My Family's History With the HTPC

[osburnfamily]

I decided to write this post here instead of where its' discussion originated, so-as not to hijack the OP's thread. It answers a question Brent asked in relation to my switch from MCE-to-STV-back to VMC and finally to 7MC. While it is quite long, it was a fun trip down memory lane and I'm sure I'm not the only one who experienced many of what is here.

Enjoy the read—or not!

Over the years my Home Theater PC experience has had many ups and downs. I decided to sit down this dreary Saturday morning and now into the afternoon to recall just how far me and my family have come in the digital media world.

"In the beginning" there was me, my wife, a small sd tube tv, and a bunch of home video tapes...but with a desire to build my own DVR for my Comcast expanded basic cable, no STB required. (I was watching every RedWings game on TV, but couldn't watch them live—yet, didn't want to wait to the END of the game to stop the VCR)... GO WINGS! It was 2001 and the media world to us had just started to begin its' ever-rapidly changing face.

Then came our cute little angle and her desire to watch every Disney movie ever. We bought all the DVDs we could... then her little hands starting wrecking them to the point they were unplayable. After rebuying one or two Barbie and Disney DVDs, we wanted a way to rip/backup just the main move and store it on a PC that could be attached to the TV. For a young couple just starting out—constantly replacing a kid's DVD wasn't very fun.

All the above lead me to build my first 2002 MediaCenter. It was a simple P4 2.4ghz HT CPU, 512MB memory, a small hard drive, with an nVidia Quadro 4 s-video out video card and a Hauppauge PVR-350 tv capture card. I tried SageTV back then as my interface to the HTPC (it was even a Hauppauge recommended solution then); but, I was so new to the entire HTPC world, that a MCE box was just easier. Not to mention, I saw an HP OEM MediaCenter that a buddy had. I just wanted to build his without spending the money he did.

I started building and converting my media collection over the next two years. During that time, I tried to keep up on what the “proper” codec/container/audio should be. Even though I didn't have a surround sound system and it was just one small TV, I still wanted to make sure that if I was spending the time to transcode all my DVDs, I didn't want to have to re-do it later. FairUse DVD Wizard was what I ultimately ended up with—choosing to transcode the main title using h264 with the raw ac3 track, and all contained in an AVI.

It was pretty easy to maintain, since my MCE box had the nVidia MPEG decoder, ac3filter, and ffdshow. My backed up movies looked just as good with the h264 as the original MPEG2s did, using the settings I had at the time.

Over the next couple years, we lived our merry lives, building the online movie collection, content with watching one show live, while recording another on the MediaCenter. We were happy. We thought we had beat the system. The only real alternative back then was a TIVO and they were just too much and we didn't want a monthly fee for something that simple. Then came that darn HD thing.

It was early '06 that a guy at my office wanted me to help him build what I had... but he had a dish with a STB and also wanted HD from his antenna, even though he didn't have an HD TV--he just wanted the source to look as good as it could on his existing TV. That welcomed me to the world of the IR Blaster, and higher-end video card requirement (Overlay vs VMR to playback the higher HD bitrates).

As I figured out how to make my buddies system work, I started seeing new possibilities on my own. There it was--the HVR-1600. I could do one SD source (s-video from the STB or in my case then, straight analog cable coax-NTSC) and one HD source (ATSC or QAM). After a short time, I figured out the IR thing, and then, which video card needed to prevent the choppy playback. Also, I should note that at this time, our home DVD/VCR box had died and we were using the MediaCenter for ALL media playback, exclusively. If it were only VHS at that point, it was tough luck!

Over the next year or so, I was tinkering A LOT with the MediaCenter setup. It was still the one PC/TV, I hadn't even heard of extenders yet; and, I was being cheap, always trying to use spare parts lying around to keep the thing running. And, as such, they weren't always the high-end stuff needed for the HD playback side of things. We lived out in the country and our antenna signal for the ATSC was always pretty sketchy. WAF (wife acceptance factor) started to dwindle because the system was crashing more and more. Not to mention that by this time, we'd also scrapped Comcast for Dish and the whole IR Blaster thing didn't always work the greatest (anybody with Dish & an IR Blaster know that if it doesn't hit the right channel, you should have your Dish remote handy to hit the “Channel Up”). Plus, my over-the-air antenna wasn't pulling a good signal for the ONE channel the wife REALLY wanted... (The CW).

By that time, I started learning more about QAM. Still with Comcast for my Internet, I knew I had access to the Clear-QAM local channels, and The CW was one of them. I also knew that my HVR-1600 could do QAM—but not in MediaCenter, and the WinTV application from Hauppauge wasn't very 10' UI (10 foot user interface) friendly.

Also by that time, we had amassed a rather large collection of DVDs and TV Series on my computer. But, I was also tinkering with different formats by then. Constantly trying to get the transcode times down, while still maintaining the video quality. I was convinced now that h264 with AC3 in MKVs were the way to go; and so, I started having a mix of media types in my Video library. AVIs & MKVs for the movies and TV stuff with a mix of AC3 or MP3 audio... and WMVs for the home-videos (ala Windows Movie Maker). What a mess I got myself in to!

The MediaCenter began crashing all the time, my library was a mess, the CW wasn't working, and the WAF tanked. I knew the majority of my issues were hardware related in that what I was throwing at MediaCenter now, my older hardware wasn't able to keep up. Having the different formats to deal with didn't help much either. But, that didn't matter--Enter SageTV, stage left.

I knew something had to give. I told my wife we were switching to Sage. The sell was tough because of the interface; but, in my reading on the forums, the hardware I had would drive Sage way better than MediaCenter; so, it was a cheap solution. I knew SageMC was out there, but hadn't messed with it enough to make it in the production MediaCenter. I convinced here that if she could live with the UI until I could figure that all out, she would at least have The CW. Reluctantly, she agreed.

Now, my little munchkin was also becoming HTPC TV savvy. Able to use the mouse up at the TV console, browse to her favorite movies in the Rated G folder, see the picture of the cover of the movie she wanted to watch, then clicking on it... WHATEVER I DID, it had to be able to let her do that. The HTPC was our sole mode of TV consumption now. My wife & daughter had all but lost what a TV remote or the buttons other than Power on the TV even look like, let alone used for.

So now I was with Sage. After some struggles with the way my library was organized in folders, and the UI learning curve, things worked. Plus, some of the new library/metadata features were pretty neat! Mostly. I had SageMC looking like my old MediaCenter but even with the mouse-control addon, it still didn't quite “feel” like MCE. You could always feel that SageMC wasn't the “real” Sage-intended-experience. Plus to make things worse, thanks to my jacking up of my video collection's format choices, I was constantly tweaking the properties file for Sage, codecs on the system were always being adjusted with the DirectShow Filter Manager, and the built-in Sage DVD player wasn't reliable. Things started going from bad to worse.

Enter NetFlix WatchItNow. I should have left it alone. My system already wasn't reliable. But I couldn't resist. I saw the future with WatchItNow, and I wanted it to work with the 10' UI, in SageMC. Those early plugins were rough. But thanks to the awesome community, it was at least somewhat usable. This was getting really cool! But, the issues with the codecs and the mouse control in the UI were really getting bad now. My wife was begging me just to find the solution that worked and leave it alone. (How many of you guys have heard that one a million times???)

Then it happened... Our TV died. SuperBowl weekend. I think that started a chain of events that led to the most painful year of my entire HTPC experience. We bought a Plasma TV. It looked HORRIBLE on my SVIDEO OUT from my little HTPC that could. So I needed a new video card. But then that led to also buying a new mother board, cpu, memory, and why the heck not—new hard drives to set up RAID and finally protect all the transcodes and home videos from years past.

After a reload of the OS, an unbelievable amount of time re-tweaking Sage/SMC, getting the freakin IR Blaster to work, codecs, display settings, tweaking audio settings, I STILL didn't have a surround sound receiver... was still using STEREO from my TV even though I had always ripped things to AC3, dealing with the audio difference between ATSC & NTSC, or AC3 sound vs MP3 sound, we then started noticing ANOTHER problem. All those videos we ripped started looking pretty rough in a true HD world. Enter Bluray., now, stage right.

I bought an OEM LiteON bluray drive for the PC, and after going back and forth between WinDVD, PowerDVD, and ArcSoft—I finally settled on ArcSoft and slowly began to rebuild our collection in Bluray. But, the integration with Sage/SMC was rudimentary at best. In fact, by that time, I was REALLY getting frustrated with much of our Sage experience. The various addons (bluray, netflix, mousecontrol, weather, etc...) were always needing to be tweaked and many times required getting up to the mouse and keyboard. It was a great DVR, and to be fair—if I had only ever left it as a DVR with the original SageTV install, it would have been as solid as count be. But we wanted more. A DVR wasn't enough and we really wanted the home theater. WAF was now totally gone, and even I myself lost all hope in the HTPC experience.

But then came the Vista MediaCenter TV Pack 2008. With a minor reg tweak you could get QAM working, the IR blaster was way more reliable, and the ArcSoft MC plugin was considerably more friendly to VMC than it was to Sage. If it played in MediaPlayer, it played in MediaCenter. Plus, the pies de resistance—true NetFlix WatchItNow integration in MediaCenter!

In retrospect, even though I'd made it to the HD world on the HTPC, extenders and discreet audio were still over the horizon (but at least, now on my radar). So with a heavy heart (the Sage community was always very supportive during my struggles), but elation towards the future, I jumped to VMC.

There were minor struggles with the UI. While we loved the polished glassy look AND feel to VMC, we didn't care much for the layout. (It's important to note the distinction between look and feel. SageMC could always look like MCE, but it never truly felt likte it) It seemed too easy to get lost in the cross-hairs of the new up/down/left/right direction of the strip and tile idea. But between MediaCenterFX (and subsequent MenuMender and MC Studio utilities) a simple drag-and-drop of the various tile to the location of our liking solved that pretty quick and easy. And while it still required some struggles with configurations and tweaks with QAM and Guide information, it got the job done with significantly greater reliability.

Now, right about the time Windows 7 was to finally hit RTM, we sold our house and while waiting to close on a new one (three months), we stayed with the in-laws. As such, the wife & I wanted to stay in our bedroom as much as humanly possible. But, I had hooked up the mediacenter to the livingroom TV down stairs—wide open to the public. We REALLY wanted to stay up in our room as often as we could (living with in-laws), but I couldn't have the mediacenter up there—the kids wouldn't stand for it.

Welcome XBOX360 and the world of extenders! I struggled a bit here at first. I was so new to the extender world I didn't know what I didn't know. Still on VMC/TV Pack, many videos weren't playing on the extender; but, VMC had really pulled my butt out of the fire with the family over those months, I didn't want to go right to 7 (knowing from what I was reading it may solve the various video playback issues), and run the risk of messing with a good thing. So I played around with, and got working albeit a bit clunky, Transcode360 to resolve the playback issues on the extender. Another cool thing at this point was the HuluDesktop. Boy was that a neat. The interface was nice (not perfect, but polished for an external interface, nonetheless). And with the aforementioned menu utilities, getting it integrated into MediaCenter was quite easy.

Now into 2009, we are into our new home. New cable company (Charter) so we've decided to give them a go and ditch the dish (actually, now it was DirecTV). Still using a set-top-box (STB) with an IR Blaster and QAM on my HVR-1600. But now I've added another HVR-1600, and two USB 950Qs. Also, we added a component LG Bluray player to compliment the XBOX360. Things are going so great right now I decided to give 7MC a try.

Confident that I could go back to a working VMC if I had to, and now that 7 was out, I made the jump. Wow! What a long way things had come. On the tuner side, no more tweaking/hacking to get QAM working. It just worked—out of the box. I was feeling so good about that, I decided to REALLY give it a test (remembering back to my Sage days with multiple EPGs based on tuner type), and I threw up an antenna with an ATSC tuner “just because”. I was close enough now in the new home to The CW antennas that I had perfect signal on all the broadcast networks over-the-air (OTA), as well as the QAM option. So I wanted to see it compared to Sage. Sure enough—It automatically recognized 1-STB with IR Blaster, 2-HVR 1600 QAM sources, 1-HVR 950Q QAM source, and 1-HVR 950Q ATSC source. It then asked me with EPG type for each source type, scanned my QAM frequencies (it found some channels automatically, the others I had to manually enter and re-map), mapped all the ATSC channels, and kept it all nice and pretty in the one guide. I even had the ability to change which tuner I wanted to have priority of a given channel or split the channels, specify how I wanted the guide to handle recording conflicts (ie default to one channel, jump to another channel in the guide if it was detected elsewhere in the guide database, prefer an HD alternate to an SD, etc...) I could setup multiple favorites, have color coding in the guide, easily make changes to it...all in all, I was very impressed with the tuner and EPG control.

Also during this time, a few of the guys over at TheGreenButton community were diligently working on some amazing apps: My Channel Logos, automatically populated the guide to color or bw logos. No more having to hunt them down and mess with all the renaming, copying to directories, etc. mcBackup allowed me to easily backup/restore all my guide and recording data. GuideTool is and was a fantastic offline guide/tuner utility.

Then there's the codec issue I had struggled with since time began. 7MC finally started supporting everything I was using (as all mentioned earlier), out of the box—with the exception of the MKV support. However, after installing the splitter, 7MC took it from there. It was automatically transcoded anything it didn't natively support on the XBOX360 (so-long Transcode360). Some other folks were working on the very cool MediaBrowser plugin that handled all the media & metadata. Though I must admit, I don't use it very much. While the metadata is way-cool, I prefer the near 100% guaranteed stability of the native Video Library. Who knows, maybe I'll start using it again, maybe not. But at least I know it's there.

The NetFlix WatchItNow native integration with 7MC is better than ever. Even though I'm using the HuluDeskop on the main MediaCenter, I have and use PlayOn and PlayIt to push Hulu to my extender. The ArcSoft bluray interface in rock-solid; and, to wrap it all up in a pretty bow, I use the EXTREMELY handy MediaCenter Studio to rearrange all my strips & tiles to my families liking. Heck, I've even gone so for lately as to install Lego StarWars for the PC, have it launch from MediaCenter with the remote, and play it with my XBOX360 wireless controller! There is now a thriving theme community to easily change the default Blue background theme and easily change or import (also via MediaCenterStudio) many new looks.

So this past Christmas, my father decided enough was enough in regards to my 2-channel world and decided to surprise me with a new surround-sound receiver. God-bless 'em, it was the worst receiver on the planet he could have possibly chosen, but he tried. And, it finally forced me to exchange it and get something real. Thank God I always chose to maintain the original audio track in all my transcodes and not downmix to stereo-mp3! So I'm now in the true HDMI audio world which of course, as all things do, has entered a new realm of things to tweak. But we were always content with stereo, so what's not working as it maybe should, isn't yet noticed by us—thus we are still happy.

The 7MC box has been running without any tweaking (aside from an occasional playing around with adding 10ui' games like Lego StarWars) or crashes since last summer. The family has been happier than ever. Just the other day a new set of “skins” were release by the crew over at hack7mc. And for kicks I decided to throw up one of the “pretty” ones and surprise the wife. To my own surprise, she said, “Wow—that looks really cool. I can't believe how long we've had that blue background.”

I know the guys over at Sage have been working on a new release that's rumored to have an updated UI. Admittedly, it has been well over a year now since I have even seen Sage and I'm sure all the same types of addons and plugins have matured at roughly the same pace as the ones I use currently. I'm looking forward to seeing it all in action. Who knows, I may even throw caution to the wind now that I know I can have a stable and working solution. I just may give it another go. I always was a glutton for punishment!

But until then, it has been a long road with my HTPC experience. It truly has been a hard labor of love—a passion unlike no other that has kept me involved. I now have four kids (twins for the youngest two who are now three). They all have their own MediaCenters in their rooms (thank you familypack). Though they don't have tuners, they still have their NetFlix and access to the video library and Hulu. All are very hands off in-terms of my needing to tweak them to keep them running (I can't remember the last time I even touched my oldest's). I've had so much free time as a result of not having to constantly play with the setup, that I've finally started going back and remuxing all my MKVs back to AVIs (which I think is were many of my problems came from). We never use(d) subtitles in our video playback so MKV really never brought that much more to our table. Our family couldn't imaging going back to the days without an HTPC. I really do thank the wonderful communities at both the Sage forums and MediaCenter (TGB, Hack7MC, even those crazy Aussie's on xpmediacentre.com.au). Many good people work very hard to deliver all those extras that make the HTPC experience what we all want. While there have been many heated debates in these forums over the years over the things like DRM, extenders, bluray support and the like—it has always been exciting to take part. And someday, the wonderful dream Sage has always had that one true big advantage may finally come to MediaCenter—softsled. The true PC tuner extender.

Matt O.
The Osburn Family

[korben_dallas]

Originally Posted by osburnfamily

they still have ..access to the video library

How is this accomplished? UNC mapping or something within 7MC or Win7 Homegroups or ?

[osburnfamily]

A combination of UNC and Libraries.

Note this requires simple file sharing to be off (ie, Folder Options, View, uncheck Use Sharing Wizard).

Since I didn't want the kids to have the ability to accidently delete files, or access the PG-13 or R folders, or certain TV Series, I created a "Kids" User group on the main MediaCenter PC. I then created Kid1, Kid2, & Kid3-4 user accounts on the MediaCenter and placed them in the Kids user group. I went to each set of folders on the main MediaCenter ("Home Videos", "Movies", & "TV Shows") and added the "Kids" user group explicit "Allow-Modify" rights and explicity "Special-Deny-Delete" rights on everything. Then added explicit "Deny-All" rights on the PG-13, R, and certain TV show folders.

Then on each of the kids' pc's, simply add the UNC path of the "Home Videos", "Movies", & "TV Shows" into the Videos library, while being logged in as Kid1, Kid2 & Kid3-4.

For reference, doing it this way allows the updating of the thumbs.db files on the MC box, so they can still browse w/o that big delay; but, it doesn't allow them, or their own local MediaCenter the ability to accidently delete stuff or access things they shouldn't.

Also note that if you use the MediaBrowser plugin, instead of the native video library, this isn't necessary since you can control all that within the application using parental controls. But since I don't use MB, this was my solution--and it works great.

[korben_dallas]

What is the MediaBrowser plugin?

For reference, I know practically nothing of WMC or 3rd party stuff for WMC.

[osburnfamily]

It's certainly not my intention to promote SageTV alternatives in Sages' own forum. I just wanted to share my experiences over the years. But, since you asked...

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

It's a free addon integration into the MediaCenter experience. Many themes, options for hi-res thumbs, automatic metadata, trailers, parental controls, support for automounting ISOs, custom layouts, auto playlisting, etc...

[korben_dallas]

I am impressed there is a developer community for WMC.

I briefly looked through the Parental Controls section of MediaBrowser. As I understand it, you would have to setup MediaBrowser individually on each of your kids' WMC's? Though it looks like they would need folder-level permissions to all movie/tv/video folders, which could be exploited by a crafty kid.

[osburnfamily]

All true. The best technical parental controls will always be file-level / share permissions on the OS if the kids all have their own PCs.

Unless the kids' devices were all extenders. Then, MediaBrowser's parental controls would be rock solid.