After searching for help on this problem, and not finding any, I thought I’d post this for the benefit of others. I recently started having trouble streaming some content to my Roku, primarily live feeds from CNN and Al Jazeera. When launching the feed, the Roku would start to buffer the video and then just hang. I would have to power it off and back on to regain control. I never did find the source of the problem, but I was able to fix it by performing a factory reset. I hope this helps anyone else out there who might be having the same problem.

I’ve had an Asus Eee PC netbook for a few years. I was initially impressed with its speed and the Xandros linux load that came pre-installed. After about a year, however, I concluded that a 7″ screen is just a bit too small for me, and I discovered that the unionfs file system that Xandros used ran out of file handles every few months requiring some major maintenance before it would even boot. So, I upgraded to a larger Eee PC 900A that I found on Craigslist for $100, and I installed Eeebuntu. This satisfied me for a while, but over the past year I’ve noticed the UI starting to become sluggish (particularly in Firefox), with mouse clicks sometimes taking 5-10 seconds to register. And about a month ago, the sound driver apparently became corrupted because the speakers stopped working. So it was time, once again, for some maintenance.

I’ve written before about my travails with Linux, but I’m happy to report that things have improved dramatically — at least within the niche market of Linux flavors suitable for netbooks. In particular, I’m impressed with Leeenux, which so far has performed flawlessly on my 900A. Installing the Ubuntu version of Opera directly from the web was a snap, and because Leeenux (v4.01) has Flash bundled, I was able to avoid the painful tweaking that was necessary in the past to get Flash video working properly in Opera. Everything just worked. And you know what? That’s the way computers are supposed to work.

Abiword has supplanted OpenOffice as the word processor of choice. I’ve never used Abiword before, but it is noticeably faster than OpenOffice in opening the few test documents I tried. The other application that I use often is Remote Desktop Viewer (to maintain a headless media server) which did not come pre-installed, but the Ubuntu Software Center made it painless to add.

Installation

1. Download the .iso file
2. Format a 2GB thumb drive using FAT 16
3. Use Unetbootin to transfer the image and make the thumb drive bootable
4. Boot the drive by pressing escape at the Eee PC’s flash screen and selecting the USB device
5. Login with username ‘eee’ and no password
6. Complete installation and enjoy!

Last year, I wrote about the Lenovo Keyboard I bought, and that I wasn’t a fan. It has its good points, but overall the lack of backlighting is a deal breaker. But I’ve found a keyboard that I can definitely recommend for the Home Theater PC enthusiast.

This IOGEAR wireless keyboard is not backlit either, but since it is a full-size keyboard and intended to sit in your lap, touch typing is easy. But the real story here is the ergonomics. They have built a well-designed trackball/button combo into the right side of the keyboard. There is no right-mouse button at this location, however. On the opposite end is a left/right button combo, which is a bit odd, but there is also a scroll wheel built into the front face for your left index finger to operate. This layout takes a little getting used to, but it works and I would say it works well.

The entire case is covered with a rubberized coating that does not show fingerprints, which I like a lot, and it has rubber grips built into the bottom which makes it very comfortable to hold. The keyboard also includes a range of multimedia keys (that I guess are also programmable, although I haven’t tried to set that up yet). Overall, I am very happy with this upgrade to my HTPC.

At the suggestion of an AT&T technician, I upgraded my old router and DSL modem to this Netopia 3347 combination unit, and I am very glad I did. He notified me that my old DSL modem, a Slipstream 4100 B that I purchased at Best Buy about a year ago, was actually two or three generations old already and that upgrading to this particular device had solved a connection problem for another customer he had helped.

I had been experiencing the same connection problem when streaming video from the internet. Since setting up our Home Theater PC, and saying goodbye to DirecTV, we have been watching a lot more streaming content, Netflix in particular. The video from Netflix and a few other sites (CNET, YouTube, etc.) would frequently stutter or pause for long periods to buffer content, making it unwatchable, but upgrading to this new hardware has solved all of those problems. It’s also one less box taking up space and electricity.

An integral part of my Home Theater PC build is the antenna, and when I first wrote about the hardware, I wasn’t even aware how complicated things would become in this area. The RCA ANT1251, which is little more than a pair of glorified rabbit ears, did not perform well at all in my house. I quickly abandoned it for the Terk HDTVa, which I found delivered a decent signal from my attic, and I was satisfied for several weeks.

That was until things started to heat up. Around the end of April, as the days started to get longer and hotter, the temperature in my attic apparently exceeded the operating range of the Terk unit, and the signal became severely degraded on virtually all channels. So it was time to begin searching for a better alternative.

During my initial research, I had turned up an instructional video on YouTube for making your own HD antenna out of coat hangers. So I figured why not? I’d give it a shot. I had all of the materials available, so it wouldn’t cost me anything. The final product performed very well for what was — a free antenna made of coat hangers — but it wasn’t consistent enough for my liking, even after some modifications suggested by other sites around the ‘net, and it also could not pull in one very essential channel: PBS. If you have young kids, you surely know what I mean.

Back to the drawing board. I briefly considered alternate DIY designs, with more sophisticated materials, but I was tired of experimenting at this point, and I just wanted something that worked. So it was time to splurge on the Cadillac of over-the-air antennas, the Channel Master 4228. I even ordered a Winegard Pre-Amplifier, to counteract the signal loss of the fifty foot run of cable from the attic, and the splitter I am using to feed multiple TVs. This seems to be the winning combination for my configuration, although I’ve only been using it a few days, so we’ll see if the late summer heat has any further detrimental effects.

If this doesn’t work, the only step left is a rooftop installation, which I am hoping to avoid — not only for the expense, but the external appearance. However, if that is the only way to get a decent digital signal, I suppose it’s worth it. Anything is better than going back to cable or satellite.

The Lenovo N5901 wireless keyboard is a small handheld remote with a full QWERTY keyboard and built-in trackball. It seems well suited for home theater (HTPC) applications, however, it has a number of drawbacks.

The first, and most noticeable, is that in the home theater environment, there is a desire to control light levels, so it is typically pretty dark. The keyboard on this remote is not backlit, so it is impossible to type on it in the dark. Touch typing is not an option either, as the remote is too small and must be held in your hands.

Other annoyances include the fact that the keyboard has a power switch rather than being smart enough to power itself off when idle. So this means if you forget to power it off, it will sit all night with the trackball LED illuminated until the batteries go dead. I’ve also had some issues with the purported 30 foot range on this remote, which is surprising, since I plugged the USB receiver into the front of my HTPC and I am sitting less than 5 feet from it. But I still find it necessary to hold the remote up in the air slightly for the signal to transmit.

Overall, I am not pleased with this offering (glad I only paid half price for it), and will continue looking for better alternatives, as I await the release of the Boxee Remote around Christmas time.

A few weeks ago I discovered a very cool and very useful Boxee feature of which I was previously unaware. On the right side of the Boxee home screen is your queue. Normally, this is populated automatically when you include shows in “My Shows”, or when you add an individual video that you find while browsing within Boxee on your TV. But, what if you find a cool video while browsing the web on your computer, and you want to remember to watch it later when you’re kicked back on the couch? Well, that’s simple. Just drag the Boxee Bookmarklet to your browser window, and the next time you are on a page with a video you want to watch, you click the button that says “Add to Boxee” and like magic, the next time you run Boxee, the video shows up in your queue. It’s so cool!

It’s been about six months since we bought this memory foam mattress at Sam’s. At the time, I read every single comment on the page, left by dozens (if not hundreds) of people who had purchased the same mattress. They all expressed the same apprehension about buying a mattress online, without ever having laid on it, but in the end, they all did it anyway, keeping their fingers crossed that they would not live to regret it. There were only a handful of truly negative comments about the mattress — overwhelmingly the owners of this mattress were happy with it. I can now add myself to that list.

We have been very pleased with how comfortable this mattress is, and for a memory foam mattress of this size, you certainly cannot beat the price. The only question now is how long will it last? This mattress is not flippable, and very few of the commenters had been sleeping on theirs for more than a few months, so it’s hard to say how durable the foam is, or whether we will end up needing to use the product’s 10-year warranty. In the meantime, I’ve never slept better, and I don’t wake up with a back ache, like I did most mornings with our old mattress.

[This is Part IV of a series on building your own HTPC]

Once you’ve assembled the hardware, and collected the software, it is time to begin your install. You can expect this entire process to take between one and two hours to complete. Please follow these instructions:

1. Install Windows
   It is assumed that you partitioned your hard drive as specified in the previous post. When the Windows install is complete, don’t forget to format the D: drive with 64K block size. You will also need to disable User Account Control, and the Windows firewall to save yourself some headaches later on.
2. Install Hauppauge software
   Insert the CD that came with the Hauppauge tuner, choose your language and then install both the drivers and WinTV (although WinTV may actually be optional, I’m not sure) and then reboot
3. Install Gigabyte motherboard drivers
   Download the latest drivers from the Gigabyte web site. It is assumed that you have already done this on a different machine with internet access, since without the LAN driver installed, you will not be able to connect with the HTPC. So download these drivers in advance and either burn them to a CD, or put them on a thumb drive. Specifically, you will need the Realtek HD Audio, which provides Dolby Pro Logic II support through both the HDMI connection and the optical digital audio port (if your receiver has one). You will also need the chipset driver package which includes the ATI Radeon 4200 HD video driver necessary if you are driving a true 1080p HD display. Install both of these drivers and then reboot.
4. Install GBPVR
   Early on, I had some issues with GBPVR crashing. If while configuring it, you run a channel scan, and for some reason it does not detect all of your local channels and you force a rescan, there is a bug that causes it to crash when you start mapping the channels to your Electronic Programming Guide. I recommend you join the GBPVR forum. There is a wealth of support information there which is publicly available, however, the search function is a lot easier to use if you are a registered user and logged in. The Boxee forum uses the same software, so the same is true for it. I recommend joining both.

   I also recommend joining Schedules Direct and paying the $20 annual fee for their TV guide data. There are a couple of free sites out there, but I can’t vouch for the quality of their data, and I can say that Schedules Direct is already integrated into GBPVR, so setting it up to pull your TV listings every night is a snap.

   Download GBPVR (I am assuming version 1.4.7) and install it, and follow these instructions to configure it.

   Now install the Visual J# redistributable, followed by the WizRecordingRename utility, which you will install into the GBPVR folder. This utility allows automatic renaming of the recording files that GBPVR creates. This is important because Boxee will automatically catalog the recordings and download IMDB data about them, but only if the files follow Boxee’s particular naming convention. Once you have installed these two items, copy the PostProcessing.bat and the WizRenameRecording.xml files into the GBPVR folder.

5. Install Boxee
   In order for Netflix to work within Boxee, you will need to install Silverlight, so do that first. Also, to make sure you are using the version of Flash that Boxee expects, go to http://www.boxee.tv/flash and install it from there. I can tell you how critical it is that you get the right version of Flash. There are a lot of versions out there, but only one that makes Boxee work. Lastly, install the Boxee beta (I am assuming version 0.9.20.10711).
6. Install EventGhost
   I struggled with getting the Hauppauge-included MCE remote to work correctly. The source of the problem is that the IR receiver plugs directly into the Hauppauge card, and is not a USB device, so it uses special drivers and Windows does not natively recognize the events that are generated when you push buttons on the remote. As it turns out, you don’t need anything beyond the drivers on the Hauppauge CD. You just need to disable the IR program that gets installed with WinTV, by removing it from the Startup folder, and then install EventGhost. Run EventGhost and go to File -> Options and set it to autostart and minimize to the system tray when closed. Then copy the HTPC.xml file to your Windows 7 user folder and load it into Eventghost (File -> Open…) — it then becomes your default config file and will be loaded automatically every time you start the machine. I have it set to autostart Boxee too, but you can remove that if you like.

[Continued in Part V, The Results...]

[This is Part III of a series on building your own HTPC]

I started out thinking this would be a Linux-based PC, but two things changed my mind. First, I’ve written before about my travails with Linux. I want to like Linux, I really do. But I can’t. Mabye I’m just not geeky enough, or maybe I’m just lazy, but configuring the guts of an operating system is not enjoyable, and I will avoid it every chance I get. If that means I buy Windows, so be it. Second, and more importantly, at the time of this writing streaming Netflix movies to a Linux box was still not an option — this was a deal-breaker.

So I began with an old OEM copy of Windows XP for this build. Let me say that you can get this build to work with XP SP2 (I know because I had it working, but then got lazy about my configuration management and wound up in tweak hell that I couldn’t seem to back out of), but you might be better off avoiding the hassles, and investing in an upgrade to Windows 7. This is the path I chose, and for the purposes of this guide, I am assuming the Windows 7 OS. But if you choose to go the XP route, I’ll just point out that SATA support is not native in XP. So you will need to obtain SATA drivers from the motherboard manufacturer, and create either an install floppy with these drivers, or a slipstreamed XP install disk with the drivers integrated. I won’t go into details here on how to do this, but I used a free tool called NLite, and it was relatively painless. It even allows you to remove all of the unnecessary Windows components, and I was able to get my install time down to about 18 minutes.

An important thing to keep in mind when installing Windows is that you will enjoy better performance by creating at least two partitions and putting Windows on one and storing your media on the other. I partitioned the 500GB drive into a 20GB C: drive and a 480GB D: drive. After your install, the first thing you should do is format the 480GB partition with a 64K block size (4K is the default). The larger block size lends itself to fewer and less frequent drive accesses, which will prevent jerky or choppy video when you play back recorded HD content, and drive fragmentation becomes less of a problem as well.

There are two main software components that you will be installing and configuring: Boxee and GBPVR. My goal was to integrate these two as much as possible since they are both free, relatively mature, products with more or less mutually exclusive, but highly complimentary, features. GB-PVR is, as the name would suggest, a Personal Video Recorder that uses the TV tuner card to record over-the-air television to the hard drive, and Boxee provides everything else from my list of requirements. These two packages were not designed to work together, but I’ve found that they can be made to play nice with each other, and perform satisfactorily — at least until something better comes along.

One caveat right up front: if you install Windows 7 and think you might want to play around with Windows Media Center, do that first. When you’re done playing with it, reinstall Windows and never run it again because when you run it you will be prompted to install all manner of helper apps that Media Center needs to function, and one or more of them prevent Boxee from working correctly. I learned this the hard way. Let me add that I like Media Center. I like it a lot. The user interface is the slickest and most sophisticated I’ve seen, configuration was painless, and it does everything! With one exception: the Internet TV module is severely limited and was enough to convince me that Boxee was a better choice. Although Boxee is still in beta testing, all you have to do is install it and play with it for a few minutes to see that it has far greater potential for future expansion.

[Continued in Part IV, The Install...]