Trey’s Blog|brain spillage!

Today, we bought our New Family Van. After researching lightly for a couple of weeks, then heavy for a solid weekend, we finally decided to go to the dealer and give them a run for their money. We decided to go with Dodge because of their reputation for affordability. Originally we were looking at the Caravan, but realized that in Houston, it is very important having A/C and heat for front and back of a van. This pointed us to the Grand Caravan, which we had originally ruled out because of its price difference. Ultimately, we got a very practical van for a very good price. Here is a table showing the breakdown with numbers pulled from cars.com:

*price before TT&L

What we bought:
Dodge Grand Caravan SE with Popular Equipment Group 1 and Keyless Entry with Immobilizer

Now that I’ve tasted HDTV, I’m starting to ponder the costs of building a Media Center PC. There are many things that I have to consider for this project. Here is are some questions I’m asking myself:

• Should I purchase a premanufactured PC or build my own?
• If I build, then should I use M$ Media Center Edition 2005 or MythTV?
• Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon?
• Use existing hardware from my best PC or buy all new better parts?
• Black or Silver case?
• How much is too much?

Here is some hardware I could use from my best PC I currently have:

• 1 GB PC3200 DDR400 (2 x 512)
• AMD Athlon 2600+
• Sony 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer (Black)
• ATI HDTV Wonder Remote Edition
• ATI Radeon 7500 64MB
• Western Digital Raptor 36GB SATA 10000rpm HDD
• Western DIgital Caviar 120GB IDE 7200rpm 8MB cache HDD

Okay, I found a post somewhere that stated that had an IRQ conflict, so they moved some PCI slotted devices around and it fixed their problem. I decided to try this, but I also figured that perhaps, my Leadtek WinFast TV2000XP Deluxe (simple TV Tuner) was conflicted with some sort of systemwide TV Capture ability. I removed the Leadtek card and moved the HDTV Wonder into its position on the board. I booted up, reintalled the software, rebooted, then BAMMO. DTV is working. The picture is a little gittery, but I found some folks that said adjusting the position of the antenna can fix that problem in most cases.

One thing I did noticed was that there are a lot more channels available than I thought there would be. Some of them have widescreen displays, while others have station-branded blue bars to the left and right. Either way, the picture seemed nice. I think I’m going to look for a way to crank up my CPU usage for this to give me better performance. I typically use this machine for single tasks, so this shouldn’t cause any issues.

Compared to my cable TV on this same PC, the picture is phenomenal. I do think that the picture might be a bit better if I had it hooked up to a TV or CRT monitor instead of my Samsung Flat Panel.

There are still some bugs to be worked out, but I got it working nonetheless.

Well, after an hour and a half of installing, uninstalling, reinstalling of 4 programs and DirectX 9, I still have not even seen TV yet, much less HDTV. I must say, this is very very disappointing.

I’m getting errors:

• DirectX components are not installed properly (I installed them and the install disk installed them, so this error: CRAP)
• Capture driver INF files are not installed (setup disk went through everything and Device Manager shows all drivers in place: CRAP)
• DMA for all drives (HDD and DVD) is not enabled (but all drives are in Ultra DMA mode: CRAP)

Update: while writing this message, I got the TV to work. Now I’ll start hunting down ATI support for the HDTV.

Today, I’m picking up my new ATI HDTV Wonder. I’ve been very interested in getting some free OTA (Over-The-Air) HDTV Broadcasts for several months. I’ve looked at several brands of set-top hdtv receivers and this ATI card, which kept whispering to me in my sleep, ‘buy me’. I finally decided to go ahead in PC direction, because of the ability to record the broadcasts to my PC, then I can choose which recordings to churn out to DVD+/-R.

As with any new technology and/or purchase, I’m sure there will be some hurdles to jump through before getting the card working perfectly, so I’ll be posting my findings within the next couple of days.

On a side note, July 1, 2005 will be a historical day for free HDTV. See why here!

I have acquired a 9GB SCSI-3 drive, but I’m not sure which computer will receive it. I’d like to use it as my permanent test drive for testing new distros as they release, but that assumes that the drive works and that I’ll have the time to get it configured in a manner than makes reinstalling distros, without hosing my other install, easy.

The drive is an IBM 7200rpm 68-pin SCSI drive that was pulled from an old Mac. I’ll be using an ATTO ExpressPCI controller card to get it connected.