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Name: Aaron
Country: United States
State: Washington
Metro: Spokane
Expertise: Photoshop, Illustrator, Word, Pencil, Computer Construction/Modding, Digital Catalogue, Writing.
Occupation: Writer . Videographer . Modder
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
2/5/2004
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| Let's eat Grandpa!
Let's eat, Grandpa!
Commas save lives.
Just saw that today, hilarious.
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| Esther was run over by a series of ideas yesterday and today. Naturally, we are in the process of turning them into reality. Today we turned our bedroom shelves into a single 10ft. shelf. Although Esther quickly slowed down due to pregnancy exhaustion, we worked together to get it mostly finished today.
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| So, years ago, I started a journey into the concept of building my own DVR/Fileserver to manage and store all of my movies, music and data. It was a long, bumpy and particularly unsatisfactory road at the time, culminating after a solid year of research and effort in an unforseen decision to capitulate to the ease and... directness... of DirecTV's offering (paid for by Esther's then-employer). The problem at the time was that there was no good interface which combined all the necessary needs for a solid media center. What exactly are those needs?
1. Play music.
2. Play videos of ANY format.
3. Tune and play television, with the option to pause, rewind or fast forward (DVR stuff).
4. Save and/or archive recordings to keep.
5. *Stream content simultaneously to multiple screens/stereos
6. Attractive living room presence.
7. Control via dependable remote device.
*This is, of course, one of the more advanced features and probably the first to go as the inevitable process of compromise starts to set in.
What I discovered back in 2002 was that no single piece of software was capable of meeting all of these demands. While it was possible to cobble together several different pieces of software in an attempt to accomplish all of these things, copy protection, unfriendly interfaces and lack of codec support generally made the process rather unattractive. The Tivo DVR which came with out DirecTV subscription was far better, simpler and more to the point, but with less features. I gave up.
Honestly, there is a second major restriction to getting a proper HTPC up and running. Everything costs money to use, try or evaluate. You have to buy the proper hardware, spend money on the full-featured software, put the whole package together and then HOPE it works, otherwise you've just flushed all your cash down the toilet along with your pipe dream. I came close to doing this seven years ago, but the rampant reports of problems, bugs and incompatabilities made me think better of it.
Fast forward to today. Money is tight. It's been tight for years and the problem isn't going away... like... ever. We're dumping services we once were accustomed to every time we turn around. Anything we think we can get rid of, we do. Then we live without it for a few months, get comfortable living without it, and turn around to think about getting rid of some other fabulous thing we used to think we could never live without. I wonder sometimes whether we will eventually decide we don't need internet any more. It's getting closer to the chopping block by the day.
One would think, in the span of seven years, the HTPC market might have developed some stability, some promise. But as I look around, I notice nothing much has changed. In fact, I can confidently say nothing has changed. It still requires a fabulous financial investment to attempt a dive. The concept of not paying Tivo a subscription fee, not paying Comcast a subscription fee, etc seems so attractive. But, who knows if it works.
Oh, and while I am at it, there's a few more features an HTPC needs to possess to be worthwhile now:
8. Must stream Hulu effectively
9. Must stream Netflix effectively
10. Must stream Pandora effectively
But nothing can do all that. From my initial findings, it seems SageTV is the most promising entry, but it doesn't stream anything, that much is clear*. (*By "clear" I mean: It is supposedly able to stream all of these things, if you run three other pieces of software simultaneously; the first of which outputs a windows desktop to a composite video out; the second of which takes the composite stream {routed back into the computer} and patches it into an imaginary channel {whose number you can define [yay?]}; and the third of which allows you to automate .exe files you must compile yourself into menu options which allow you to perform mouse clickey functions which you cannot see while streaming video of the streaming video which streams back into the computer from the first stream which is streaming from the internet.)
Windows Media Center is... pretty and stuff. But it really doesn't do anything useful. It... uh... shows you some previews of stuff. So that's neat. And it gives you the option to buy (rent) some things (not so neat, especially if you have netflix). And it DOES have a scant few third-party plugins which barely work while trying to offer some functionality between crashes. Also WMC is a memory hog, runs slow and generally gives the impression of crappiness.
Essentially, I feel the quest is pointless. There are too many corporate forces at work in the market, actively working to foil any sort of innovation or inventiveness in the HTPC market because it is financially beneficial for them to be the only source of (crappy and poorly designed) streaming entertainment. Our culture has gotten it backward. Seven years have yielded nothing in a market ripe for innovation. How did we get here?
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| After reading up on everything I could get my hands on while preparing for building this computer, I came across some disheartening information about how Windows XP doesn't support more than 3GB of RAM. That's no good, since I was already set on upgrading from 2GB to 4GB. It became apparent I would need a new OS to go with my computer.
I was hesitant to get Vista at first, having heard many horror stories about its troubles. But, after talking to a few people who have been running the OS for awhile, I was convinced to buy Vista for my new computer. I had some trepidation about my decision since I don't like doing new things, but the installation went incredibly smoothly - far nicer than the Windows XP installation experience. I only had to find a driver for one thing - my video card - and that was only to make sure I got the most performance possible out of my setup. Otherwise, between the (short) Vista install process and Windows update, the computer was up and ready to go in a record amount of time.
But new computers never stop there. Since installing Vista, I have been plagued by a new problem. It seems Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to completely remake filesharing in Windows Vista and accordingly it refuses to access or be able to access any of my Windows XP shares. Some people I have talked to claim to have gotten unprotected shares to work between the two computers, but nobody I know of has had any success at all with getting a protected XP share to be readable by Vista. I have given up hope.
It's a bother because all of my data is stored on our fileserver. So, I have had to keep my old computer up and running as a conduit for moving files to and from the file server for my Vista computer. It worked momentarily, but since then all of my file shares have stopped working for some reason.
I spend a large portion of my day just trying to figure out why nothing is working any more and meeting with absolutely no success whatsoever.
Happily, though, my new computer is wonderful. It is fast. It is pretty. It is exactly what I was hoping for in an upgrade.
Yay.
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