Day 1

Not much happened today. Took the machine out of the box and hooked it up to the rest of my Home Theater System.

First problems already encountered:

• The TV card’s RCA connections are in the front of the PC. The back only has a coax cable connection. Not going to be fun to connect this at a later stage. For the moment I’ll connect it to the front.
• Connected it up to my Plasma using the VGA connection
• Also tried SCART, but not impressed with the quality on the screen
• I also need to connect the TV out of the screen card to my existing system. This then distributes it through the rest of my house so I can use the HTPC almost in every room. (more on this one day). The output to the TVs are in Black & White. Can’t figure out why. Also tried using a SCART to RCA converter, but then the gfx card doesn’t even pick up the TV
• I walked through the MCE setup process. Everything went fine.
• I was concerned that the MCE transceiver won’t be able to learn the IR commands from my DSTV PVR’s remote (the DSTV PVR is like a TIVO STB satellite receiver). From previous experience using Girder I knew that even though the instructions say that you need to hold the button, that this doesn’t work. So I held the button in and then it asked me to do it again and then I only pressed it like I would normally do to change channels. It learned the IR codes this way and so far it seems like this worked.
• The DSTV PVR has a standby function to preserve the HDD. When in standby mode it takes a couple of seconds to get out of it before you can change channels. This is going to be a problem with the MCE recordings and changing channels.

Phew, the first day didn’t go to well!