So my house was struck by lightning a few months back and it zapped all the network (NIC) cards in all the devices in my house. This was particularly devistating for my XBOX, which my wife and I used every day for years. The XBOX was hard modded with an Xecuter 3 chip and it was running XBOX Media Center as its dashboard. With the XBOX out of commission I set out to create a PC based media center to replace the XBOX. Of course I could have just bought a used XBOX on Ebay for $30 and re-chipped it but the XBOX can't run High Definition video or Blu-rays so we decided early on to go ahead with building a dedicated HTPC. 

Below you can see the HTPC running on the 52" Plasma TV in the living room. 

The process of getting everything setup and running correctly was not easy. After about a week of trial and error I have finally gotten everything setup and running properly (including HD/Blu-ray playback). I have created a step-by-step checklist/guide for building an HTPC.

The topics covered are:

• Choosing a Nettop PC
• Choosing a Remote Control
• Choosing a NAS Server
• Installation/Configuration of XBMC
• Installation/Configuration of MCE Remote
• Installation/Configuration of EventGhost
• Automating HTPC login & XBMC Startup
• HD Playback with DXVA/CUDA
• Installation/Configuration of MPC-HC
• Configuring Shared Folders

DOWNLOAD - XBMC-Basic-Setup-Guide-W7.zip

  In what could be one of the coolest projects a company could undertake, DirecTV has now offering a program called DirecTV2pc which allows you to watch all the recordings from all of your DVR units on your PCs.  

In order to get it up and running you have to download the tester application to determine if your machine meets the minumum requirement to run the client. When I ran it against my tower, the application indicated that I could not run the application since my monitor is connected via DVI and my monitor doesn't support HDCP (the copy protection scheme). I continued anyway and it works perfectly so far. This is almost as good as my old hacked Series 2 DirecTivo, which I hacked only to be able to stream my recordings and increase the hard disk capacity. 

For quite some time I have had a pretty decent DVD movie server running at the house. It consists of a File Server (Buffalo TeraStation 2TB), which is used to store raw DVD rips, a X3 chipped XBOX running XBOX Media Center, and a 52" Plasma television. One of the most impressive features of XBMC is it's scraping capability, or the ability to fetch information from websites for you and import it into your media center library such as plot summaries, movie reviews, cast, year, genre, etc, etc. With the latest SVN builds of XBMC I have begun to notice that the scraper is acting strange. I guess most people use this kind of setup to watch pirated movies, but in my case I'm using raw DVD rips from DVDs I own. As such my file structure is a bit different. For example the movie 310 To Yuma is in a folder named 310 to Yuma and inside that folder are the traditional VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. Whenever I launch the IMDB scraper it searches for VIDEO_TS instead of 310 To Yuma since VIDEO_TS is a sub folder. To quickly resolve the issue I wrote a simple C# console application to do this:

1. Enumerate the Movies Share
2. For each folder move the files in VIDEO_TS into the root folder for the movie
3. Delete the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS folders

The script took 5 minutes to write and it saved hours of time of having to do this manually.