Tag Archives: media

HTPC of Doom!

Posted by on June 15, 2012 1 comment

Ok, it wasn’t really of doom, but I liked the title.  This last week I have spent a lot of time building my new media PC to be hooked up to my TV.  I canceled cable, and my Tivo service and am now relying on online services and rentals.  I just got tired of missing things when they aired, the DVR not catching them for some reason and then not being able to see things.

So I built an HTPC (Home Theater PC) to pull in my DVD’s, and play videos straight off the web.  I was using my Xbox for this, but, while the Xbox has been coming out with more and more apps to cover everything, it’s still not perfect.  So I balanced it out with the HTPC.

Sorry for the low-rez, I was excited

Thankfully, I am friends with an HTPC expert, my friend Louis.  The one I built is based on the one he owns.  He helped spec out the parts and guided me through the setup.  See, I haven’t exactly built a desktop PC in around 8 years.  Apparently, a lot has changed since then!  All of the parts arrived on Monday afternoon.  This was bad.  See, I a the type that wants to open and play as soon as I get stuff.  So that evening I dove in to start building.

Huge Mistake.

I was up till 1am before I finally got everything installed and running.  WIndows was fully patched and ready to go.  Then, Tuesday, Louis had me check the mode the Hard drives was running in.  Turns out they were defaulted to IDE and needed to be in ACHI.  Yeah, when I made the switch (even after following instructions to ensure it wouldn’t happen) the OS was wiped out.  I had to do the software portion all over again.

Long story made short, I spent the last few evenings tweaking and configuring.  I am now running the following:

  • [amazon_link id=”B004EBUXHQ” target=”_blank” ]Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost)[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”B002X578GE” target=”_blank” ]G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”B004Q81CKY” target=”_blank” ]OCZ Vertex 3 VTX3-25SAT3-120G 2.5″ 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive[/amazon_link] (SSD) (Boot Drive)
  • 2 x [amazon_link id=”B0042SGDVG” target=”_blank” ]SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive[/amazon_link] (for 4TB Total)
  • [amazon_link id=”B0048D7AD0″ target=”_blank” ]SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6850 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”B005FE52X6″ target=”_blank” ]ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard[/amazon_link]
  • [amazon_link id=”B005HGPPG6″ target=”_blank” ]LIAN LI Black Aluminum PC-C60B ATX Media Center / HTPC Case[/amazon_link]

Needless to say, I may have gone a bit overboard on the hardware for something as simple as a Media Box.  However, playing Civ-V on the 47” tv is pretty damn cool.

Downside, I am exhausted.  Sleep soon!

Belkin can suck my butt.

Posted by on August 5, 2010 4 comments

Well, last night the rest of the family was out doing what they do on a Wed. Night which left me to putz around the house and do my own thing. Since they were all out I figured it was a good time to work on the network issue I had been having. To recap, I recently bought a Belkin Play dual band wireless N router for the house. It was much more powerful than my netgear wireless G router so it would cover the whole house. Now I do a lot of odd things on my network. I love to stream movies and music to the xbox or ps3 from my pc, I also picked up the software package PlayOn from Media Mall to stream Hulu and YouTube to the consoles as well. Ever since hooking up the Belkin, all that stopped. So last night poured over the settings inside and out, tested every scenario and flipped every switch. Nothing worked.

I googled the heck out of my situation and found a few posts about how the Belkin routers block the DLNA media streaming protocol. But nothing on how to fix that. So, off I went to the Belkin support site. Still no mention of blocking the DLNA protocol, except that the router itself will stream using DLNA, but only directly from the router. I tried to “Chat with a support representative” only to learn that they had no clue what DLNA was and was fixated on the ports of the xbox and the ip of my PC, even though I explained what the issue was. I gave the person (assuming it was even a human) 10 min to explain before I scrap the router and buy something else, she couldn’t even explain what DLNA was.

Needless to say, I then set out to Best Buy and purchased a new Netgear Wireless N Rangemax router. 10 minutes later my whole network was up and I was streaming again with no issues. Because of this, I will never buy another Belkin product again. Be Warned!

p.s. I am in training all this week (if you hadn’t seen the twitters) so reviews for Limbo and Risk will be put next week.

What are you playing?

Posted by on July 20, 2010 7 comments

I have been thinking of trying to get a weekly post up of what I am playing and maybe put it out to see what you guys are playing as well. I have seen a lot of sites do this to get a good discussion going and maybe get some ideas about a game I wouldn’t normally pick up.  So, seeing as how I am the only one here, I’ll go first.

The past week or two I have been working on some house type stuff and reconfiguring things on my network.  After picking up the new Xbox 360S (I traded in my old 20gb Xbox) I decided to upgrade my router to a Wireless N to use the new Xbox’s N device.  I bought the Belkin Play Dual Band Wireless N router and replaced my crappy Netgear G.  Long story made short, I can’t stream media from my PC to the xbox anymore and have no idea why.  While I am not a hard core network guy, I still know my way around a subnet and have spent the past 2 weeks tweaking and such to figure this out.  It’s kind of a pain.

Outside of that I have been playing some Lego Harry Potter with Sarah.  It’s one of those games where we pretty much only play together.  I believe we are towards the end of Book 3 right now.  the Quick review on it, it’s a Lego game.  Same basic premise and humor.  That’s not a bad thing, because I love the Lego games.  Aside from that I have picked up Risk: Factions from the Xbox Live Arcade.  They found a way to really make a Risk game fun for everyone!  We have played as a family, as well as through the solo campaign.  Enjoyable all around.  May have more of a full review on it up soon.

In the life department, I also picked up an Elliptical machine and am using it to get back into some sort of shape that’s not “round”.  My hope is to turn some of this belly fat into muscle in time for DragonCon at the beginning of September.  We’ll See, as of this morning I was at 192lb.  My target is Around 175lb but I would be happy with a strong 180-185lbs.  The goal is not so much loss but re-distribution.  Wish me luck!