James Lloyd

I have this weekend completed a new upgrade to my media center solution at home,  replacing the old Silverstone LC-16 based xbmc-live system with a mac mini. This upgrade is largely for aesthetics how ever I have had some other minor success.  the Mac Mini in question is the 2010 model, not because still has the DVD drive in it as i agree with apple that optical media is dead. The bluray drive in my LC-16 still only having been used once to check if it worked. The 2010 model was instead because the 2011 models have a choice of intel or ATI graphics which IMHO are a bit less than awesome.

I have been using XBMC on ATV2 now for a just over a month as the media centre for the main bedroom and it is proving to be well worth the £101 or $99 (Grrrr) for the hardware. Since the initial release Greenpois0n has released an un-tethered Jailbreak.  Which makes life a lot easier; previously you would have to boot the ATV2 whilst it was hooked up to your laptop. Which when doing your initial configuration would be a right PITA. There are still a couple of issues of note. The wifi didn’t work for me at all after the jailbreak which I need as have no Ethernet in the bedroom.  This was actually easily fixed by ssh on the ATV2 and running the following:

My ATV2 arrived today, which I ordered straight away after I header on twitter that the xbmc team had ported to iOS .  Obviously im being a bit bleeding edge here.  However I'm currently watching a 1080p trailer from my nas with zero visible frame drops. XBMC is a bit buggy currently but we'll let them off its only been out a couple of days. My main issue currently is the resolution of the AppleTV 2 it natively outputs in 1280x720 or 720p.  Which is fine im currently using it on a 1080p Samsung 2333hd and looks better than you'd expect for upscaling.  The big problem is ironically on a 720p,  now because of reasons I fail to understand (despite trying) 720p TV's generally have a resolution of 1366 x 768, a signal of 1280x720 is going to appear out of focus. It's still unclear as to whether the 720p output is hardware limited or whether we can adjust it to better suit 720p tv's (madness). Conclusion is it works and it works well,  the number of features xbmc brin...

Recently I have successfully migrated away from SKY HD and from Freeview+ to an entirely XBMC based solution.  Most importantly this solution currently has a very high WAF .  My setup is built using XBMC live in an overly powerful PC in a rather nice silverstone media center case. My current problem is now I have relegated all of my media to the lounge,  using the ipod dock in the kitchen with a meagre 16GB Ipod seems positively lacking when, your media centre is connected directly to a 5Tb NAS.  What happens now is you play music in the lounge and turn it way up to a probably neighbour unsuitable level to be able to properly enjoy it in the kitchen.  This is why I crave multi room audio, I wrote a while back why I think XBMC is a far better and cheaper solution than the Sonos solution, though Sonos still do have the killer feature present and correct.

This morning, I flicked on the media centre to listen to some music, browsing to music library and the music is jumping all over the shop. What appeared to be happening, was media centre re scanning my library. This was very annoying particularly as I hadn't added anything in a couple of months. So whats the solution, seeing as the wife has gone Christmas shopping, I decided to format the system and install OSx 10.4.9 an uphuck release. bit ott?

Ju st found this how to get your Vista refund!

The Zalman coolers have now been fitted, and the good news is the reduction is noise is quite substantial. The bad news is its not quite where I wanted it. All of the remaining noise is coming from the 3 HD's and the northbridge cooler.

So my media centre is now in place in the lounge, and is looking rather fabulous, even while in black. Why the manufacturers insist on changing colours from silver to black every no and then I don't know.

Yesterday I got Vista Ultimate installed on my media centre. Installation all very smooth, except vista not having the drivers for my SATA 150 controller (why not its about 3 years old). Apart from that the install is all pretty smooth and possibly quicker than XP? That may not be actual fact as I was watching the Discovery channel at the time, learning about hovercraft (essential pub quiz research).

Yesterday my silverstone LM16 Media PC case arrived, all very exciting. So last night I after getting back from City link I immediately tor apart my desktop tower case.

Tags: xbox 360 , media center extender , XVID So last night I rebuilt my PC with Media Center Edition, somthing I have been putting off for some time. Due to the epic nightmare it always turns out to be. Antics that followed : Discovered didn't have the drivers around for my SATA raid controller Found drivers Realised Cant install them from USB device as Windows will only look for them on A: drive Spend 20 minutes looking for a floppy disk Find floppy disk to find my floppy drive wont format it ( probably has had a strop through lack of attension Think Stuff it ill use the SATA 133 controller instead of the SATA 150 ( morale you can never have enough controllers on the mother board ) All is well windows installs in record time ( about 10 minutes, despite telling me at the start this was going to last 39 minutes). So I have got MCE up and running and immediately install the Xbox Media Center Extender software so I can connect my Xbox 360. This install takes quite an ...