MP: Scheduled a recording...

With ITV HD testing upscaling of their SD material on their HD stream and with the fact that in MP 1.0.2 there a recording timer facility under the TV section, I performed an experiment...

I turned on my HTPC, went into the TV section, turned on the TV and tuned into a blank channel. I then setup a timer to record The Matrix Reloaded on the ITV HD channel, and left it. Before I went to bed, I setup WinOFF to turn off the HTPC 5 mins after the timer ends.

The next morning, I checked the HTPC to see that it was off, and booted it up to check to see if the timer had recorded. All was successful - it was off and the timer had recorded ITV HD!

Here's some screen grabs upscaled of The Matrix Reloaded! (It took me a while to fine where the 14Gb ts file was, as MP had not put the recording to where my settings was pointing to...)


And for those who want to compare the PQ look at this screengrab from Blu-Ray.com and my screen grab:


Spot the difference! :) (open both in new windows...)

Upgrade to Windows 7

After experiencing the sluggish behaviour of Vista, I decided to upgrade it to Windows 7!

The beta version of Windows 7 (which is still available to download, running out in July next year) allows you to upgrade from Vista. The upgrade took a while to perform on my P4, but went without a hitch. Someone informed me that VMC is not upgraded in the process but it seems to have done so. Although I had not configured VMC too much, it certainly seems to have upgraded, rather than forcing me to start from a fresh set up.

But it looks like the 'upgrade' has only upgraded the OS. It has certainly not transferred the VMC settings to 7MC - I had to perform a retune to get back my TV channels. In fact, I had to do this with MediaPortal too... I guess it didn't want to keep any TV channel settings!!

More memory woes...

So I bought 2 x 1Gb memory sticks to replace my 2 x 512Mb sticks that made up my 3Gb of RAM in the P4 HTPC, only to find out that the BIOS could only handle 3Gb. Initially I thought the memory was faulty but the constant 3Gb value that appeared each time I moved the sticks about in different configurations... was a good indication that there was a limit of some sort.

I had to perform a BIOS upgrade to see if I could get more than 3Gb of memory to appear, so I has to find out how to perform a BIOS upgrade... After much, much fiddling about - I could not get a floppy disk and drive to work - I burnt a bootable CD and performed a successful flash with that. Now the PC can see 3.4Gb of memory! It wasn't worth the effort, man! All I am hoping for is that the some of the 3.4Gb is not being used by the GPU - that the GPU memory is addressed separately and that is why only 3.4Gb can be addressed for the rest of the system... I don't even know where the rest is being used...

The two USB flash drives have also arrived and I am using one as the Readyboost drive. I'm not to sure that it has speeded anything up or not - too early for me to tell.. The other USB flash drive has not been used to buffer MediaPortal TVServer yet. I am having a problem with decoding TV with the codecs on the HTPC at the moment, having only installed PDVD9, CCC codec pack, and TMT3. I haven't experimented with all the codecs but PDVD9 for TV gives jerky pictures...

Running total:

• Antec Veris Remote Max HTPC case @ £133
• Pinnacle 7010iX Dual Analog + DTT + Dsat tuner card @ £23
• 2 x 1 Gb PC2-4200 DDR2 RAM @ £20
• Pentium 4 CPU fan @ £15
• SATA DVD rewriter @ £15
  
• HD 2600 Pro GPU @ £23
• Zalman GPU heatsink @ £10
  
• Liteon BD-ROM @ 45
  
• 2 x 1 Gb PC2-4200 DDR2 RAM @ £20
• 2 x 4Gb flash drives @ £10

Total: £314