We discovered this snake living underneath our sidewalk by our front door. I think he’s harmless to us, just wants to eat toads and tree frogs.

Although I would like a super nice media center computer in my living room that can act as a PVR, play music, etc. my current budget won’t permit it.

Currently I have an 11 year, 21″ Hitachi TV (yes, so small) with no remote, an old Toshiba VCR that can only be controlled via the remote. A DVD player that’s missing the front cover, and a Phillips mini stereo. I have a radioshack switch selector to go between the VCR which also acts as the tuner for the TV, the DVD player, and a selection for my notebook when I plug it in to watch movies rented from MovieLink.

So yes, I am way overdue for an upgrade to our ‘entertainment system’, and we will … eventually. In the meantime, here’s how I’ve created a Media Center system utilizing my current electronic artifacts. This project began in the Spring, but I have only now had the time to reconcentrate my efforts in getting this to work decently.

I purchased a Hauppauge MediaMVP media extender (a linux based digital receiver) and a Hauppauge PCI tuner card for our main computer (which serves as the primary file and print server on our network) this past April. The MediaMVP model I purchased has a wireless unit, but it only supported the weak, WEP security and I felt that it would be faster over standard CAT5. Unfortunately, the wire I had previously ran when the house was being built didn’t work. So this forced me to run new CAT5 through the attic to my office router. The default software that comes with the MediaMVP is very rudimentary, and you can see that Hauppauge is relying on 3rd party interfaces to be used in lieu of theirs. So I spent a considerable amount of time, researching and finally decided to use the free GB-PVR software. Perhaps if I were running this on a computer in the living room instead of the media extender, this would have been an ideal solution. But I had too many problems with an unresponsive remote and the software crashing over the MediaMVP. I tried different dongle files, different revisions of the software, and read through multiple forum postings but the stability and quality wasn’t there. However, I did like GB-PVR’s flexibility. You could play streaming radio and there were so many different plugins and skins. It might be something I’ll reconsider when I purchase a MediaCenter PC for the living room.

I checked out SageTV and wow, what a difference! There is apparently some truth in the statement, “You get what you pay for.” And although SageTV came with a price, the stability and difference is ‘night and day’. The picture is great … oops wait. I forgot to mention the MediaMVP ‘dark screen’ problem. I had this issue with GB-PVR and even using SageTV’s software. If you google on it, you’ll find that it is a known problem that the manufacturer seems to have no solution for. Some commented that it seemed to depend on the television device that you plugged it into. Some mentioned removing certain resistors (yikes). There was talk of editing certain .ini files, etc, and others just increased the brightness on their televisions. Someone commented that they were connecting it through their VCR or DVD player and that seemed to adjust the brightness accordingly. I tried that … and voila, it worked!

So now we have PVR functionality. I can browse using the built-in tvguide, record shows, pause livetv, etc. (with no monthly subscription fees). I can watch other videos on the computer, even google and youtube videos. I can view pics (but do people really view their pictures through this?), and we can listen to our music collection. In order to do this, I had to purchase the Hauppauge MediaMVP media extender, a tvtuner card which was the Hauppauge PVR-150, and the SageTV Server and Placeshifter software licenses. I also upgraded the computer with another gig of memory, so now it has 1.5GB. The only thing I need to do now is purchase a larger hard drive, so I don’t have to monitor our somewhat limited hard drive’s space usage as much.

Computer Specs: 1.5 AMD Athlon, 1.5GB RAM, 256MB ATI Video Card, 100GB Hard Drive running on a Soyo Motherboard, WindowsXP2 OS.

- Tim