MediaPVR Gen2 - REFERENCE ONLY

The MediaPVR Gen2 model will be replacing the current MediaPVR system. The Gen2 system will have much of the equipment swapped over from the first generation MediaPVR, and for the most part, will function in exactly the same way. The Gen2 system, though, will be capable of HD playback, something the current system is not capable of doing. I'm upgrading this system because of a future possibility that the old CRT TV in the living room will be replace with a flatpanel display.

A basic system overview is shown below:

Here is the main guts of the system:

CURRENT HARDWARE

Motherboard: ABIT AN-M2HD - now being trialed in new Cronus UnRAID server

The motherboard is an ABIT AN-M2HD. It can accommodate the Athlon CPU listed below. It has 4 memory slots, 4 SATA connections, 1x PCIex16, 1x PCIex1 and 2x PCI slots. It also has GigLAN and on-board audio. It has an HDMI port so I may try it without a video card in place and see how it performs, as it should be able to output up to 1080p video.

CPU: Athlon 64 x2 4800+ Dual Core Windsor @2.5GHz - now being trialed in new Cronus UnRAID server

This was originally used in the HTPC, but due to the motherboard issue, I replaced the motherboard and this CPU with the M2A-VM/5200+ setup. This CPU is pretty good, and has worked great in the playback of HD material.

CPU Cooler: Zalman CNPS8000A - now being trialed in new Cronus UnRAID server

This was the cooler used with the 4800 CPU. The big issue with this CPU cooler is the it is wide and could interfere with surrounding components. When I had it paired with the M2N-X motherboard, the heatpipes actually rested against the memory. When installed in the M2A-VM motherboard, the heatpipes would cover the first 2 memory slots. Mounted the other way, they would interfere with some tall electrolytic capacitors. The locking tab also interfered with the chipset heatsink, which I had to remove to install/uninstall this CPU cooler. It performed rather well though, and it was very silent.

RAM: Mushkin Silverline 996527 PC2-6400 4x1GB RAM - used in Zeus UnRAID server

I got this kit as a B-day gift. Should work nicely in Dual Memory mode. In addition, I've move the two sticks that were in BES into this one to increase the memory to 4 Gigs. This will allow for the Win7 upgrade, which will keep MediaPortal current.

Case: Generic

I will use the same Generic case that I'm currently using in the existing MediaPVR box. The required equipment will be swapped out. I'm using a simple Generic case because the computer resides in the basement office and doesn't require a nice box, since it isn't on display. The case was recycled from an acquaintance that wanted to get rid of their old computer. So I stripped the parts out, and used the case.

HDD: Seagate ST500DM002 SATA drive

I ended up replacing the old WD 160G drive that malfunctioned with this drive. It was on sale at the local computer shop for $49.99. Hopefully I won't have to worry about this system in the next few years.

DVD-ROM: Lite-on SOHD-16P9S DVD drive

I won this off ebay a while back and was used in the Gen1 MediaPVR project. This will be only used for watching DVD movies and for installing things. It is an IDE interface drive and is capable of 16x DVD read/48x CD read abilities. Supposedly with the right firmware, it is blindingly fast, and is relatively quiet...I think I have the wrong firmware...so I'm going to have to look into it. Doesn't really matter though, since the system resides in the basement, drive speed noise is not an issue.

Capture Card: Hauppauge HVR-1250 ATSC Tuner card

This TV Tuner card is used for receiving the OTA signal from my antennas. I used this same type of card in the HTPC and have been very pleased with its abilities to tune in weak stations, when compared to the internal tuners in my TVs. This was a very nice Christmas gift.

Power Supply: Antec Earthwatts 650W

The Thermaltake supply was replaced by this Antec supply. Originally this supply resided in the UnRAID server, but I learned that server supplies should be single rail 12V supplies, so the Antec was replaced and sitting as a spare. I had opted to use it in either my Workhorse or the Video editor computers, but decided that I wanted a real nice supply in the MediaPVR. Not to mention that it is a "Green" efficient supply helps too.

IR Switch: MayIR circuit

This circuit is used to turn on the system from complete shutdown or from standby using any IR remote control. More details on this DIY circuit can be found here.

Gaming: Logitech Cordless Rumblepad 2 Gamepad

Got this as a Christmas gift and will use it in the MediaPVR Gen2 system to play emulator games as well as other types. I includes the rumble effect, though I don't know how to incorporate that into the old console emulators.

Control: VRC-1100 USB HID Remote

Picked up a couple of these off ebay for both the MediaPVR and BES to replace the Hauppauge remotes. In the case of the MediaPVR, it was to remove the buggy Hauppauge drivers that usually crashed. It also allowed for mouse control outside of MediaPortal, which using the Hauppauge drivers, wouldn't allow. This was needed to be able to navigate around the Kylo web browser for view Netflix/Hulu and performing other web features.

CURRENT SOFTWARE

Main Software:

Win7 SP1

MediaPortal v1.5.0 final using the latest StreamedMP skin (v2.1.4.3385)

Extra Plugins loaded: Moving Pictures, TV Series, Fanart Handler, LAVFilters, MediaPortal Source Splitter, Show Times Plugin Suite, Trakt, TV Management, myFilms, aMPDroid (WiFi Remote), OnlineVideos, World Weather, Emulators 2, RadioTime, Multishortcut, Generic Keyboard/Remote Input

Screen capture of my MP setup using StreamedMP

MediaPortal's TV Server 3 for the ATSC TV tuner

MPC-HC - mainly for video playback verification. If I can play it in Media Player Classic, then I should be able to play it back successfully in MP

Kylo Web Browser - 10 foot GUI browser used for Netflix viewing.

Drivers and Codecs:

SAF 6.09 codec pack used by MP for all video media playback

Utility/Management Software:

MAME/SNES9X/Fusion emulation (along with ROMs) - for classic console gaming play

mc2xml - Media Center EPG scrapping software

RealVNC - server for remote access control

TSReader - for ATSC OTA signal verification and analysis

AutoHotKeys - Macro scripting for keyboard simulation

NOTES

Currently the system still in the planning stages.

*12/5/10*

Well so far I have gotten the motherboard, and the CPU just came in today. For the first bit, I'm going to use a stock cooler I had kicking around, though it sounds like an airplane taking off (meaning it's loud), I've modified it by adding a thermal control. So under normal conditions, I'm hoping it won't be so noisy. Well anyways, along with the 2600 Pro, the 500 Gig hard drive, and the spare Thermaltake power supply, I have enough to power on the system and verify that it works.

Fingers crossed.

*30/09/10*

The system is now back and in development. I just recently purchased the ABIT motherboard to use. I still have to pickup memory. Then it is just to swap everything over.

*5/10/10*

The Abit AN-2MHD motherboard came in yesterday. I have to connect it up to the CPU, and I have to pickup some memory for it still. Everything looks in order. Hopefully I won't have any issues with using the board.

*22/11/10*

Got the memory (Mushkin Silverline) on the weekend, and finished installing the MediaPVR Gen2 system (decommissioning Gen1 at the same time). Some of the parts, including the case were recycled from the Gen1 system. Everything seemed to work out well, and I'm generally pleased in the systems performance. I didn't have to add any extra sound or graphics cards. The onboard HD graphics adapter is working out rather well. I played back a couple of HD movies, and except for some glitches, HD play pretty smooth. I going to play around some more with the HD codecs and see if I can clean them up. This allows me to keep the PCIex1 slot open for a future ATSC tuner card.

Basically the system is shown below, excuse the wire mess...I'm not the best on cable running yet.

*29/11/10*

Noticed some quality issues with some video playback over the weekend. The one was some terrible tearing occurring during DVD playback after ffdshow upscaling to 1920x1080. The second is stuttering and distortion during playback of 1080P HD material. I think I solve the tearing issue by going into the settings for the nVidia drivers for the on-board video. This also had some affect with the 1080P playback problems. What really fixed the HD playback was fiddling with the MPC-HC player settings. I had to disable/"block" ffdshow filters and adjust the internal filters and use CoreAVC. This all helped with stuttering. The system is capable of playing back the 1080P video more smooth. What I have noticed though is that the picture gets distorted at times...like images are overlayed on top of new images, and the picture becomes very blocky. I will try and get a screen capture of this, but it is only happening with certain video too.

*30/11/10*

Spent time last night playing with different setups in MPC-HC, but I couldn't get 1080P HD video to play properly. I even went as far as to install the ATI HD2600 I had sitting around, but I think it conflicted with the onboard video, and I couldn't install the Catalyst drivers or management system. I then went back to the onboard video, and decided to try the SAF codec pack that I used on the HTPC when using MediaPortal. Un-installed all the other codecs, ran SAF...well...1080P HD playback is now rock solid. Video that gave me problems with stuttering and artifacts are now playing smooth. I ended up re-installing DScaler MPEG decoder and AC3Filter codec back on so I can use Zoom Player for DVD playback.

The only thing that I noticed different when using SAF is that it configures MPC-HC by turning off all internal filters, and only using a version of ffdshow that is supposed to allow for DXVA.

The only thing that I have noticed is a little bit of tearing in the video. So I will have to go through the nVidia settings a little more, and hopefully take that away. The only other thing is that when using the SAF codec package, I can't upscale DVD content with ffdshow. I can filter video with ffdshow on the fly, but for some reason it will not allow me to resize (upscale) to 1920x1080. I will take that drawback and keep 1080P playback anytime.

So now I think I've been successful at keeping open the PCIex1 slot for a future ATSC tuner card...YEAH!!

*1/12/10*

Well, I may have spoken too soon. What I discovered was when using the above scenario, 2.39:1 1080P video played fine. But when playing 1.85:1 1080P (fullscreen) video, it would run choppy, and audio would sputter. If I went and used CoreAVC as MPC's external filter, then the 1.85:1 video would play fine, but the 2.39:1 video would exhibit pixel artifacts similar to this screen shot:

Here's another example of the issue I'm seeing when using the CoreAVC decoder:

Upon further investigation, I found it isn't really with 2.39:1 video aspect, but more as to how it is encoded. After scouring I found out that a branch of the H.264 codec, called x.264 made some changes to the way the codec encodes video. These changes affected how the end decoder is able to decode the media file. CoreAVC was one of the affected decoders. Their V2 decoder is supposed to clean up this mess, so I'm going to give it a try (I currently have CoreAVC 1.9.5). If updating to V2 works, then I think then I will have been successful at getting full HD playback from the on-board video. Fingers crossed.

*2/12/10*

Installing CoreAVC 2 was a success. All different types of HD video played flawlessly. The artifacts were gone. So then I decided, since I was using the SAF setup, which I have noticed before that I can't resize DVD video in ffdshow when using SAF, but I looked at how MPC-HC was configured, that I could then un-install SAF and install the individual components. Well I was able to resize DVD video, but then all HD material playback choppy. For the life of me, I don't know what I was doing anything different to the SAF codec pack, but for some reason when using SAF, HD runs smooth. So I figure I'm going to bite the bullet and not worry about resizing DVD video so I can at least playback HD material...so I re-installed SAF along with the CoreAVC codec for HD playback. I'm still using Descaler/AC3Filter for DVD decoding. FFDShow is still used in ZoomPlayer to perform some extra filtering on the fly during DVD playback.

*4/1/11*

I haven't been reporting here all too much, but one of the nice Christmas gifts that I received was a wireless gamepad from Logitech. I've started to integrate it with this system so I can play some of the different emulators I have on this system. So far I have it working with SNES9x and will include more in the near future.

*13/1/11*

The gaming console integration has continued. Most of the emulators used {ALT}{F4} to close, so my existing Hauppauge remote definition works fine. MAME uses the {ESC} button to close, so I had to create an extra button state to take care of that console as well. The only emulator that is giving me any grief now is the Sega Genesis emulator called Fusion. It is running choppy for some reason.

I also got for Christmas an HVR-1250 Tuner card for this box. I had it installed since then, and for the most part it was working. The only issue was a codec issue when watching live HD 1080i content via GBPVR. I haven't really utilized the tuner since installing but figured I'd look into fixing it. Since the time that I first installed it to now, though, something happened, and the tuner stopped working. I didn't have any video in GBPVR, and WINTV7 indicated that the tuner didn't exist. May have been an overload or something, but I had to un-install the card and re-install. That's where all the fun started. After re-installing, WinTV was fine, but then I lost the s-Video connection to the PVR-150. GBPVR displayed the ATSC signal, but not the PVR-150 s-Video. WinTV was the same. Then I discovered that even though I defined the S-Video input to the PVR-150, WinTV addressed the input to the HVR-1250. This would have been fine, as the PVR-150 would be used to channel change the STB, and all signals routed to the HVR card, but later I found that GBPVR stopped displaying any video. Also, I could not setup the HVR-1250 s-Video in GBPVR...there is no setting for it. So I completely un-installed WinTV and the two cards and re-installed again. But this did not help at all, and it seemed that I couldn't get video to work in GBPVR, nor get the s-video from the PVR to work anymore...now comes the twist. Since GBPVR seemed to not work, I figured I'd just try MediaPortal. After installing and setting up the TV Server, I was able to scan from the ATSC card, both digital and analog signals, but the funny thing, I defined the s-video input to the PVR card, and it works. I couldn't even get this to work in WinTV, but MediaPortal it works. So over the next day, I'm going to finish setting up MediaPortal on this machine, and both the MediaPVR and HTPC will be virtually setup the same. The only tricky thing with MP is to setup controlling/blasting the external STB.

*14/1/11*

So MediaPortal is installed, and I'm mapping the satellite channels manually. This is my only grief with the TVServer. There should be an easier way to map the sat channels to the EPG to the input...GBPVR can do it, so I don't understand why after all this time MediaPortal can't. Not only that, but I basically learned how to do it by trial and error, as there seemed to be no info on the MediaPortal website on how to map EPG channels to external set-top-box/analog tuner input.

Also I just have to finish integrating MediaPortal with Xlobby, and this system is as good as gold.

*20/2/12*

So like what I mentioned in the HTPC thread, I swapped over from Xlobby to a full run of MediaPortal v1.2.2. I state the three main reasons why the change of heart. It took about 5 days to get the bulk of the three media machines switched over, but so far, things have been running exceptionally well.

*13/2/13*

Things have changed since that last entry. First, this system has been updated to MediaPortal v1.2.3. The Hauppauge PVR-150 has been removed from the system, since going OTA, and those signals are only ATSC, there was no reason to keep this card in place. The Thermaltake supply was replaced with the Antec Earthwatts 650W supply that had been used in the UnRAID server (before learning the dual rail 12v supplies are a no-no in a server).

The other more recent change was that I replaced the Hauppauge remote control system (which was buggy when using the MediaPortal drivers), and opted for a VRC-1100 USB remote. Though it was touted to be a MCE style remote (and if it had been it would have worked flawlessly with MP), it was far from being generic. When first used, most buttons were not recognized. After reading over the MP forums, others who had used this same remote ended up installing the Generic Keyboard/Remote plugin. After some trial and error, I finally got all the buttons of the remote to function as they should. The one exception was the Green Start button. I use that to start MP if sitting at the Windows desktop. For this to work, I had to install the program AutoHotKeys, which runs off of scripts to simulate key strokes.

The other major reason for going with this type of remote is that all the media systems use the Kylo web browser to access Netflix. The Hauppague remote setup that I had been using would not allow mouse functionality outside of MP. The VRC-1100 remote has a mouse type pad and both a left and right mouse buttons. So in MP, once Netflix has been selected, and Kylo started, one would use these buttons to control the cursor. Upon exiting Kylo, then one would go back to the other remotes buttons for controlling within MP.

*10/6/13*

The MediaPVR was the second machine to get the Win7 Upgrade...though it didn't run as smooth as the BES upgrade. I had issues tying to use the Win 7 disk. At first I thought the problem was hardware related, so I replaced the DVD drive with a supposed backup. Still didn't work, but the backup drive was acting weird...so I guessed it was still hardware related. I researched the web and found ways of putting OS images on a flash drive, so I tried that. But the install didn't like the way the imaging software setup the install image, so I continued getting errors. I ended up finding a different imaging software. Created a new image on the Flash drive, and finally, after a day and half, Win7 was installed and running.

The rest of the time after was installing the rest of the software, and configuring MP again. The MediaPVR in its current state seems to be working rather well. A few more things need to be setup (Emulators plugin). I had a tedious time getting the proper codecs to work. I ended up using SAF6 over the LAV codecs installed with MP 1.3.0.

I chalk this up to one of the most pain in the ass installs of all time overall. Hopefully take the lessons learned from this install, and my HPTC upgrade will be easier.

*23/12/13*

About a month ago, I ended up updating MediaPortal to version 1.5.0. Soon after, the hard drive in the system went down. I'd figured I'd wait until Christmas...to see if I have been naughty or nice, and see what Santa would drop off. It's been a hard ending to an otherwise flawless year, as I not only lost this drive...but possibly two drives in my UnRAID server.

I'm hoping that Santa will be extra special for me this year....I tried to be the best person I can...honest Santa.

Will hopefully have more positive news in the near future.

*31/12/13*

Ended up getting a Seagate 500G drive to replace the broken WD 160G drive. Spent the day re-installing the software, and getting the system back on-line. Ran into some issues with the MediaPortal install, which made me have to re-install it over again from scratch. Pretty much have it working, and will work out the kinks as I run into them. Hopefully I won't have to worry about this system for the next while.

*21/09/15*

Do to software issues, and a broken power switch, this system had to be taken offline. In it's replacement, is a WDTV Live streaming box that my one kid wasn't really using. This systems onboard video has always been subject to bugs as well. MediaPortal when starting a video would crash to windows and report that the video drivers were at fault. When I get a chance, I will look into the system and get it running again. It may perform better too using the Kodi ADDONs, that I started to use with both the HTPC and BES.