by ·Comments Off on The Wonders of Computing

I’ve written before about the home theater PC (HTPC) I setup a few months ago.  I spent a ton of time getting it setup initially, running software called XBMC (www.xbmc.org).  It was great for the initial time, but it only ran movies I streamed from my server.  That’s all fine and good, but it was limited in its application. 

There’s a ton of great other software out there which can do a heck of a lot more, though. 

Initially, the Acer Aspire Revo’s setup doesn’t have the best specs when it comes to computing power.  It’s compounded by the fact that Acer installs so much bloatware that performance is bogged down even more.  That’s what initially led me to install XBMC-Live. 

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by ·Comments Off on A Week with the HTPC

So, after a week of struggling, fighting, and generally cursing computers in general, I’ve gotten my setup to work.

The original intent was to run Wireless (Draft-N) standard to stream my movies from my server in the office (which is less than 10 ft away).  That didn’t go so hot.  For whatever reason, despite the strong signal strength and high data transfer rates, my media files didn’t play worth a damn.  Well, the 1080 ones at least.  The 720 seemed to do ok.  I’m at a loss, because I’ve seen that people have been able to wirelessly stream HD content without the buffering every 10 seconds.  I’d be tempted to believe it was a failing of the Samba protocol, but it works fine over wired ethernet.  I’m stumped.  I gave up and did the “elegant” solution of running CAT-5 out to the living room.Continue reading

by ·Comments Off on Home Theater PC (HTPC)

When I bought my new Blu-Ray player in March, it kept me from building out an htpc. Or so I thought. My Sony works with my home network, and was supposed to be able (after a firmware update due this summer) to play content from any of my PC’s. That was the plan.

Little did I know along the way that they’d start killing off my media codecs one by one. The biggest blow was the loss of the XVid codec. I like it because it’s high quality, high compression (i.e. small file sizes). I can’t play them any more. And it’s restricted to Windows Media Player extensions (WMV). No AVI, no QuickTime (mov). I spent all this money on a platform that’s turned into a fairly basic blu-ray theater now. (In it’s defense, the internet connectivity is still pretty cool).

Following a post from lifehacker.com (Check this link out) a few weeks back, I started to seriously look at building an HTPC again.  I opted to purchase it’s big brother (The Acer REVO R3610) so I could get the wireless card, faster processor, and more memory.  Continue reading