Andrew Van Til

[babgvant]

1) I would stay away from most Full ATX fanless designs. They still generate heat and if it’s in a cabinet that will need to be dissipated somehow. If it’s a smallish system, you could use a PicoPSU style PSU however. They are so efficient that you don’t need cooling. That said, most 120mm PSU will be quiet enough that it’s not a problem.

2) It depends what you’re looking for. Most of those chassis aren’t going to have the same fit and finish of the all Aluminum Moneual or Wesena cases, but it might not matter either if all you’ll see is the face plate.

One benefit of the Moneual cases is that you can run LCDWriter to handle the internal IR, and use its process specific keymaps to customize what the buttons do per application.

[babgvant]

[quote=Techbutton]

Just hangs and spins and I have to close out or force quit to move on.. All the movies are in one spot.. but maybe the homeserver is slowing everything down.. maybe I will take that out of the equation right now and try it again..

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The problem is a bad design which doesn’t scale, not your home server.

[babgvant]

[quote=Mike Garcen]

gah, i have like 200+ and no problem, but yeah, ur doubling me up. I wonder what the bottleneck is. What happens, it just hangs?

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IIRC WMC rebuilds the movie library when you load the Movies Experience. So having a lot of movies spread out across the network kills the performance. RecTV used to work the same way back in the day, MS fixed that with a cache (file, then db based) design. Pretty sure they never got around to making Movies work properly.

[babgvant]

[quote=Aaron Ledger]

I unsoldered the IR receiver from the board itself (3 pins). I then took some wires and connectors and soldered them to the board and IR receiver such that the two could be unlinked as needed. [/quote]

That’s a great idea.

[babgvant]

Aaron probably used this one or something similar.

[babgvant]

Sorry. Sold it yesterday.

[babgvant]

This happens because the EDID is going away and the audio driver reverts to a “safe” setting. You can use StandbyHelper to fix it. That said, if you have your PC setup to bitstream it doesn’t matter what the speaker layout is set to.

[babgvant]

[quote=captain_video]

IIRC, you need to set up your speakers in Windows as stereo and then configure your receiver or preamp for 7.1.  If you configure Windows for any other surround setup then you’ll run into issues with WMC.  I forget exactly what happens but it will affect proper playback.

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If you have WMC set to use navigation sounds it can cause issues because it requires mixing the audio. If you turn that off (which I do because it’s annoying) it’s not a problem.

[babgvant]

In that case I think Aaron’s idea is the best. Save the ppt as wmv and play it off a USB/SD drive attached to the TV.

[babgvant]

Does the content need to stay in sync?

[babgvant]

FWIW, I’m not convinced that WiFi will replace specialized protocols like Z-Wave and Insteon for many of the tasks they currently handle (light switches, locks, etc.). They do it better, are cheaper and require less power. I do think that WiFi (or general IP enablement) will supplement the specialized technologies for HA and will probably see wider adoption in general appliances (i.e. TVs, ranges, refrigerators, etc.) because everyone has these things and can realize some benefits from putting them on the network.

This is one of the reasons I went with the Vera, it is so extensible the underlying plumbing doesn’t matter very much. It can integrate with pretty much anything (expect Zigbee :)).

[babgvant]

[quote=osburnfamily]

So, I’ve seen others do a 2k8 server on the physical host, and the bring up a virtual machine guest for the windows 7 piece.  It’s doable but I believe requires hacks in the guest (not sure on that part, check other posts of people who’ve done it).

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If a DCT is used, you will need to use the DCA override tool to enable it. The only other caveat is that all of your tuners will need to be network or USB addressabl.

[quote=osburnfamily]

I never found the pros of having a server outweigh the complexities of another layer to support.  Maybe others can chime in here.

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If WMC & file serving is the only thing you use it for then there isn’t a reason to take on the additional complexity. I run a w2k8r2 box as a file server and use Hyper-V to host a web server, WHS11, and some testing builds so I would have the infrastructure setup anyway. In this scenario (if I didn’t want to have a WMC at the TV) it would be easier to setup the box as a VM on the server than use physical HW.

[babgvant]

[quote=Chroner]

Thanks for the confirmation.  I’ll definitely miss that capability from SageTV. 

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Me too.

[babgvant]

[quote=seneca]

The DH77KC looks also interesting, could you possible recommend suitable RAM for this motherboard Andrew ?

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I’ve had pretty good results with G.SKILL RAM. The 8GB pair I tested with the DZ77GA-70K board also work well with a H77 board that shares the same BIOS as the KC.

[babgvant]

You are correct. It’s a problem with directshow and the SBE source. For it to work the splitter would need to update the duration periodically (or leave it unset – which is what I think the SageTV demuxer does). I’ve been thinking about trying to add that to LAV, but I haven’t had a chance to see how much effort that would be.

 

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