How I built my own media center (Episode 2 of 3)

If you thought that spending my days jumping from place to place looking for the best priced components was the hardest part of setting this up…you’d be wrong!!

I spent countless hours downloading and trying out different media center software to find the best software and configurations that work with my hardware. Not to mention all the trouble I got into for focusing too much on the project and forgetting the people around me.

Now for the software I focused on three main points

• Stability – I needed something that would work without a lot of hiccups that would force me to switch back to keyboard and mouse input in windows XP.
  
• Speed – Now back in the day this computer was a beast. It would eat up any game you would throw at it and spit it out like it was nothing, but time was not kind to my old beast and these days it can barely boot without me being there holding its hand. So I needed something that would leave enough resources for the computer to do its thing.
• Price. – This was the most important factor. I was not about to pay for my software! It had to be free!
  

Now as a windows user, my options were rather limited. Especially since Batelco was so kind as to cap my speed to 56k before I even got to Bahrain for not paying!! How the hell was I going to pay with me out of the country!

Even as a 256k user I was having a little trouble downloading the software. Damn those corrupted downloads!!

Anyway, I narrowed my choices down to 3

Sesam TV – Small download size easy to work with and all the remote buttons worked except for fast forward and rewind. Unfortunately it also has a problem playing DVDs since it doesn’t come with its own decoders and for some reason it can’t access the codecs installed on my system correctly. These issues proved to be tiresome to fix so I switched to my next choice.
MediaPortal – Now this is an Excellent open source media center with great support. The remote worked like a charm without much configuration and it played everything I fed it. There were only two problems with this software.

• The download was a bitch! The installer (25 megabytes) needs dot net framework 3.5 (231 megabytes) to work which requires windows installer 3.1 to install (smaller download). After 6 hours of downloading the dot net framework twice! I had to use utorrent to fix the corrupted download which was an even bigger hassle because there weren’t any seeds around!
  When I was finally able to get a working copy of Microsoft dot net, I found that the media portal installer needed to download another 4-6 components depending on whether or not you have them on your system. This was just unacceptable, but I stayed with it because I knew I was getting a quality media center (I had tried media portal before on y laptop).
  
  
• The second problem was speed. The thing was just too damn slow. It had to initialize everything at the beginning and playing videos would take forever.
  

This led me to my last hope

XBMC – I had tried xbmc once before, but didn’t find it to my taste. I don’t really remember why. Whatever it was, the new version works like a charm. Some of the buttons on the remote like the play/pause and stop buttons don’t respond, but you could work around that easily as I will explain below and it comes with 3 different themes and unless you’re using a brand new HD television for this setup I recommend the mediastream skin since the fonts are more legible and if you’re connected to the internet you can get those nice show and episode synopses, If they’re named correctly.

With that you can move on to other aesthetics.

First of all I recommend you download:

Bootskin which is a nice little application that changes your windows boot screen for free. (You know, that ugly black loading screen with the windows logo you get when you start windows). You can download different boot screens from www.wincustomize.com.

You can also change your logon screen with

logon studio, but I don’t have a password setup since I want the media center to load with as little human interaction as possible so this doesn’t really affect me.

I also downloaded some nice Icons to replace the default windows XP setup,

I also chose a desktop wallpaper to go with the overall theme, removed all unnecessary icons from the desktop (I only left the recycle bin and one Misc. folder for quick access).

Icons for Full and empty Recycle bin and Misc. Folder

Note that you can access My computer directly using the remote.

The last episode of this series will be dedicated to configuration and setup of the media center.
Which requires that you have windows media player 11 or higher installed on your system.

How I built my own media center (Episode 1 of 3)

The media Center project has been on my list for two years now. It started out as a home-made PVR project, but in time I found that to be a bit infeasible. The thing with a PVR is that you really have to find a reliable guide if you want to automate anything, which I am sad to say, does not exist in the region. Anyway. All the good shows can’t be watched here anyway since they’re

• Late
• Usually, they are out of sequence
• I download mine an hour and a half after they air through IRC and torrents (Commercial Free and sometimes encoded nicely in HD)

HD is also a pain in the butt, none of the channels here air in HD and it’s almost impossible to find a DVB satellite card anywhere in the kingdom – trust me, I looked -. So the best that you can hope for is converting your digital signal to analogue using a regular TV card and losing some quality in the process.

Anyway, I finally settled for buying a cheap new dish with a free to air channel receiver for BD 38 instead.

SO here are the hardware components of the media center:

• Old desktop computer AMD 2000 Athalon XP processor with the NVIDIA 4200 TI 8x graphics card with S-video output.
  
  Price - Free!
  This actually cost me quite a bit back in the day and I also had to change the power supply and motherboard to fit it (Crazy I know), but it shouldn’t be that expensive now and any video card will work as long as it has a video out so you can connect it to the TV.
  

• One S-video to RCA adapter and cable
  
  Price - Free!
  I got this with the graphics card. You can also probably get one from radio shack or you can get an S-video to RCA cable instead. They all work the same way and they shouldn’t be too expensive. You can use any composite rca cable to connect to the adapter.
  
  
  
  
• One 3.5mm stereo jack to RCA cable
  
  Price – Also free.
  I got this with an old CyberShot Digital Camera. You can get the two jacks one, but those inputs are usually in front of the TV and I wanted this one to be hidden and only work on the video channel.

• Digital sattalite dish and receiver - Arabsat, Nilesat and Hotbird
  
  Price - BD 38 including installation
  

• One External hard disk (1 Terabyte of space). You can use the internal hard disk of course, but out of the two hard disks I have installed in my computer I have a fried 40 gig drive that fails on boot and I had to bypass its initialization completely in order to get the computer to run unassisted and the other is a puny 120 gig that I would fill up in 14 minutes if I tried.
  
  Price - $169 Canadian
  I have a LaCie Hard Disk designed by Neil Poulton 1TB USB 2.0 - 7200RPM that I bought last year. Sharaf DG in Bahrain had an offer on a nice I0mega with one Tera of space for about BD 40 a while back so I wouldn’t pay more than that.
  

• One PC remote controller. This was a really hard to find here in Bahrain. I spent an entire day looking for this before I found it at colors 2000 while going to see a movie in Seef Mall with friends.
  
  Price - I got the nice looking one for BD 7.5.
  They have another one for BD 6.5, but it doesn’t look that pleasing to the eye and it doesn’t have that nice analogue stick to control the mouse which I found to be extremely useful.
  

• One Wireless-G router. I personally connected My old 3com wireless router to the computer using an Ethernet cable that I had since it doesn’t have WIFI capabilities, but you can get a Buffalo USB wireless adapter for around BD 10 at Sharaf DG.
  
  Price - Free. I had this for a while. I don’t remember how much it cost to be honest and I didn’t bother checking. Given a choice I would actually go with one of the new N routers instead of the G and connect it using an Ethernet cable to both the Playstation 3 and the computer since it gives better speed and connectivity.
  

Note – Don’t Pay more than BD 12 for a wireless adapter.

Optional -

I also connected my Playstation 3 to the network wirelessly. It has excellent capabilities and another 80 gigs of storage on the network can’t hurt.

Total Price I paid for this setup minus optional and pre-owned components

BD 45.5

And thats the end of episode 1! I’ll write another post to explain the software I used and to show you how to connect everything together, but this should be enough to get everyone started :D

Good luck and happy streaming!!