Grande sucks less now.
Posted on Monday, November 27, 2006 at 2:29 pm
Remember when I said that my cable company sucked?
Well, at long last, they have gone a good way toward redeeming themselves. 11 months and change after we moved into the apartment, Grande finally got off their butts and managed to start offering cable internet instead of DSL. So I called and set it up for them to come out and upgrade us to 8mb cable, instead of our old 1.5mb DSL. God bless faster Internet.
Not only that, but with an install window of 8am to noon (like last time), the installer guy was actually there at 9:30am.
The only problem is, the new faster internet was only going to run us an extra $15/month, but for some reason the install ticket they left with my wife said our next monthly bill was going to be nearly $50 higher than normal. I haven’t seen the breakdown of charges; I’ll be looking at that when I get home. But I can’t imagine how it’s going to be that high. I already had a cable modem, so I didn’t have to buy a new one from them. And they swore up and down on the phone that there wasn’t going to be any installation fees or anything. So I dunno. We’ll see when I get home, I suppose.
But hey, at the end of the day, at least I am finally reunited with my wonderful 8mb internet. Hooray!
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Lifetime – Television for Domestic Violence Victims
Posted on Monday, November 20, 2006 at 8:56 am
Lifetime is proud to announce its new TV schedule, with new, innovative shows for today’s women on the go!
12:00 (Noon)
“Hard Love” – 2 hrs.
A woman (Meredith Baxter Birney) is raped and tries to move on with her life.
2:00pm
“Choices” – 2 hrs.
A woman (Judith Light) is raped and tries to move on with her life.
4:00pm
“The Other Side of the Tracks” – 2 hrs.
A woman (Meredith Baxter Birney) is raped and tries to move on with her life.
6:00pm
“Unsolved Mysteries” – 1 hr.
7:00pm
“Oh good Lord, Not Again!” – 2 hrs.
A woman’s (Judith Light) daughter is raped and tries to move on with her life.
9:00pm
“Really, guys? Honestly?” – 2 hrs.
A woman (Meredith Baxter Birney) is abused and tries to move on with her life.
11:00pm
“Golden Girls Marathon” – 4 hrs.
3:00am
Off air. Enjoy rotating photographs of Meredith Baxter Birney and Judith Light until 12:00 (Noon), at which point this schedule will repeat.
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Build your own DVR – Part 3
Posted on Thursday, November 2, 2006 at 11:37 am
Finally, I’m able to do the third and final part of this, for those who even care. Judging from the comments received on the first two parts (or, complete lack thereof) I’m guessing that’s not many of you. But hey, it’s my blog, and I don’t have anything else to write about at the moment. So I’ll write whatever I damn well please.
This part is about the extra software and drivers you’ll need to have a fully-functional Media Center connected to a television.
Once you’ve finished your Windows installation and gotten to the desktop, the absolute first thing you need to do is check your Device Manager for drivers that didn’t install automatically. There’s a very good chance that one of these will be your WiFi card. At this point, this is the only driver you want to install, because without it, you’ll be unable to download anything else. So pop in the drivers cd that came with your card and let it do its work. After a restart, you should have functional wifi access. You may need to manually connect to a network and enter your password, if you’ve got a WEP-protected WiFi router. (Note: if you’re using the onboard ethernet, instead of a breakout WiFi card, you can install the drivers found on the CD that came with your barebones kit.)
Now that you have working internet access, before you ever even think about opening the Media Center application itself, you’ll likely need to download a shit-ton of Windows Update stuff. So turn on Auto Updates (or at least set it so that it downloads automatically and lets you choose when to install), then go eat dinner or something. By the time you come back, you should have the first of several rounds of updates downloaded and ready to install (or already installed, waiting for a restart). Do this, rinse, and repeat. It will take several restarts – at least 3 or 4, if I remember correctly – before all available updates are downloaded and installed. You won’t want to actually continue doing anything else until Windows Update is completely finished doing what it needs to do for the time being. Trust me, it’s just a lot easier that way. You don’t want its stupid taskbar balloon to rear its ugly head and cry about needing to restart, when you’re right in the middle of a driver install.
Once Windows Update is done, the next thing to do is to continue installing drivers for everything else that didn’t get pre-installed with Windows. Likely, this will be a fairly hefty list. Luckily, you’ve got CDs for almost all of it. The sound card, the card reader, and the onboard ethernet are all contained on the CD that came with the barebones kit. So pop that in and install all of those. Do NOT install its video drivers – we’re going to download those separately.
After this is done, you should only have a couple things remaining: the TV tuner card, and the video drivers. TV Tuner drivers can be downloaded here if you got the same card as I did, or as long as your card is powered by ATI’s Theater550 chip. If you got a different card… well… I guess you’ll have to find them yourself. For you Theater550 people, download and install all three files listed on that page.
Next comes video. For this, you’ll need a specific version of the ATI drivers: namely, Catalyst 6.4. This is an old version, already superceded by a half dozen or so newer versions. Unfortunately, these newer versions come with a bug that tends to make them grumpy when switching to the resolution needed by your TV (720×536). From my research, 6.4 was the latest version of the driver that could properly handle this resolution without crapping out. So do a Google search for “download catalyst 6.4” and pick whichever download location you feel comfortable with. Install those, once they’re downloaded, and restart your machine.
Now we should be all done with drivers. You should have a nice, clean Device Manager. So next comes 3rd-party software.
Due to some weird power struggle between Microsoft and 3rd-party app makers, Windows does not come with an MPEG2 decoder (aka. dvd player) out of the box. Vista does. But MCE 2005 doesn’t. Pretty much the best one you can get is PowerDVD, which just so happens to come on the CD that came with your tuner card. Hooray! Wait just a sec, though. Unfortunately, that CD comes with PowerDVD 6.0. This particular version apparently has some weird glitch specific to Media Center. One of the services used by Media Center, specifically, ehrecvr.exe, apparently doesn’t play nice with PowerDVD 6 – when PDVD6 is installed, the ehrecvr service will, for no apparent reason, consume 100% of your CPU for about 5-10 minutes each and every time you turn on your machine. After this point, it drops down to normal and there are no more problems. But for the first 5-10 minutes, your computer will be completely unusable, meaning you’ll need to go find something else to do for a few minutes before you can actually watch TV.
There are a couple different ways to address this problem. First, you can just suck it up and deal with the downtime. It only happens on cold starts, not when you wake it up from sleep mode. So once you’ve got everything stabilized, it really won’t matter all that much since you shouldn’t have to restart but maybe once every couple weeks. You can also choose to use some other DVD player app, such as WinDVD. I personally don’t recommend this, as most other ones don’t seem to support hardware acceleration, and it will make TV watching kind of stuttery (since it must use the CPU instead of the video chip to spit stuff out to the screen). Or you can purchase/download PowerDVD 7.0, which luckily does not seem to suffer from this problem, while at the same time still giving excellent speed and picture quality. Do whichever one you think works best.
Once you’ve got PowerDVD or your choice of other DVD player software installed, there’s only one last thing. You’ll want to get the K-Lite Codec Pack FULL. This will let you watch any movies or TV shows you happened to have downloaded from BitTorrent, which are most likely encoded in either DivX or XviD.
And that’s it! You’re done! Restart your computer one last time, and you’re ready to start using MCE for the first time. At this point, it’s relatively safe to unplug your keyboard and mouse as well, since from here on out you can do almost everything with the remote control.
Hit the “home” button on your remote control, and it should pop you into Media Center, at which point you’ll need to run through its initial setup wizard. This process is pretty self-explanitory. It asks you about your TV, your speakers, etc., so that it can run properly. You’ll also want to go into your Settings and manually set it to send all recorded TV to your D: drive instead of your C: drive. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. All there is that I remember, anyway. Enjoy your new media center.
