Oingofan

[Oingofan]

Aaron, are you talking on the left or right of the drive cage?  On the left, there is already a fan there.  If right next to it, there is room, but there are no holes in that location.  If on the right, it would still be bypassing the expansion slot area.

[Oingofan]

OK, I was able to run the diagnostics and it showed 69C and then went up to 75C.  So definitely out of spec.  I have my HTPC all bundled within a Wesena E6 case and as you can see in the pictures, the fans on each side are blocked by drives.  Suggestions?  Thx!

[Oingofan]

I’ll have to check my actual temps, but it was hot enough to burn my finger.  I already have 4 fans in it: P/S fan, left/right case fans, and the CPU fan.  They are all fans designed for being quiet yet move some air.  I put my hand at the back of the P/S and can feel some good heat coming out.  Let me check my actual temps.  I could be worrying about nothing…thx

Wayne

[Oingofan]

Hey everyone just letting you know that I did get this problem fixed…today. I ended up putting in the NVidia GT 430 video card in, but still had problems with HDMI with the screen consistently flashing to black and putting the 1080P signal indicator up in the right-hand corner of the screen.

The funny thing is…if I turned the Denon AVR off and let it run in bypass mode using the same exact HDMI cables, everything worked fine. Ugg! This behavior was the same with the Intel HD 3000 graphics as well (no HDCP errors). So, I thought it was a Denon issue and contacted them…which was pretty useless as they said it was a handshaking issue and that I’m pretty much on my own.

Then there is Intel and how they still have not resolved HDMI repeater issues with their graphics cards: http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2008/04/22/hdcp-hdmi-repeaters-and-you-well-me-anyway/
They even admit that they need to look into it and fix it…but even after years, the problems still exists.

Anyways, the MOST critical fix on the NVidia GT 430 was to make the following setting in the NVidia Control Panel (which is defaulted to Auto):

Display->Adjust deskop color settings->Apply the following enhancments->Content type reported to the display->Full-screen video

This information was provided to me by a fellow AVSForum private message. Thanks to all for helping me out! Now to finally enjoy my HTPC! 🙂

Wayne

[Oingofan]

Thanks for the graphics card suggestion…I’ll give it a shot.

The current graphics driver I’m running is 6.​14.​10.​5374
…which I believe is the latest driver as of August 2011.

[Oingofan]

Well, I gave it a shot and I actually thought it fixed it, but I didn’t give it enough testing time and the same problem came back. It’s strange…as sometimes it seems to be timing based. Maybe I’ll need to log everything to try to see if there is any corralation.

Wayne

[Oingofan]

WMC navigation sounds? For real? Why would that impact HDCP?

I will disable it…and if that is the problem, then Microsoft should have it issued as a bug. No?

I’ll let you know my results. Thx!

Wayne

[Oingofan]

My HDMI cables are actually from MonoPrice and I got the THICK 22 gauge ones because one has a length of 25′. Here is my setup in more detail:

HTPC -> 3′ HDMI 24AWG High Speed -> Denon AVR-2312CI -> 25′ HDMI 22AWG High Speed -> Sharp 70″ TV

I just tried swapping out the 3′ HDMI cable for another 25′ HDMI 22AWG High Speed w/ Ethernet cable…same problem. I also tried swapping out the 25′ HDMI cable for another 25′ HDMI 22AWG High Speed w/ Ethernet…same problem.

After Googling around, a few people were able to fix this by putting a HDMI switcher in-line. What a pain.

Someone mentioned the HDMI detective. Is that some type of software I can run to truly find where the problem is?

Thanks guys!

Wayne

[Oingofan]

Ya, I went down to their local office today asking when they were going to move more channels to the digital lineup and she said, “oh we are!  We moved channel 67 to 93.  Channel 36 to 74, etc.”  Not quite moving them to digital.  🙁  In the meantime, I plan on getting the Haup 2250 to get me by.

Thanks for answering my question about the tuner assignment and prioritizing them.  I really am enjoying my HTPC that I put together.  🙂

Wayne

[Oingofan]

Aaron, I wish that were true.  Check out the lineup I attached…  I want many of the channels in the Expanded Basic…

Wayne

[Oingofan]

Hmmm…this must be a tough one..or not many have this issue.  I’m shopping around for cards, but the more I shop, the more I notice that not many are running analog cards with their InfiniTV4 cards.

So, now, I have a question.  How does it work within WMC for analog cards to be assigned to specific channels?  Obviously I wouldn’t want the InfiniTV4 card to try to tune to an analog channel (NTSC). 

Any thoughts on the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner to live along with the InfiniTV4?  Thx!

Wayne

[Oingofan]

So how would you do an F5 on the Lenovo N5901/N5902? Just curious…

[Oingofan]

They have such promotions with TMT?  If so, where is normally a good place to look?  thx!

[Oingofan]

Josh, after thinking about it for a little bit, I’m starting to not want any extenders for the way I use my media.  The primary benefit of an extender is that I won’t have any copy protection issues from the WMC HTPC.  However, if my current cable company (Charter) has all standard TV as copy freely and only the premium channels as copy once, a secondary small WMC HTPC (that pulls the content from the primary) in the bedroom would be more powerful as it won’t have all the issues that extenders have.

A drawback to having multiple WMC HTPC’s would be that the Ceton doesn’t support tuner pooling (that I know of), so maybe another tuner setup would be better.  This just opens up a new questions that should be in their own thread.

Wayne

[Oingofan]

Josh, you have cleared up so many things for me that I had no idea on. I thought the biggest negative to an extender was no native Netflix support. Hard to believe they won’t support all my ripped DVD’s in Video_TSG format, won’t work on my .MKV files (although some do), and transcoding not working smoothly.

I did convert some of my .MKV’s to .WTV and it works good, but I’m worried that if I decide to move away from WMC someday (for whatever reason), the platform I move to probably won’t play .WTV files. So, I’ve been doing that only as necessary.

I’ve been expecting my XBox 360 extender to do many things that it won’t do. Wow. That would be a great future article: What extenders will…and won’t do. Again…thanks for clearing that up.

Wayne

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