies are backed-up with all menus and extras in the original file format. Although I could save a bunch of space by compressing everything to a different format, I want to keep everything in the original format. The drawback is that this requires quite a bit of disk space, more than I originally anticipated. I justed addedRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 27 Comments

Update 2010-Jan-21: For playback of FLAC in Windows 7, use either the xiph.org Directshow Filters or the Shark007 Codec Pack. The Lossless Audio Blog is reporting that FLAC lossless audio files can now be played in Windows Media Center 2005.  This is great news, because every music player I own now supports FLAC, the format I use to encode all of my music files.  So I can listen to my FLAC music files at my PC using dbPowerAmp or one of many players, around the house on my Sonos, in my car with my PhatNoise PhatBox, and now in my home theater with Windows MediaRead More →

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In: Tech
With: 5 Comments

I’ve built my new desktop computer / server and now have it up an running. It’s been 4 years since my last PC, so it was time for an upgrade. The biggest advantages of the new computer are a dual-core processor, a super-quiet case, and a RAID hard drive controller card that provides protection against drive failures and lets me add disks to the array to make one huge drive. Biggest advantage: all of my movies stored on my network, so that I can use the PC in my basement to browse and play movies. Just like TiVo, only with a better looking interface (WindowsRead More →