bordagen

I was iddly catching up on reading mates blogs one lunchtime at work and I stumbled across Paul’s site, and I was struck down with astonishment – he’d updated!

The most recent post on his site tells us that he is planning to get rid of his Sky subscription and invest in a media centre (which is strange as I am trying to get Sky at the moment – but thats the subject for another day). Now having recently built one of these, here is my view on the topic.

The media centre is a great idea, but it is not without it’s downsides – mainly if something goes wrong on a program on it, you either need to sit on the floor, straining your neck whilst working on it, or increase the font size so that you can see it from the comfy sofa. Luckily though, nothing much has gone wrong with ours (a few hiccups now and then mind) *touch wood*.

Lets start with the specs of mine:

Hardware
Synergy HTPC Media Centre Case
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H 780G Socket AM2+ onboard VGA 8 channel audio mATX Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4450e 2.3GHz Socket AM2 Energy Efficient 1MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
2GB PC2-6400 RAM
250GB HDD
LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray/HD DVD-ROM, DVDRW SATA Black
Cooler Master Vortex 752 Intel SKT 775, AMD K8, AM2 Processor Cooler
Extra Value All in 1 Internal Card Reader Plus One USB2.0 Port (Black)
Cyberlink Media Center Remote Control – With Mini USB IR Receiver
D-Link 520+ Wireless Card (old one I had lying around)

Software
Windows Vista Ultimate Edition
Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-Ray (very important to get the version correct)

The hardest part to get setup was the blu-ray playback as it was frought with ‘issues’. Firstly I had the wrong version of the software as you might be able to tell from my note above. Secondly I discovered that Blu-Ray can use one of two audio systems, Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio. I then found out that my AV receiver (the hub of my entertainment centre) did not support ANYTHING to do with DTS so I had to invest in one that did.

When building it, I had to remove some of the fans inside the slightly larger-than-I’d-like case to keep the volume down as well as change the fan speed in the BIOS to ‘auto’.

The setup allows me to watch anything I could on my computer (avi, mpeg etc) as well as now enjoy high definition content from Blu-Ray AND the now extinct HD-DVD.

The reason that I am using Windows is simply that there is no Blu-Ray/HD-DVD support in Linux yet.

It’s a really good setup and although it needs a bit more RAM (mine is only using 1GB from my PC because I screwed up and bought the wrong RAM – in my defense it was in the wrong category on the site anyway) I’m very pleased with it. One thing I would like to do later on is use NAS for storage of video/music and maybe increase the speed of the wireless network – but at a later date, I’m not made of money!

I’ve just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7. It’s drastically different – lots of AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML) around so it’s very slick indeed.

I also figured that a new version deserves a nicer theme – so I found this one called pixeled by samk. I think it looks quite nice – until I do my own one again anyway!

I can’t really say much about this video – it’s better if you see it for yourself.