El Blogo Del Juan

I’ve always been a sucker for new hobbies, radio controlled cars, paintball, guitar/music, golf, baseball, programming are just a few examples I’ve actively pursued. There have always been some hobbies that I am amused by but will likely never follow through on. Model Trains, Lego models, woodworking a la New Yankee Workshop, computer animation are all things that are super interesting to me but will likely never be realized. Some hobbies I’ve stuck with and some have faded into the past. Despite not having any time to do the things I do now I’ve been thinking lately about how cool it would be to build a home theater. Of course I would love to have a home theater but half the fun would be designing and building it.

I don’t have the space or money to build one so I am firmly in the “design” phase at the moment. The thing that really got me thinking about this is this site where someone built a Pirates of the Caribbean theme. The theme is obviously cheesy so I don’t think I would go for a specific theme but I do like some of the details like the recesses arches and the nice double doors leading into it. The chairs he picked seem pretty standard and I haven’t decided if I would prefer recliners or nice couches. Maybe a combination…

So here are my thoughts on the whole idea of a home theater:

• I’m not going to use it all the time. I won’t watch TV there. I could see some benefit of having the ability to watch a cable movie channel down there but the majority of the time it is going to be a dvd or movie from some sort of online source.
• It has to have the ability to smell like popcorn.
• Projector, I can’t imagine giant Plasma/LCDs coming down to a price soon enough that I could afford one big enough for a room I would call a home theater.
• It has to have uber surround sound. I have never had a place where I could turn up the sound and watch a movie loud so I have never had even
  crappy surround sound. I would really like full surround with one of the acoustically transparent screens so the center channel is behind the screen.
• It has to have a candy counter. Some of the things people do like fake ticket counters and such are cheesy but a stocked candy counter and popcorn machine is functional and awesome.
• It should be dramatically lit and also have dimmer switches.
• It should have a piece of furniture that faces the screen so you can eat a meal somewhere other than in a chair.
• It has to have an air exchanger of some sort. An entirely interior room with no windows in the basement is going to get stuffy.

So that is essentially a brain dump of features. I will probably add more features and do more things like this essentially just for a record if I ever do build it. I often think like this in unordered lists so more feature lists will be incoming. Probably next will be features of a house in general.

After something like a year of failure I finally have a working install of windows media center. Having tried a few different tv tuner cards, 2 different video cards, a couple dvd decoders(software required by media center) I finally found a combination that worked. I had seen media center at a coworker’s house and was very amused.
Media Center can be used as a Tivo to record TV, it can play and organize music, hold photos and play DVDs. The idea of media center is not to have all the media on your computer though, the idea is to push it to your TV but have an interface that can be controlled from a remote control.
I have 2 Tivos so the DVR functionality was not a priority. What is a priority though was the ability to rip DVDs to a hard drive and watch them straight off there. I know it sounds lazy but I hate changing out dvds. Long ago I ripped all my cds and stuffed them in a box. Now it’s time to do that with my dvds. The issue is an uncompressed dvd takes up around 8 gigs of space and I have over 100 movies and seasons of TV shows many of which have multiple discs. Lets say I have 150 discs I would like to rip not counting dedicated special feature discs that I could live without having ripped. That works out to around 1.2 terrabytes. At around $300 dollars per 500 megs that is a lot of money.

I will try to collect some screenshots and go through some of the things I find out about it. So far though I am amused.

Well my saga getting windows media center continues. I finally got a video card that is compatible. I bought a TV wonder elite which is just the new more expensive version of my previous TV Wonder card. The new card comes in at $149 dollars at microcenter a Chicago chain type computer store.

So media center will now show the TV option and the settings tab will now let me configure so it obviously is cool with the card. The problem is it uses the DVD decoder to process the TV signal so without a DVD decoder installed you can’t watch TV. I assume DVD technology is proprietary and Microsoft didn’t want to sign a contract to include it inside their operating system. Anyway, some searching through forums have found people suggesting winDVD 6.0 Apparently this software is very often pirated and that makes it pretty hard to find in stores. I was able to find out there is a new version 7.0 out for it. I’m not sure if I should stick to 6.0 since I’ve heard it works or go for 7.0.

Granted I don’t fret over this every night but man has this been a pain. The problem is a new media center PC is going to run you 1K+ and I don’t see massive advantages over Tivo(perhaps having the ability to easily transferring files). You can pay for a lot of 14.99 months for a 1k media center box. Granted I paid for my PC also but since I had it laying around running XP I couldn’t see why I wouldn’t upgrade it.

I read once that Armstrong actually botched that line and if you think about it that may be true. One small step for man a giant leap for mankind. What the heck does that mean? What is the difference between man and mankind? I think it should have been one small step for “A” man. That makes more sense and it’s what we all think it means. Anyway….

So for the last couple days I have been gearing up to install Media Center. I have the two ISO files and attempted to install using Daemon tools. That is me being dumb because when it asked for cd 2 there was nothing I could do so I had to start over. Second attempt I burned the images to cd using Nero which was an adventure but that was just because of my shady cd rw drive. So with shiny new usb external cd burner I attempted to install from cd. About half way through the installation I get a message asking for a certain file in the mediactr.cab file that it says it can’t find. A little hunting on the internet finds that other have had the same problem. A few said try putting all the contents on the hard drive for both disks so I did that and still got asked for a missing file. I tried a few times to tell it exactly where the file was( I was able to look on my other computer in the cab file) The file was there so something is weird. So I just started the installation over again got the missing file box but for some reason it was able to find the file and the installation completed. So Media Center up and running but I’m not totally sure how.

I suppose I should add that Microsoft doesn’t sell WMC seperately as software so I can’t complain too much. You have to buy it preinstalled on a pre built media center machine. It was still a pain. I think that is what is going to be a hurdle for Media Center to jump before it can really compete with Tivo or Cable Company DVRs. The average person doesn’t want to mess with that kind of thing. They want it to work like other consumer devices. Just like a stereo you plug it in press power and it goes. I don’t think that is an unreasonable expectation.

So a bumpy start but to me the allure of media center is the ability to develop for it. The MSDN blogs have a lot of cool info on media center. I’ll get some I don’t know that I’ve mentioned it yet but the MSDN blogs are an awesome idea. MS seems a lot less like the evil empire that’s for sure.