HTPC Build

As you may have read elsewhere on this blog, I’ve been using a customised tswriter for the EPG data - it essentially reads the data that Sky broadcast.

Recently however, some channels started going wrong. Most annoying was Channel 4- I just had no data for it! Running TVServer config showed several Channel 4’s so I added the second one. The EPG populated this, but the channel came up as encrypted!

Anyway - the root cause was that over time, channels move around on the satellites - they swap numbers/frequencies and so on. The scan in Mediaportal’s TV Server was happily adding new channels as it found them (such as the non-EPG’d C4 I was using) but for whatever reason, the EPG didn’t seem to be updating to reflect the right information.

I solved this by deleting all the channels (I also deleted them from the SQL Server table, to make doubly sure!) and then re-scanned and added my channels back into my group. Now the EPG is working flawlessly again. So, moral of the story, is I’d recommend a full cleanup of the channels once in a while to catch all the ones that have shuffled around correctly!

The Mediaportal team recently released version 1.0.2 - this contains a host of new bugfixes (many of which were around the installation area of 1.0.1) so it’s well worth updating.

Visit the Mediaportal site to download this update.

Retrieved an old 4×20 LCD display I had for a previous project, so my next project is to try and hook it up to Mediaportal!

The Scott Electronics BPP 420VY display is a very simple serial driven device (as all the electronics for controlling it are on the display itself) so it basically requires 3 wires, +5v, gnd and SER. The one I have is the “yellow on blue” backlit inverse model. Pic:

The ideal end result for me is as follows:

If MediaPortal is on the ‘home’ screen, to display the weather in the top line(s) and then scrolling along the bottom have the RSS ticker (the StreamedMP Skin i’m using has both of these on the home screen so hopefully it’s do-able). Then, if I go into the “Music” page, it can show scrolling through the lists and perhaps info on the current track when playing. The idea of this is so that Music can be browsed/selected without having to have the TV on!

For the rest of MediaPortals’ screen I will ignore the display for now, as… well, if the TV is on there’s not a lot of point Although if coding it is easy enough, I could always scroll through the current program/movie information. Any other ideas?

I’ve just finished setting up the My TV Series plugin, along with the StreamedMP skin.

The new skin is very slick looking, with lots of nice dark grey and some nice animation touches. The WAF is diminished slightly due to the lack of MePo and it looking like “some executive loft apartment” but she’s ok with it…!

I’ve also installed the My TV Series plugin. This is a great tool if you have quite a few episodes from various TV programmes, as it organises them nicely and displays them in a very attractive way.

On initial view, you get a display showing the list of all the series - depending on which is selected, the fan-art background and the poster logos change. You also get a description of the series in question. Selecting a series takes you in to the episode list, where the poster is replaced with a screenshot from the episode, a brief synopsis is shown, and again, the fan-art cycles randomly on each view.

The information is obtained from www.thetvdb.com where users around the world create and upload the images. It’s a really great plugin - a lot nicer than picking a video file from a list. I’ve added a short YouTube video to show it in action, below.

Up till now, i’ve been using the XMLTV EPG. This basically downloads tv listings from the Radio Times and formats them in the open XMLTV standard for import into MediaPortal. This works ok, apart from the fact that a lot of channels don’t actually get listings in the Radio Times (albeit some of the more random ones) but it also means that ITV HD was always empty in my EPG as the way this works on “official” freesat is you just get a red-button “watch in HD” type thing when viewing normal ITV.

Well, one of the clever MediaPortal devs has worked out how to extract the full EPG info from the satellite stream, so we can now get the same EPG data as you’d get on a SKY box! Unfortunately this functionality isn’t (yet) in MediaPortal, but it’s very easy to set up. It involves using a patched TSWriter.ax, and then selecting the relevant channels for EPG grabbing (in the case of Sky, it’s actually a radio channel, the one that plays the funky lift music) and for Freesat it’s “Brit shorts”. Once selected (and given an hour or so as there is a lot of data) I now have a full EPG, including ITV HD and all the other random channels I rarely watch!

The only downside is I have had to re-activate the Grab EPG when Idle option, which if you’ll remember from a few posts back I disabled as the TV Service seemed to hang when this was on. Hopefully whatever that problem was (no one ever worked it out) isn’t present in the more recent releases, or this patch also doesn’t cause it. Certainly the initial grab has worked without any trouble. The reason for grabbing while idle rather than when timeshifting is because the process is rather CPU and memory intensive, so it could disrupt watching TV if grabbing during Timeshift.

Anyway - if, like me, you’re using MediaPortal to pick up Freesat, then I’d definitely recommend experimenting with this patch. The thread is here: SKY/Freesat EPG patch for MediaPortal

Well, I should apologise for not having updated the blog for a little while. The truth is that a) I’ve been a bit busy recently, and b) Mediaportal and the PC are, as a general rule, working very well day to day!

Around Christmas, Team Mediaportal released the final version 1 release (i.e not a Release Candidate).

I duly installed this, and it’s working very well. In addition, a few of the problems I’d been having recently have gone too. One other bonus was a new release of the “My Showtimes” plugin with a new mtsa.exe - this plugin had given up altogether around RC3, but is now back to working well.

With the new series of 24, Lost and also Fringe, i’ve started testing out a torrent feed plugin too, which i’ll detail in a later post, but it’s a good quick way of finding and starting torrents straight on to the HTPC (although dealing with files that come down as a .RAR is still an issue…)

Anyway - happy new year!

The Mediaportal team have today released RC4! I’ll try and get it installed shortly.

Thanks in advance to all the team for their hard work!

I’ve recently started playing around with another great looking Mediaportal plugin - the Last.FM Radio plugin.

If you don’t know what Last.FM is, then in essence, it is rather similar to “Pandora”. You listen to music, tell it what you like, and it will recommend other artists and tunes you might like. The first thing to do then, is head over to the Last.FM site, and register.

There are then a couple of plugins to enable within Mediaportal. Firstly, there is the Last.FM plugin itself (this a Window plugin that gives you the screen to listen to streams from within MediaPortal) and secondly, there is the “AudioScrobbler” plugin. This one needs setting up with your Last.FM account username and password, so it can update the site with music you listen to through Mediaportal (handy!).

Once we’re set, you can then run the Last.FM plugin from within MP. the initial menu looks as below:

The first option allows us to start or stop the internet stream and will produce the options below:

You’ll see that the first option is “My Recommendations”. This will play some music based on what we have previously rated as ‘love’ or ‘hate’. The next option lists “Ludovico Einaudi” - the last artist listened to. The rest of the options i’ve yet to play with really, but the names are self explanatory!

OK, let’s say we don’t want to listen to Ludovico, instead, I want to listen to some music similar to Craig Armstrong. If we back up to the main screen and then click on the “Ludovico Einaudi” button, we see the screen below:

We can hit “Enter artist”, type in Craig Armstrong, and then the stream will start. You can see in the screen below some tracks that Last.FM has recommended to us as having a similar style - to try one, just select it, and it will start to play via internet stream!

You can of course then “love” or “hate” the tracks that are played, improving your profile and the accuracy of the results.

This is a great idea for a plugin, and one my wife is looking forward to trying as well - it’s a fun way of being introduced to new music by artists you may never have heard of!

Spotted on a couple of forums, channel 5 (”Five”) is now broadcasting FTA so can be picked up on the PC at long last!

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as just tuning to the FIve i’d already added to my EPG in preparation though, as it’s on a different frequency!

So to get FIVE working, I had to re-scan the sat channels and pick up a new one labelled “6335″. This is C5. So a quick rename and update to the XMLTV plugin and we’re away! Now I can watch 5th Gear and the Gadget show on the big telly

It should be added to the official Freeview EPG in the next couple of weeks.

Today I’ve managed to do a little more browsing of the Mediaportal forums and it looks like this problem is one that’s been around for a while. There is a possible fix (well, i’d call it a workaround) where disabling the EPG grab when the TVService is idle stops the hang.

I’ve set this option, so fingers crossed it does the trick. The stuff mentioned in this thread is pretty much the exact behaviour I was seeing.