05.20.10
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 9:01 pm by mike
So I was an early adopter of a Corsair P128 SSD drive for my media center machine. I was extremely pleased with the fact that it eliminated 95% of the disk noise, even though I left the 1TB HD in the machine. Even when recording to the HD, it barely makes a noise since the OS is completely running off the SSD and the HD doesn’t need to do any seeks. But because I bought the disk right around the time Windows 7 was release, the SSD firmware didn’t yet support the TRIM command.
What the TRIM command does is tell the SSD to actually clear all the data from deleted files. Regular old harddisks don’t care much whether they are writing to an empty space, or overwriting a deleted file. Hence, when you delete a file, usually all the operating system does is mark the space used by the file as free. Then the next file is welcome to overwrite that space.
Unfortunately, due to the design of SSD memory, it’s actually much slower to overwrite existing memory, because it needs to be cleared first. This becomes even more time consuming when you are writing a file that is smaller than the SSD block size (Both traditional and solid state drives like to deal with data in a standard size like 256KB or 512KB. This is called a “block”). In the case of the SSD, it needs to read the entire block into memory, clear the entire block, then write it back with your small change. Now this is all done internally on the drive, but still is much slower than a simple read or write.
If the OS knows it’s dealing with an SSD, it can send along a TRIM command after every delete operation. This tells the SSD to clear the memory associated with the files that were recently deleted. Note this can usually be done in parallel to other work, so by the time you want to write something to that same block, the freed data has already been cleared! Note, this does disable the ability to retrieve deleted files, which has long been a double-edged sword in the DOS/Windows world.
Anyways, I thought I was running on a TRIM-less SSD, which meant my performance was going to suffer over time. Luckily, at the end of last year Cosair released a firmware update for the both the P and X series which adds the TRIM command. It just took me a while to remember to check for it. I was able to verify the SSD firmware version using a clever tool called Crystal Disk Info. Unfortunately, I only have the “after” screen shot. In the before shot, the work TRIM was faded/stippled, like the APM in this one.
That’s the good news, the bad news is that the firmware upgrade ERASES THE ENTIRE DISK! That meant I need to explore Windows 7 backup and restore options a little more.
I was pleasantly surprised. Backing up an image SSD to the HD was just a few clicks using the windows backup tool (OK, I did have to delete a number of old episodes of Ace of Cakes and Project Runway to make space [ sorry honey ] ). The one hiccup I had was creating a bootable recovery CD. After telling you to insert your CD, the create recovery disk program would hang and eventually error out with an Optical Drive error. The problem turned out to be an old version of Virtual Clone Drive which was giving the system fits when trying to identify the disk devices. Removing it solved the problem, and I wasn’t able to repro it after installing the latest from Slysoft.
The most challenging part was that firmware upgrade documentation insisted that the installation program was only supported when running from a bootable USB flash drive. This turned out to require a bit more research than I expected. I found a number of links with a number of different methods for creating a bootable flash drive. The simplest one I actually found on a German website I translated through Google. But after a quick search today, I found the same instructions on a native english site as well. The bottom line is you grab the HP Flash Format program and a copy of the DOS system files. The HP program is fairly idiot proof, and will allow you to browse for the DOS system files you want to load.
After copying the P128 firmware files to the USB drive (after formatting it with the bootable OS) it was amazing how quick and painless it went. I did have to muck with the PC Bios to tell it to boot off the flash drive, but once I did, every thing went quick and easy. I actually wasn’t sure it had worked, but running it the second time it said there was nothing to do. I then booted off my Windows recovery disk, and it automagically found my backup on the HD, and asked me if I wanted to restore the SSD. It really couldn’t of been any easier.
Now, if I could just get the latest version of Arcsoft TMT to play BDs on my system.. but that’s a story for another time. For now, learn from my trials and tribulations and DO NOT try to use your HTPC as your primary BD player. It will cost you at least $400, and you can buy the same thing for $99 at Best Buy. As you can guess, there’s a 1000 word rant waiting to be released about this one.
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04.26.10
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 7:25 am by mike
I put a new HTPC spec up on Amazon listmania. I’m not sure why… 
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04.24.10
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 11:35 pm by mike
Hanging out in Santa Cruz this weekend, using the new hammer drill to bore through some tile and concrete floor. Quite pleased with the result. Found a couple other things that I need to follow up on this week.
- Microsoft Silverlight 4 It looks like they added the h261 hardware accelleration in this release, just like Adobe is doing with Flash 10.x. The one thing Microsoft likes about Apple these days is Steve Jobs telling everyone Flash sucks, but I don’t think we’ll see Silverlight on the iPAD anytime soon.
- oishiiunko on TGB just posted a link to his Remote Control application for WM 6.5! He’s now officially my new hero. I’ve already installed it on the Tilt 2, but of course, I can’t do anything else until I get back home and install WMC Controller on the HTPC. I can see some late nights and low contracting productivity coming this week.
- Speaking of gigs, I just finished a little HTPC R&D project for a customer. I’m considering posting a version of the results on Amazon’s Listmania to see if I get some more traffic back to here.
- So I used the proceeds from #3 to order a MSI ATI Radeon HD5450 1 GB DDR3 VGA/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card R5450-MD1GH from Amazon. Two things about this card. The most important is I’ll finally be able to send the TrueHD audio track from a BluRay Disc to my receiver. In short, the studio’s insist on a 100% hardware encryption/decryption scheme for the audio track on a BD, so you need a complete hardware solution to play it. My recommendation to anyone else is just buy a $99 BD Player and get on with your life. That said, Intel has just released a processor line that will do it, along with ATI and Nvidea. This ATI card is only $70. It doesn’t have any of the fancy 3D engines (actually, I think the 3D is slower than my current card) but aside from the TrueHD bitstreaming, it also has DDR3 SRAM, which runs cooler than DD R2 and hence doesn’t need a fan. The only remaining noise after installing the SSD is the fan on the ATI 4850, which I now know is much more graphics card than I needed. I’ll see if I can resell it on EBay, since this is still a decent gaming card.
- Finally, I also game across a Windows Services Hacking article on hack7mc. This will be another time sync, but it will be nice to free up some memory on Windows and get the boot and response time just a little bit faster.
That all should keep me busy for a while (not to mention I’m doing another LCD screen mounting and install for another customer this week). If you know anyone looking for help setting up their Home Theater, Flat Screen or HTPC, please send them my way.
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02.27.10
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 8:32 pm by mike
Many thanks to Spockers at the Dragon Global forms for posting his ShowAnalyzer global.conf file. Commercial skipping is now much improved and no longer being confused by the odd opening scenes in Damages and Fringe. Seems the tuning effort is a continuous process and if I get anymore info, I’ll post it here.
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02.13.10
Posted in Home Theater at 3:17 pm by mike
So I finally carved some time out after the 11PM feeding to do some more Media Center upgrades. Following a tip from this 7MC config page, I installed the Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta to address a flash performance problem I was noticing. This, plus the ATI Catalyst 10.1 drivers did the trick. I now suspect it was a driver problem all along, since the release notes call out a problem dropping frames in Flash. Now Hulu playback is pretty much flawless.
I also took the opportunity to upgrade to DVRMS Toolbox 1.2.2.0, along with the latest DTBAdd-in for Windows 7 and ShowAnalyzer. The latest DBTAdd-in has a fix for the null MediaExperience bug which I was forcing me to restart Media Center in order to get commercial skip working. I’m hoping the upgrade to ShowAnalyzer will improve the over-aggressive commercial removal when watching Fringe. But it’s been almost perfect on all the other shows.
I’ve also recently begun to play with Handbrake for converting videos for streaming from Amazon S3. Converted a whole set of Girls basketball games from a tournament in Wisconsin. These were raw captures from a Canon GL2 which even though it’s only an SD video camera, still runs around $2K. I ended up encoding them 3 different times: 1600kbps@30fps, 800kbps@15fps, 400kbps@15fps, all mpeg4/H.264. It turns out the average Internet connection in Wisconsin isn’t quite the same as Comcast in San Francisco. I was very impressed at how good the 400kbps videos looked. The page is a mix of all three, so you can see the difference yourself. Also, I need to plug Flowplayer which made the integration with S3 a painless cut & paste operation.
Funny thing is that DVRMSToolkit can do all the things Handbrake does, but the UI’s are designed for vastly different purposes.
Finally, the home theater consulting and installation work is beginning to pick up. On the list of things to do is tossing up a gallery of my installations.
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11.20.09
Posted in Home Theater at 8:53 pm by mike
One of the upsides of having a Home Theater PC connected to your big screen is the ability to watch streaming media from the comfort of your couch. With that in mind, I’ve been playing with various online streaming sites to watch out-of-market NFL games as well as been investigating streaming technology for my own business use. There are basically three categories of service out there: Legitimate offers with NFL licensing, pirate P2P sites and a couple offshore fraud sites after a quick credit card charge. Let’s call them: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
The Good
Or the legitimate sites. First of all, the NFL is streaming every Thursday night game on the NFL Live site. The coverage of the game is a little different than the standard TV coverage, but I actually like it better. In this format, they’ve decided to not be so concerned with realtime tracking of the game. Instead, they will often cut away from the game to highlight the last touchdown drive or other interesting set of downs. This includes detailed slow-motion/rewind/whiteboard analysis which football strategy fans such as myself are sure to appreciate. It reminds me of post game film review back with the coaches in High School, just with better technology. They then cut back to the game with the luxury of jumping back in time if something interesting happened, or simply catching you up on the current action. Currently, there are far fewer commercials in the stream than you would see on TV (the stream is pretty heavily front-loaded before the action starts).
On the downside, the player does NOT allow you to expand the video to full screen. It is also resolution aware, so decreasing your resolution will not make the image any larger. The one trick that does work is using the Windows magnifier app, but you have to make sure not to bump your mouse. Also, hit F11 to hide your browser bar and tabs.
NFL Live
As you can see, the quality is nothing special, but much better than you’ll get off the P2P sites listed below. Also, definitely not a simple 10ft interface for the naive Media Center user, but easy enough if you have a wireless keyboard.
ESPN 360 has a streaming player download which will expand to full screen mode. The quality is definitely a step up from above. It appears the player can handle HD video, but it appears most the content is in SD format. On the big screen, you still get a number of lighting and compression artifacts coming through.
ESPN 360 Video quality
While they have plenty of MLB and NBA games, along with College and CFL football, I have yet to see any NFL games here. They are also partnering with Comcast, who is exploring more streaming options for paying customers via comcast.net. There may be some potential here, but given the traditional tight-fisted greediness of the NFL, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Finally, the NFL also offers Game Rewind. This is actually an impressive service. For $24.99 (mid-season price) you get access to the entire archive of 2008 and 2009 seasons. So in order to write a complete review, I just had to order and try it…
The video quality is by far the best out of all the options. It happens to use the same player as ESPN360, which means ESPN could be streaming this same quality if they wanted to.
Best Video quality by far
Once again, the full 1920×1200 image. The snapshot doesn’t really do the picture justice. There may be some loss in the PNG compression as well. So I’m pretty happy with the quality, but I suspect I won’t use this all that much. There is a mode which will let you watch 4 games at a time, switching 3 small screens into the main one. It seems like a great idea, but the fact none of this is available until after the game is over, it’s difficult to even justify the $25. I probably should of done the $7.99 for one week just to check it out. Not a bad option if there’s one game you missed and you just have to see it.
On my wish list for both of these is a Media Center plug-in and the ability to control the app with the remote. I may hack something together to do this in my copious spare time.
The Ugly
So the truth is, you want to watch your game when its actually happening, and not after you’ve seen the score go by on the ESPN Ticker. Well it turns out you can do this, but now we’re probably crossing some DMCA lines, especially as far as the NFL is concerned. On the otherhand, these games are being broadcast over the air in other markets. If I have a very powerful TV antenna which gets a signal from another market, who’s to say I’m violating any copyrights? Well, if you want, you can think of the following as antenna extenders:
There are basically three or four sites out there that act as a central clearing house for users who happen to be streaming a particular NFL game. Unfortunately, the quality is extremely variable, if you can get the stream at all. Here are some I’ve had some luck with:
MyP2P – Will usually show you a number of streams to choose from for each game. All the streams require some sort of StreamTorrent player. Quality is actually improved if there are more people near you watching the stream. Most of the sites appear to be in the EU or Australia, which tells me the NFL cracks down on these when it can. They also show various TV shows including some premium channels, but I really can’t imagine trying to watch those at this quality level given so many other choices.
Justin.tv – Justin.TV seems to have higher quality streams using a built in flash player. Of course since they are a legitimate company based in the US, they need to be a little better behaved. I don’t know if they proactively filter for the NFL games or not, but after the first quarter or so,the game is often replaced with a DMCA take-down notice. Here’s a snapshot from this weekend’s Minnesota game. Although the quality is low, the feed appears to be the Fox satelitte feed in that there are no commercials. Probably coming from overseas:
Justin.TV Fox Football Feed
ATDHE.NET These folks appear to be based out of France. It’s also a clearing house, so you may get an mms stream which Windows Media Player can handle or sometimes it seems to redirect you back to Justin TV.
UStream.tv – UStream is another legitimate company which will probably take down an NFL game fairly quickly. They are partnering with many content producers, so they will have other high quality broadcasts.
There are other similar sites as well, often they will point back to one of the three above. The problem with most of these is that they take advertising from some very questionable players…
The Bad
So even a google search for NFL streaming will bring a couple of these shysters up in the ad blocks. They basically try to sell you either a PC Satellite TV or a tag line like “Watch NFL & College Football Online Access All Games Live in HD Quality”. In fact, I bet my AdSense plugin pulls a couple of them up right now:
What these slimballs do is charge you somewhere between $29-99 and then redirect you to the sites listed above. I’ve listed a couple of them here, with the names edited so they don’t get any free SEO out of my posting.
- www the-honest-review com - gotta love the name
- www live-football-now1 info
- livefootballstream info/
- www squidoo com/watch-nfl-online
- live-online-now tv/ncaaf
I’ll try to keep this slimeball list up-to-date as I find more. You’ll also find a number of BS blog sites recommending these services. First red flag on these websites is you can’t find any “About Us” link on the page, and the Terms of Service mention a Bahamas or other off-shore country. All their credit card processing and support is done through legit companies, so if you do get suckered by one of these, your credit card company will have no problem reversing the charges.
In summary, the options out there are getting better, especially as 10Mbit+ home connections become the norm. It would be really nice if the NFL offered a pay-per-view for a specific game, but I believe they are still locked into an exclusive deal with DirectTV. It would be interesting to know when that expires and whether they plan to keep it exclusive…
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11.02.09
Posted in Home Theater at 5:39 pm by mike
Join EFF in San Francisco Monday for Discussion on Hollywood vs. Consumers’ Rights
Please join the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for a panel discussion on “The Future of DVD” at the Varnish Gallery in San Francisco on Monday, November 9, at 5:30pm.
Panelists include Kaleidescape CEO Michael Malcolm, RealNetworks Vice President and General Counsel Bill Way, and EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. “The Future of DVD” will examine the legal battles over DVD rentals, ripping, backups, home media servers, and portable media players. These questions surrounding RealDVD, Kaleidescape, and Redbox underscore the continuing struggle between Hollywood, consumers, and innovators over the future of the DVD.
“The Future of DVD” panel is free and open to the public, and includes a hosted bar sponsored by RealNetworks. For more information or to RSVP please email events@eff.org.
WHAT:
“The Future of DVD” Panel and Happy Hour
WHEN:
Monday, November 9
5:30pm to …
WHERE:
Varnish Gallery
77 Natoma St.
San Francisco, CA
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10.20.09
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 10:26 pm by mike
I’m now keeping a running page of the HTPC configuration. This is mostly for my own reference so I can remember what I’ve done and I’ll be keeping it up to date as things change.
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10.19.09
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 8:48 am by mike
OK, my first hiccup while installing the SSD drive was not having an extra SATA cable! Solved for $10 (probably $9 more than I needed to spend) with a quick trip to Radio Shack on my wife’s scooter. Decided to time the installation since I got to figure the SSD will make a significant difference.
Total installation time for Windows 7 Ultimate: 17 miinutes, 30 seconds. Subtract at least a minute for my typing and pauses.
Unfortunately, it took me twice that time to put the machine back together and get all the cables reconnected. Digital Cable connectors can be quite problematic at times.
Step #2. Download latest ATI Catalyst software for the video card. Windows Update automatically found something, but it didn’t install the full ATI Catalyst system.
That’s as far as I got yesterday. Family responsibilities cut into my fun and I needed to switch back to Vista to record shows during prime-time. Copying over the channel and recording settings is going to be the most time consuming part of the project.
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10.18.09
Posted in Home Theater, Windows at 3:46 pm by mike
So for no good reason at all, Microsoft sent me a complimentary copy of Windows Ultimate along with a box of party swag (streamers, toys, coupons, bags, etc..). I was actually going to hold off on the upgrade of my HTPC (which is pretty happily running Vista), but with Microsoft’s encouragement, I broke down and used my Amazon coupons to buy a 128G SSD drive. Went with the CORSAIR P128 after reading this review. I’ve decided to do a fresh install rather than an upgrade, this way I can simply switch back to booting Vista off the old 1TB drive. Eventually, I plan to hang that drive off of Buffalo NAS and silencing the HTPC completely, but that will be another project. In anycase, given that the rebuild of the media center is non-trivial, I’m taking the week off to do the reinstall before the party bond with my new son.
Finally, I’m going to track the whole process here for my own reference, since it’s helpful to know exactly what drivers and software I installed when, and why. Makes a great reference for my HTPC consulting work.
BTW: Yahoo has upgraded WordPress for me which at first brush looks pretty nice. I still need to figure out how to leverage FB or Yahoo identity management, so people don’t have to create their own accounts to comment on my site. If you know how to do this, please drop me a pointer.
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