The Wild Ride of Moguai…

Ok, so a while ago I bought all of the equipment for a DVR, and I got fed up with it… I took everything apart and put the disk on Sam’s desktop and just said the hell with it and left everything in a big pile of expensive parts…

Well, since the XBox360 now supports DIVX and I can stream media through UPNP I decided that I need to get back on track and work to make things how I initially wanted… You know, being able to stream movies, music, and my favorite tv shows to my tv through the xbox, screw the svideo problems i was having before…

So, I piece everything back together, ensuring I have the best secondary hardware in the house in the machine (yes, I was a jackass and compared my mom’s hardware in her desktop to that of what is in my DVR, but I already had the good stuff…). After failing that mission (well, I think I passed since it was mother superior!) I got to work…

I decided that I had wanted to go with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, so I got to work and got to patching, moving things around, and after getting pissed at a black screen on windows setup and referring to google, I got windows installed and MCE running…

A quick “what was” for those wondering, when you run the Windows Installer when you’re installing from running a Linux distribution (CentOS/RHEL in my case) you’ll want to use a disk fix utility to just blindly format the drive to NTFS, I used the Ultimate Boot CD. What happens is that the Windows Installer cannot read the Ext2 partition and dies, leaving you with 0 information on what happened…

So, now that I had WXP MCE installed, I decided to work on hardware and see what I could get to work with my Hauppauge 350 multimedia card (hardware decoding baby!)… So I get all my drivers installed, and I load up MCE… It doesn’t like the radio function of my Hauppauge… Moreover, it doesn’t even recignise that it’s plugged into a media source… Nor does it utilize either through the media center connection to the XBox… Such a let down… (I will write another entry on setting up the XBox360 to a media center, so be patient for a next entry)

So, here I am just waiting for an answer, so I visit the xbox360 website and look for more options… Well, one option was to use Windows Media Connect (WMC) to connect my XBox to my PC… Well, this uses uPNP to make a connection… What have I been using before? Same crap, different program… BUT, this one doesn’t keep a library, it seeks all data live, when you look for it… So no need to make updates every time I add a new file…

So I get it all installed, set my media folders (Digital Camera, Digital Camera Corder dump directory, etc) and I go to the XBox and look for new devices… WHAM, “DVR - 1″ is a new device on the network… So I connect looking for video, and what do I find? All of my video! 0 problems!

So, I have a working DVR now, so I can ease off of Sam’s computer… Well, not really, I have a lot of stuff there too… Next posting? WMC for XP a pain to find…