Delicate Genius Blog

Over the past few years, many people have asked about my HTPC (Home Theatre PC) setup.

Mostly they are superficial questions exploring the cool factor, “Wow, you can pause TV?” or “You mean you can pick any album and listen to it whenever you wish?” or even “I can see my house from here” (explained later).

There have, however, been enough technical questions to warrant me documenting the setup.

But, before I go into detail I’ll talk about some of the key features of my setup.

• Timeshift (pause/rewind/forward) while I watch TV
• Access photos, videos and music from anywhere in the house on any TV.
• Very extensive media cataloguing capability with J River Media Center.
• Google Earth on the TV – This is very handy when you have non PC using friends (yes, I’m embarrassed to have them) over and you wish to blow them away with the capabilities of Google Earth on your TV. Finding their house for them is always fun.
• Bluetooth remote control – This allows me to use my remote control from anywhere in the house.
• Built in web server – This allows me to watch TV, schedule recordings or access my media from any internet connected computer.
• Syndicate my recordings with my friends using RSS and enclosures.

I’ve also included some images at the bottom of this page.

Ok, enough of the fluffy stuff, here goes . . .

Hardware

Shuttle SB61G
The system is built on a Shuttle SB61G box. The main reasons I chose this was they’re ultra reliable, very quite and very compact.

60 GB Seagate Barracuda
This drive holds the operating system and is the redundant backup drive.

200 GB Seagate Barracuda
The main drive. All of the media is stored here.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200
Although the shuttle has onboard video I fond it too slow and CPU heavy as it shares resources with the onboard video. The GeForce FX 5200 was chosen simply because it was the cheapest video card with onboard MPEG decoding and video out.

VideOh! DVD Media Center PCI Edition
The VideoOh! is my main capture card. My input source is analog as it’s coming from my cable box so this card captures the signal and converts it to MPEG real-time on board. An onboard MPEG capture card is a must if you’re to capture decent quality from an analog source.

IPAQ 4150
The IPAQ is the main remote control for the system. It runs NetRemote and connects to the Shuttle via bluetooth. Bluetooth was chosen over 802.11b wi-fi because it drains significantly less power.

USB-UIRT
The USB-UIRT serves two main purposes:

1. It transmits IR codes to my cable TV box when Beyond TV needs to change channels.
2. It receives IR signals so if you were to use an IR remote to control the system it will pick them up and send commands to BeyondTV and Media Center via Girder, I use this as a backup incase my wife has the IPAQ on the road with her for GPS navigation (but that’s another story)

Billionton USB Bluetooth Dongle (USBBTC1A)
There’s a Billionton USB bluetooth dongle attached to the shuttle box. This is used to enable bluetooth networking on the IPAQ to talk to the machine. An important factor in choosing the USBBTC1A was that it’s a Class 1 Bluetooth device, meaning it has a range of 100 Metres very important in my setup as my video signal travels via coax cable to 3 other rooms in the house and I need to be able to control from anywhere.

Core Software

Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Not much that needs to be said here I guess, I’m using Windows XP Professional (SP1) as the main operating system. Its worth noting that I’m using IIS (the built in Windows web server) to serve content out to the internet so that I can access my media from any internet connection.

Snapstream BeyondTV 3.4
Beyond TV 3.4 is the brains behind all of PVR (Personal Video Recorder) functionality. Visit the Snapstream site for the low down on all of the features that this product offers. I highly recommend it.

J River Media Center 10.0
JRMC is the main media management software. I’ve been using it for a few years now and I highly recommend it. It’s used for managing my video, photos and music and is accessed mainly through “Theater View” via the HP IPAQ.

The main reason I continue using Media Center over, for example, Snapstream BeyondMedia (and others like it) is that it’s highly configurable. A scenario which I use quite regularly which I can’t replicate with any of the other HTPC based media mangers is as follows.

There are an infinite amount of attributes which I can tag to my media. So, in my instance I have all of my photos in my library and as painful as it may seem, I tag every person in every photo and the event at which the photo was shot. Once I have this meta-data stored I can view my images in any hierarchy of my choosing. So, for example, I could locate the same image under “Year/Event/Person” or “Person/Event” – very useful at 4,789 photos (and counting)

Google Earth
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Google Earth is a free satellite image viewing app and is well worth a look at. I have it running in full screen mode and control it through the IPAQ.

NetRemote PRO+IR
Netremote is what I use to control all of the front end functionality of the HTPC. It uses both the hard buttons on my IPAQ as well as the touch screen and is highly customisable using Tonoto, a visual editor used to configure the layout.

NetRemote also has a great feature worth noting. All of the control functionality occurs on a TV where I navigate my way through menus and options. However, NetRemote has a very nice J River Media Center plug-in where I can navigate my entire media library on my IPAQ remotely from any room in the house. Check the screenshots and it’ll make more sense.

Girder
Girder is the glue that joins the IPAQ to BeyondTV, Media Center and Google Earth. Girder is Windows automation software which takes a command from a source (i.e. an IR remote, the keyboard or in my case NetRemote) and performs an action.

A note about the the NetRemote/Girder relationship
Netremote has a client and server component. The server runs on the HTPC machine and awaits commands from a client. I have three clients running, one on the the IPAQ one on my desktop and another on my laptop. So…

1. I press a button on the NetRemote client on my IPAQ (e.g. up arrow on Beyond TV)
2. It travels via the bluetooth network to the NetRemote server
3. The NetRemote server receives the signal and notifies Girder of what’s been pressed
4. Girder gets the signal and performs a predefined action which in this case would be an up arrow on Beyond TV

Simple, right? :-)

Supporting Software

LM Gestion BeyondTV XMLTV Importer
BeyondTV takes advantage of an EPG (Electronic Program Guide) which allows it to schedule recordings by name (eg record all episodes of “Survivor” etc).

Only problem, the guide data that Snapstream provides is US and Canada data. Not very helpful where you live in Australia. So, this utility picks up an XMLTV file (explained later) and imports the guide data into BeyondTV. The XMLTV importer runs as a nightly scheduled task.

LM Gestion Web based program guide
Another great tool made by the same group that makes the XMLTV Importer. The web based program guide accesses the EPG data and serves it up though IIS, the built in Windows XP web server.

With this, I can now access my EPG from any internet connected computer. This allows me to schedule recordings or even watch them over the internet.

SoundSpectrum G-Force
G-Force is the most amazing visualisation I’ve ever seen. It generates artistic images and shapes on the screen which move with the music. I can watch it for hours.

JAlbum
JAlbum is a free image gallery creation tool. It scans a predefined folder with my entire photo collection in it and generates a web site out of it. This site is exposed to the internet over IIS. JAlbum runs as a nightly scheduled task.

HTPCInit
HTPCInit is a utility which I have built. It is by far the most complicated piece of software if have ever seen or written. Because the HTPC runs without a mouse, keyboard or monitor (as the output goes directly to the TV), there is no need for the mouse pointer to be seen on the screen. So, HTPCInit runs when Windows XP starts and performs two highly complicated functions. Firstly, it moves the mouse pointer to the far right of the screen. Secondly, it hides the cursor. HTPCInit is the amalgamation of my entire software development career all rolled up into one application.

TV Guide Data
Unfortunately, being in Australia there is no clean and easy way to get TV Guide data into my DVR.

The best way I’ve found is by using the ozTivo guide data service.

It takes a few steps to get it going and is explained in more detail here.

The output of this is an XMLTV file which I can then import into BeyondTV using the LM Gestion BeyondTV XMLTV Importer.

The approach replaces my old TVHarvest/XMLTVMerge approach.

RSSGenerator
A friend and I recently encountered the need for him to be able to download certain recordings from his home in an automated fashion.

Being the hardcore gurus that we both are, we decided that RSS would be the best way to syndicate the content. RSSGenerator was born. I wrote it one evening and what it does is scan a specific folder on the HTPC and generates an RSS2.0 file for him to subscribe to.

TightVNC
TightVNC is a free remote desktop control tool. It’s used when I need to access the HTPC front end to perform administrative tasks etc.

Images

Some images of the setup. Click to enlarge any of them.

-dg

v1.2 (last updated: 10 Jan 2006)