Embedded Files
September 2010
I'm using XP Pro (SP3), Beyond TV Link for recorded TV, XBMC for CDs, DVDs & Internet Radio, and Total Media Theater 3 for BluRay playback. The PC is controlled by an RF keyboard with trackball and Media play buttons, an MCE remote receiver, and a Harmony 680 IR remote. I bagged this remote with a receiver from Newegg for $22.
I had a horrible time getting the remote receiver to work because of all the old MCE remote threads floating around on EventGhost's forum, at XBMC's forum and several of the TV program forums. Everything's too complicated and aimed at fixing problems that existed between 2004 and 2008. I found that the drivers and inf files from my SP3 cabs are now the most recent (except for the irbus.inf file from a 2006 patch), and all that was required was properly adding the VID to the irbus.inf file.
I decided to write the whole mess up in detail so others can use the information. The link to the writeup is at the bottom of the page and includes screen captures of the driver installation, setting up EventGhost and some tips for the Harmony setup (Curing Problems with MCE Remote Installation in Windows XP.PDF). The drivers I used to make this work are in the irbus drivers.zip file below.
This setup lets me control a Yamaha Receiver, a Samsung LCD TV, Beyond TV, XBMC, and Total Media Theater 3 with my Harmony 680 remote (nothing else required). I do keep my remote keyboard on the headboard, but I rarely need to use it.
June 2010
Well, the PC in my bedroom had been on since I installed it Last December. I've been in the habit of leaving my PCs on continuously since my my second or third PC, back in the early 90s. This does seem to stress the newer low noise power supplies some. The only failures I've experienced were two SeaSonic 500 W power supply failures, and then this Antec PS failure. I've never had any other problems though, not even a drive failure. I changed the TV in my bedroom from a Samsung 32" 720P to a Samsung 40" 10880P. While I was doing this, I shut the PC down and moved it out of the way. Long story short - the power supply died.
While I was replacing the dead power supply, I decided to go with a new mother board, video card, and sound card. While I was lucky with the on-board sound in the original motherboard, I wanted to see what the HT Striker 7.1 and Xonar DX would sound like. Also, the on-board Nvidia 9300 chip ran at a steady 136° F, just scary hot (the Azus heat sink on the video chip was a bit of a joke).
I used the following components, and re-installed all software for a completely clean install (including XP).
Motherboard: Asus P5G43T-M Pro
The only problem with Micro ATX motherboards is that all of them I've found so far for LGA 775 for Core 2 Duo/Celeron etc CPUs come with on-board video, and the on-board video can't be turned off. I'm still left with a chip running at 120° to 140° F that isn't doing anything. I assume that the North Bridge functions are integrated into the video chip somehow. I hope this changes and Micro ATX boards are made available without on-board video some day... The heat sink required to operate a video chip without a fan is quite large, and there just isn't room on the motherboard for an adequate heat sink.
Also, be careful about the system RAM. The newer Micro ATX motherboards for LGA 775 CPUs from Newegg are using DDR 3 ram now. I wasn't paying attention and it cost me $60 and a week to find this out...
The cheapest two stick kit I could find (for dual channel memory access).
Video Card: EVGA 512-P3-1213-LR
This card comes with a huge heat sink with vertically oriented fins. It's also cheap.
Sound Cards: HT Omega Striker 7.1
A PCI slot sound card recommended by many, with good reviews of both the card's performance and HT's customer support.
A PCIe 1 slot card with a growing number of good reviews and recommendations. You'll need something to de-compress a .rar file (I just download Win Zip and install the trial version) when you download the latest driver.
The system is back up and running well. Things worked out great, the Xonar goes into the PCIe 1 slot next to the back side of the video card, and by leaving the card slot covers off on the heat sink side, cool air is drawn into the case and circulates around the heat sink. Video chip temperature reported by speed fan is about 102° F idle, rising to only 106° F when it's processing video. The CPU is still running in the mid 80s to mid 90s, depending on the load. There are no fans on any of the heat sinks in the case, just the two 120 mm fans on the rear end of the right side of the case.
I tested the sound cards with quick runs of RMAA v6.2.3. I then listened to stereo music using my test amp, checking for noise the old fashioned way (no signal, test amp turned all the way up, small test speakers held to my ear). I tried the HD Omega Striker 7.1 and Asus Xonar DX sound cards and discovered a few things:
The Striker sound card has a large and dedicated following. This makes me think the card I got was damaged in some way.
Frequency Response was very poor (started to roll off at 1 kHz, down 4 dB at 20 kHz).
This card made enough hiss/high frequency noise that I could hear the noise clearly with the speakers sitting on the table, 3' from my ears.
The RMAA test summary for the Striker is attached in PDF format at the bottom of the page.
The Xonar DX is incredible.
Dead flat frequency response.
Absolutely no noise. With the test amp turned all the way up, I could place the test speaker over my ear without hearing any noise. No hum, no hiss, nothing at all.
"Excellent" ratings from RMAA on all tests.
The RMAA test summary for the Xonar is attached in PDF format at the bottom of the page.
The little test amp I built for my speaker testing system is still dead silent (inputs open, shorted, or connected to a source component).
My Yamaha receiver is very noisy. With the Xonar outputs connected to a pair of the receiver's line inputs, hiss and high frequency garbage are clearly audible at 1/2 volume and above.
I wound up with some glitches though. XBMC has issues with the Xonar. When the Xonar control panel is displayed, there are five DSP mode buttons displayed in the lower right corner of the control panel. The GX button is "on" by default. This doesn't appear to invoke any processing, and I didn't want to waste the time to figure out why. In the picture below, all of the DSP buttons are "off". The green glow on the button gets much brighter when a DSP function is turned on.
What I finally figured out (with help from the XBMC forum); If the GX button is on, XBMC will not play any audio files (streams from the internet, mp3s, or waves). XBMC's play time counter would start, but the audio stream wouldn't. What was really odd is that audio on DVDs and High Definition m2ts streams worked fine. Turned off the GX button and XBMC now plays audio files as it should.
I'm still looking into two small glitches in the XBMC/Xonar system:
In album view, if I press the "play" button, it freezes XBMC. However, if I use the context menu to select play, it works fine. Distracting and definitely not-right, but usable for now.
When stopping an audio stream, XBMC produces an irritating blat of noise. A repeating burst of noise like you sometimes hear when a digital steam freezes and keeps repeating a sample. Not low bass, maybe 100 Hz, about 0.1 seconds long, repeating for about 0.5 to 0.75 seconds.
I'll post solutions when I find them.
09/20/2010, The latest release of the Dharma version (Dharma Beta 2, v33778) of XBMC has cured the play button problem above, and is better about the digital noise when stopping an audio stream (but it still makes the occasional blat of noise).
The Nvidia Ge Force 210 video card worked as it should, runs cool and off-loads the video processing as it should during BluRay playback.
The Xonar sound card is excellent, for $80 you get good clean sound with no audible distortion or noise of any type.
Jay R. Taylor
July, 2010
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