Dan’s Space on the Web

Switched to using Composite input from the Starhub HD box. No significant improvements, unfortunately.

The poor quality can be primarily described as having a lot of significant scanlines. I’ll try to upload a screenshot/sample video. Perhaps something to do with the NTSC/PAL settings? I don’t know if Media Center has such settings, though.

Deciding to stay with the current setup, so that we can record other Starhub channels as well. After discussing with my dad, we decided that it’s not as important to be able to watch and record at the same time, as the likelihood of that being required is very low – usually we record stuff only when we’re not around. The chances of there being two programs we really want to watch being shown simultaneously is low. However, this gives rise to a new problem: I can’t get the IR blaster to work reliably.

First off, Vista Media Center is unable to recognize the Starhub HD box remote, and I can’t seem to get it to learn – it keeps telling me to press-hold-release button ‘1’, and never moves on. I decided to work around this by telling VMC that the box doesn’t have a remote, but it doesn’t change the channels properly 100% of the time. What happens is that the numbers being sent gets recognized extra times. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it sending the recognizing numbers altogether. I’ve noticed that this seems to happen more (if not only) with certain numbers. In my case, the number 6 (ie. if I try to change to channel 6, about 40% of the time it changes to 66 instead). This of course is unacceptable because that means we may end up recording the wrong channel, so more investigation is required here.

Settings I’m using: Cable, comes with Set-top Box, No Remote, requires to press “Enter” or “OK” before changing channels, StarHub, code: (the first one) I think it is C19…something, speed: slow.

Come to think of it, when testing the speed, Fast/Medium may have worked. They worked sometimes, and other times I had the “duplicate numbers” problem. I forgot to notice whether or not that happened for all channels, or only certain numbers. If it was only certain numbers, perhaps the IR blaster is sending the wrong signal for those numbers, and the problem has nothing to do with the speed.

HTPC Quick Specs:
Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.80GHz
2×512MB PC3200 DDR RAM
Microsoft Windows Vista (6.0) Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 (Build 6001)
Shuttle FB71x

[Full Specs]

Tested sleeping with hybrid sleep enabled and Media Center running. No problems. Not sure what happened the last time.

Waited 5 minutes after recording ended, did not go back to sleep.

Switched BIOS settings to S1&S3, works fine.

Noticed that when there’s a scheduled recording, it sometimes either doesn’t go to proper S3 sleep, or maybe it just takes a long time. so far 2 out of 3 times it didn’t go to S3 even after a couple of minutes (but display was turned off), and once it went to S3 after about a minute. Will have to test this further. On further thoughts, those 2/3 times were when I had a scheduled recording to start in about 5 minutes. Perhaps this forced the PC into Away Mode instead of sleep. Should check what the timing is for “wake computer x minutes before” (is there such an option?).

Seems to be working fine now. Did two scheduled recording tests. Went to S3 sleep, automatically woke up, recorded, and went back to sleep. The main problem was the “when sharing media, allow computer to go to Away Mode” power option. Changed it to “allow computer to sleep”.

Parents came home and they usually use the TV for the rest of the night, so I can’t work on improving the TV input quality.

Instead, am remoting in from my laptop and setting other stuff up: WebGuide and EPG.

WebGuide installed successfully, and I’m able to access the web interface fine. Can play recordings from there, but it’s a little slower than simply opening the files directly. This is probably since I have my recordings stored on a NAS, and so it’s clearly less efficient to do NAS –> ShuttleBox (my Media PC) – WebGuide –> WafflesSeven (my Laptop), as opposed to NAS –> WafflesSeven.

Since EPG for Singapore is not available through VMC, I have to use TVxb instead, in conjunction with BladeRunner Pro . Halfway through this – currently have both installed, am TVxb seems to have successfully downloaded EPG data for Starhub channels.

Next up:

1. Improve Live/Recorded TV Quality (from yesterday)
   • Check if it’s signal quality issue (including analog vs. digital) by switching to composite video input from STB (ie. see how cable channels look like)
2. Continue setting up EPG
   • am on the step of “Granting permission to write into the BladeRunner GuideData, Native, and QuickGuide folders.”
3. Ensure EPG works with WebGuide
4. Continue testing WebGuide, figure out how to watch Live TV (so far I can’t find the option for this. Suspecting that I need to have EPG data)

[Click Here HTPC Specs]

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer to manage my posts. It’s great.

Lightweight enough for me to launch at will, and plays well with Wordpress (and many other CMS/blogs, apparently). It’s so much faster than having to log in to the usual web interface, especially when just updating a draft (which can be saved locally or on the web).

Also, the editor is sweet. It’s able to mimic what the post will look like, so you don’t have to keep hitting Preview. It’s also a lot more robust, providing easier hyperlinking, adding images (which can do minor image edditing too), text formatting etc.

You can also set post metadata such as categories (syncs up with what you have on the server), tags, date right from here. and when you’re all done just hit Publish. Like I’m going to do now.

(Quick Specs: an old shuttle PC running Vista. ok, I can’t remember the specs. will update later)

Attempting to get S3 sleep state to work.

Had to change power settings in BIOS – ACPI Standby State set to S3. I think setting it to S1&S3 didn’t seem to work, will elaborate more on this later.

Initially, I followed the instructions as linked above but it made things worse – the PC didn’t seem to power down at all, with the “On” indicator light not going off. It turned off the TV display but that’s about it.

Then I found out that the problem was having created based off the High Performance plan. When using High Performance, the computer doesn’t sleep much, only as above. Switching to Power Saver fixed this, and my shuttle went off nice and quiet (previously you could still hear a fan spinning), as if it was completely off. Cool.

Minor problem at this point – had to push power button to wake it up, keyboard/remote control didn’t work. Fixed this by enabling wake by USB keyboard in BIOS.

Quick elaboration on setting BIOS ACPI Standby State to S1&S3 – when I had done so earlier, I think I was still using the High Performance plan. Don’t remember testing after I switched to Power Saver.

Next attempted to schedule a recording and put computer to sleep. However PC seemed to just turn off the display again. Suspecting Windows (Vista) Media Center to be preventing proper S3 sleep, closed VMC and tried going to sleep. Success. It came on as scheduled to record, but it didn’t go back to sleep after that.

End of this for today.

Noticed that watching TV through the PC (tuner card) was significantly worse than watching from Starhub HD STB. Understandable since what I’m getting is probably the analog free-to-air and signal strength is not as good as cable’s (and it’s analog vs. digital). Currently I’m using the TV OUT from the Starhub STB to connect to PC (via coax cable). Rerouted this TV OUT to TV to test signal quality. TV looks better than PC, but still worse than cable STB (over HDMI). Makes sense, but notes that the PC is indeed degrading quality. I need to figure out if it’s due to the TV card, or a VMC problem. Perhaps VMC is enconding the video badly before displaying? Or is the video encoding handled by the TV tuner card? The “bad” quality looks like it may be a compression issue. Will have to look into this.

Next up…

1. Fix S3 Sleep
   • Run another scheduled recording test, see if it goes back to sleep
   • Verify scheduled recording behaviour by reverting to regular sleep
     • Find out if this uses the Windows Task Scheduler. If so, might be able to get info from that.
   • Verify inability to sleep when hybrid sleep enabled and VMC running
2. Improve Live/Recorded TV Quality
   • Check if it’s signal quality issue (including analog vs. digital) by switching to composite video input from STB (ie. see how cable channels look like)

[Click Here HTPC Specs]