Oh no!
So, Mediaportal is all installed (at least in an initial sense…!) so I tried playing some of my music and a couple of .mkv files I’d had for a while. They worked, but every minute or two there was a horrible slowdown/stutter in the audio. It would last for maybe 4 seconds. Not a [...]
One of the great things about MediaPortal is the amount of different skins on offer. The default blue skin is a little plain, and almost a carbon copy of the Windows MCE skin. I wanted something that looked a little neater, and after some testing I settled upon “Revision”. XFace is one of the most [...]
So, Vista installed fine. Next problem, the default 800×600 looked ugly on my 32″ LCD (as expected) but the ATI Catalyst drivers didn’t offer 1360×768 which is the native for my TV (a Samsung LE32T5). I was using DVI at this point, so figured I’d try VGA. Same problem. Hmm, this could be a showstopper!
I [...]
It’s all very well having this nice hardware, but something was needed to bring it all together. Setting up a keyboard and mouse, and navigating around various windows apps just to watch TV or listen to music is pretty much a no no…
The obvious choice was the media centre built into Vista - I wrote [...]
So, all the bits turned up (apart from the two Satellite cards, but hey-ho…).
Initital impressions - the motherboard is a nice looking bit of kit, small (mATX, so will fit in a smaller case than I am using) - especially given its features. The case itself isn’t bad. It’s not the last word in Germanic [...]
The first thing I needed to decide on was what hardware to use.
Budget would be a primary concern, so I wanted to minimise the number of components - this should prove cheaper in theory. Salvation came in the shape of the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2814) . This board could almost have been designed [...]
Hi,
This blog is going to take you through my experiences of building my first “media” (or htpc) pc.
What brought this on? Well, we’d been having a few problems with Sky (poor reception thanks to a tree) and decided that to be honest we could lose it and get freeview instead. Unfortunately, where we live, freeview [...]
