2018 Update

Home renovations were made in the winter of 2017-18.  New floors, painting, new kitchen counter, backsplash, and home automation. 

With the TV in our bedroom and other devices, we needed to add another wired ethernet to our east bedroom wall.  We now have four hub/switches connected to our cable modem.  Most items are hard-wired to our 10-100 network.

One of the great things from the renovation is all the home automation.  Almost everything can be controlled by Alexa.  The blinds go up and down on voice command (and schedule), the TV can turn on (and change channels), lights can turn on/off, and the sweepers can be deployed.  All by voice command!

With so many wireless devices now, we had some trouble since the wireless router had a limit of number of concurrent devices.  Two repeaters, three desktops, five (or more) laptops, six or more alexas, five (or more) tablets.  Nothing too fancy or new, but it adds up.

The SteamLink and Steam Controller are pretty nice to sit in the den and play on the big 4K TV from the couch.  That was nice.

Made it through security with 20/21.  Thee final one will meet us there.  Wish us luck!

Christmas 2011

Been quite a while since this was updated!

Last Christmas (December 2010) our Christmas gift to ourselves was a new 42" LCD for our Kitchen. We attached our little netbook to this TV, along with a nice bluetooth keyboard so you can surf from the bar in our kitchen while PIPing TV. We also put a Ikea desk in the eating area with a desktop PC.

But both of these were running off of our wireless network, which seems a little flaky and slow. Plus, the TV had wires dropping down to plug in the wall.

This Christmas, with the help of my little brother Paul, we did a little work...

We ran HDMI and VGA cables down from the TV through the wall. This hid the cables so they are not as noticeable from the TV. They come out from the bar by a bookshelf where the DVR and netbook sit. We also ran Cat5 from the den stack to this area so that we could put a router in the kitchen. We ran Cat5 from the bookshelf under the house and over to the desk. To power the TV and DVR without obvious wires, we added two power outlets, one behind the TV and one behind the bookshelf. Both are run off the power outlet inside the bar.

So basically, we had to put in five new boxes, including two new power boxes. Cables had to run down inside the wall from behind the kitchen TV, under the sink, and out on top of the bookshelf.

Paul spent a lot of time under the sink, helping pull wires. Thanks Paul!

PS, last year we dropped our Tivo and went with Time Warner signature dual DVR system. I hate the interface on the Cistco TWC boxes, but you get a lot of HD channels, on demand, and it works a lot more than the Tivo did. They also do our phone now, along with internet and cable.

2009 Christmas

So this Christmas we finally managed a BluRay player, a PS3. The decade old Sony DVD was starting to fail on playing some DVDs. We also bought a Guitar Hero set, which requires a mic. Also, we had realized that some of our speakers were not working! It was time to reorganize the stack!

We spent and afternoon taking most everything down and labeling it with a nice label maker (better than tape and marker I hope). I also put some nice speaker end caps on so that the wires may stay in the crappy zone 2 speaker splitter. We now have all our channels in the den as well as kitchen and deck! The center channel was totally disconnected at the amp. A rear channel was not working, but I was smart enough to go look at the speaker knowing it was near an area where the kids play before I took all the speaker wires off the amp looking for a problem.

Everything went back well, but we are still having troubles getting some HDTV channels. We can't tell if it is the cable card (we have a single M-card in the Tivo) or the Tuning adapter or the signal. We get encrypted channels, so you would not think it was the cable card. We get some HD SDV channels, so you would not think it was the channel adapter. They replaced all the wires into the house, and now think it could be the tap at the street. The TWC guy said the tap was fine! What is going on?

Anyway, the PS3 looks great. We can only run at 1080i instead of 1080p due to a limitation of the Onkyo amp or we get flickering. Blu-ray looks great. I did not know this, but can tie into a PC for access to movies, music, and photos very easily. Tivo and Wii can do this as well, but the speed and quality were terrible. The PS3 is wonderful! Now in the bedroom I am not running any HTPC software, just a simple TV application from my USB PCTV stick (which I got from woot for $30). It is slow to start, but it does TV well. And we can still Slingbox from the den. But no nice front-end application in the bedroom.

As for Guitar Hero, the main thing I did was cable tie a USB extension so that a singer hopefully won't rip the Wii off the stack.

I put a little board under the amp to help hold up the many cords. If I had to do this again, the table itself would have a triangle extending behind the main riser to help support and hide cords. I may put something in the side so you don't see so many wires as you walk past, but maybe nobody notices unless they are really inspecting it. It looks fine from den.

We replaced the old box in the bedroom with a newer faster bigger box. It seems to be working better than the old one. It can even run the Tivo Desktop server (upgraded), Tiversity to stream to the PS3, and ORB to stream to just about anything (laptop online, cell, etc).

Also, the Wii sensor bar had been giving me fits. The one we had was too small for our room, so when you sit on the couch it would jitter a bit. The solution is to get the IR LEDs a little further apart. I bought a cheap plastic bar from monprice and with my FIL we cut it in half, rewired it with some extension wire, and hooked it into a transformer. It actually works! It also seems to look a lot cleaner, as each side sits right in front of a TV riser. However, I just just some electrical tape to cover the cut-away ends, but that actually looks ok the way I did it. The area under the TV looks much cleaner than it did once the wires are pushed back. The old bar is still there, just turned around so the LEDs are not seen. I left it there in case our hack job does not last.

Back to my TV-

We got back from a year abroad. Thankfully Time Warner had rolled out the Channel Adapter so we can get all their HD channels now (but no on demand). They use Switched Digital Video (SDV) so that they don't send out all the HD channels at once, you have to request a channel and they send it. This saves some bandwidth assuming there are lots of obscure channels that are rarely watched. Basically, I had a new box on my stack that goes between the TiVo and the cable and plugs into power and the TiVo USB port.

We ordered a USB HD stick for our HTPC. I ripped out the two PCI cards for tuning HD and dual Cable (low def) and it is now stable. The USB stick is slow and the video gets blocky after a few hours, but it works much better now for watching TV in the bedroom.

I also ponied up for TiVo Desktop Plus. This allows us to transfer and watch video from the HTPC to the TiVo without too much trouble. So now we can watch videos in the den from the HTPC using TiVo Desktop and the reverse. Not all as slick as I had hoped, but not too bad.

USB enclosure

So I still had problems with my BeyondTV HTPC system. The damn thing would need a reboot every few hours. Finally, I got a USB enclosure to put my big HD in, removed the extra IDE PCI card, and installed the new 4.8.1 version of Beyond TV. It seems that the system may now be stable. And I can take nearly a TB of video with me when I travel easily!

I also recently bought a 1 TB drive for work-related stuff. Only $230! That is freaking amazing. Someone should make a cheap device to RAID cheap USB/firewire drives. Something like drobo but just plug in a bunch of drives and let it appear like a single mass drive?

HTPC Update

Hauppage finally sent back my PVR 500 card. They were nice enough to do a RMA even though I had already had it for months. It never worked and never worked and new drivers never made it work, so they finally fixed it. Or maybe they sent a new one? Who cares, now every channel is crisp and clear. A good SD signal with a good encoder actually looks pretty good on a LCD. Deinterlacing is nice too, but it makes my system lag a bit...

Also, I got a response from Snapstream about problems with my beyond TV installation. They said it was a HD problem. After inspection, it looks like I had my master HD in the slave spot and the slave HD in the master spot. Swapping that and it seemed to work through the night, fingers crossed.

Beyond TV Issues

The HTPC in the bedroom has issues. We have a WinTV 500 MCE card that does hardware encoding of two channels at once. Problem is, it is very grainy, especially on low channels. Even the good channels are wavy. I have tried everything to get it to work, but finally I am sending it back to Hauppage to get replaced. For now, it does a moderately terrible job of tuning stations.

I settled on Beyond TV as my software. It was easy to use and it worked. Compared to my problems setting up MythTV and Media Portal, Beyond was super simple and it worked. Mostly. After I had actually paid to register the software ($100) we realized that it crashed every night if you were watching live TV. Great. Now I have to try to get it working to a point where it is stable.

But really, the main advantage of this setup is the mpg files it records in: They are playable on the Tivo HD. I can record TV shows on the HTPC then move them to the Tivo. It also works with DVDs. So we have two more tuners and nearly a TB of storage added to our AV system.

Network Wiring

We use a cable modem from Time Warner. We have slowly been adding more and more to our network. Since we have a Wii, Tivo HD, and Slingbox that need fast connections, I have a 10/100 switch that also connects the HTPC in our bedroom (supposedly). I tried to use the installed Cat 5 cable to splice the run from the switch to the bedroom, but my wiring appears to not be so good. I may have to pull a new cable into our bedroom, but the existing hole is quite tight. Luckily, we had not trouble adding a network cable into the hole with 25 wires already there, we left our pull ropes in place. My wife and I had a great system last year with pull ropes and a loop. Glad to know it still works...

Update 1/2/08: Of course it did not work. I got the cable tester and wire 1 was dead. After reseating it on both ends of the cable, it still did not work. So I cut the cable under the house and pulled it up the little bitty hole with the help of my wife, wired it up, and it works! Now we have a 10/100 wired network in our house with three major locations: upstairs office+ teleco closet, den, master bedroom. Now if the HTPC would line out and work...

Switched Digital; Time Warner Stinks

So the cable guys came to my house for the third time this week. I had also called in to tech support about five times. They could not get the cable card to work with the Tivo HD to get all the channels. We started with two S-cards that do single stream decoding, then I got a M-card that handles multiple streams. Some channels worked (ESPN, Discovery) but some did not (ESPN 2, MTV HD). We could not figure out what was the issue. I knew some people had trouble with Tivo and cable cards and I knew they were only one way (no on-demand) but I assumed everything would work for us.

Finally someone at tech support was smart enough to realize that Time Warner is using switched digital. This is a 2-way scheme that sends a request for a specific channel that is then routed. This way they save bandwidth, since these channels are rarely used, so some channels can be used for multiple signals.

This means we get the following:

• ABC
• NBC
• CBS
• Fox
• Public TV
• TNT HD
• Discovery HD
• ESPN HD

For $7 a month we get the enhanced HD tier:

• HD Net
• HD Net Movites
• Mojo
• Universal

But Universal is on switched digital. This is also where Battlestar Gallactica in HD airs...

I told the cable guy I was goint to sue Time Warner. Maybe I should.

The tech support lady was somewhat helpful, she gave me three months free on the HD tier, so that is $21. Since I only get 3/4 channels, that seems like a decent break (almost).

The real problem is the plethora of HD channels I am missing due to use of switched digital. Home and cooking channels for my wife. Music and videos.

Although they advertise channels available in HD "free with basic cable subscription" at http://www.timewarnercable.com/SouthCarolina/products/HDTVAvailableChannels.html

I cannot get many of them due to the switched digital issue.

• HGTV
• History HD
• ESPN2
• TBS HD
• Food HD
• M HD
• A&E HD
• Golf HD
• National Geographic HD
• CNN HD

So this is false advertising and I really think I should sue...

They have a solution. A USB dongle that allows for 2-way communication. Due out in the second quarter of 2008. Time Warner is a monopoly and they are abusing their monopoly power and should be sued for not getting FCC mandated cable cards to work.

Recent System Stack

More recent picture of stack. Switch, slingbox, speaker switch on left then Leapfrog and Wii on right. Tivo HD on amp on DVD player.

Old Pictures of System

The old stack of equipment on the old shelf. No Wii, slingbox, switch, or leapfrog. Old stinky SA 8300 DVR.

The corner showing the swing out shelf with components.

TV in alcove over fireplace. Notice Orb Speakers are mounted a bit high. This was partially by design, partially due to limitations of access for wires. The imaging is not bad, even though they are nearly three feet above the TV.

Tivo HD, Slingbox, HTPC

So I got my wife (and myself) a Tivo HD for Christmas. Very nice! We also received a Slingbox AV. The Tivo is almost working (cable card issues) but even now I can see the system will be very nice.

After downloading the Tivo Togo desktop to my HTPC, I published my music and photos directories. I put shortcuts from my TV and home video directories in the proper folders as well. The music and photos showed up on the Tivo immediately. After some time and a few reboots, some of the videos showed up in the "Now Showing" portion of the Tivo.

The HTPC with Beyond TV is currently set to record in Mpeg 2 to a given directory. They automatically put the show information and a date in the file name. Amazingly, all my BTV HTPC shows appear in the listing for the HTPC on the Tivo! So now, you can watch all my HTPC shows in the den. Of course, the card is bad so these are grainy SD videos at best, but it is pretty slick to have access to your HTPC videos from the Tivo. Problem is, my AVIs and DVDs don't show up yet.

When watching these videos, the tivo starts to download them. It gives you the option to watch as it streams, but sometimes it is slow downloading and you have to pause. Ideally, you pick a show to download, watch something for a bit, then go watch your show. You also have to delete it, you can't just stream it from the HTPC.

The slick part is using the sling box to watch the Tivo. Now, I can easily watch the Tivo using the HTPC in the bedroom with the sling box. No Tivo desktop downloads, just watch like I was there. The quality is not bad, even for HD stuff. The HTPC runs at 1920x1200, and it looks ok when slingbox is streaming video. And the slingbox works at work and on my treo cell! Woohoo.

The system is not perfect, but it certainly is fairly slick and polished at this point. Other than Beyond TV needing daily reboots, the system appears stable. Now if Time Warner could get off their butts and get my cable card working!

BeyondTV in HTPC

So I finally go a working PC in our bedroom. After struggling with MythTV installs, I finally gave up and ran XP with Beyond TV. This installed easily and works nicely. The interface is snappy. The interface is intuitive, like a Tivo, but generally more options. Using a WinTV 500 card, I can record two streams at once. It seems to work well with finding shows and dealing with conflicts and priority issues.

I also got Beyond Media, so I can watch DVDs, home video, pictures, and MP3s as well. They have a plugin to stream XM radio too. This is slick overall, but it is not integrated with Beyond TV, they are two separate applications. No big deal, I mostly use the TV application. It would be nice to have the skins be similar though...

We have had problems that are still not sorted out. I got a dud Win TV card that has a terrible signal. They switched up production about a year ago and I got one of the first new cards that did not have working drivers, and still after using the drivers it is still not great. I have an RMA to send it back.

The overall system is nice but loud. I should get a new Mobo with a quiet fan, but that is a job for another day.

The biggest issue is that Beyond TV dies on me. We leave live TV on overnight and the system generally hangs by morning. I sent the following the them, but after two days I have heard nothing:

While running BTV and BMedia, the system is never stable more than 24 hours.  We start live TV at night when we go to sleep, by morning the system is hung.

Menu bars, window frames are black, the little images in the tray are black.  The warning says no D3D device available.

Sometimes it loses the Hauppage Wintv 500 location and claims no devices are present.

Sometimes it loses the TV recording directory, so it can't record.

Sometimes it locks the machine so hard you have to unplug it (not just hold power).  Usually, the OS is still running but killing all the BTV processes does not seem to fix the issue or allow you to restart without a reboot.

Sometimes it loses all the setup information, so you have to enter your shows to record again from scratch and put in your configuration.

I have turned off XP system screen savers and the BTV screen savers.

I turned off auto updates, thinking that was causing trouble.

I turned off ShowSqueeze which was scheduled after midnight (seems to happen mostly at night).

The system is still not stable for long periods of time.

Noting interesting shows in the logs.

SA 8300 HD PVR

So for the last year we have had a Scientific Atlanta 8300 HD PVR. We used a Tivo Series 2 for years and loved it. The SA 8300 is like night and day. This thing is terrible in so many ways. I can't believe Time Warner charges people for this piece of garbage. Some problems include:

• HDCP Problems - We constantly had problems with HDCP using the SA8300. When viewing TV, we would often have a error code displayed that required us to turn off all the components and sometimes the TV. Thanks DRM!
  
• Interface Quality - The interface is kludgy at best. It looks like something from 1980. Text is blocky, everything is blocky.
  
• Picture Quality - I assumed the HD signals were just crappy using the SA 8300. Using the Tivo, you can see that HD shows actually look nice. Artifacts are rare with the Tivo.
  
• Season Pass Management - There is not an interface to specify priority of season pass management. Also, season passes seem to be get lost periodically.
  
• Interruptions When Viewing - It would often put up a silly message while you are viewing to let you know that it is about to record something. Who cares, unless you actually are watching live TV and you need to make a decision?
  
• Fast Forward - No 30 second skip, fast forward does not auto-correct after you stop like a Tivo.
  
• Remote - The remote is a big clunky boxy thing.

On the positive side, it does record two different streams at once. It does PIP (who uses this?). It can be expanded with a eSATA drive. It can do on demand.

Even with the headaches I have had with the Tivo HD, I still prefer it by about 10 to 1 over the SA 8300 HD box.

Wiring

Wiring is a big freaking mess when dealing with modern component and AV systems.

Our Onkyo amp does switching, so all you have to run is a HDMI cable. I ran extra cables between the TV and amp, including a component bundle (RGB +LR audio for five total RCAs) and a few extra RCA cables for SD video and audio.

The DVD player was pretty easy. We only have an old Sony DVD player, so it has RCA for video and anlog audio, as well as optical for digital audio. That runs directly to the amp.

Wiring the DVR was not bad either. It had HDMI out, so that runs to the amp. Optical for digital audio also runs to the amp. The Onkyo receiver cannot send digital audio to zone 2 (kitchen/deck) so we also ran RCAs for analog audio to the amp.

The Wii connection was also quite easy to put in. Just run three RCAs for video and audio to the amp.

We recently go a slingbox AV, so I ran analog video and audio from the DVR to the slingbox. I actually had to get some RCA splitters so the audio could run to both the slingbox and the analog amp input (for zone 2 in the kitchen or deck). The slingbox takes S video inputs as well, so I ran that from the Tivo too.

The Wii gave us trouble using our wireless (dropping out a lot) so I go a 10/100 wired USB adapter for it. No troubles. With so many internet boxes (Tivo, Slingbox, Wii) we also had to add a ethernet switch.

We wanted speakers on the deck and in the Kitchen, so we also had to get a speaker switch box.

So the stack of equipment includes (from the bottom):

• Sony DVD player
  
• Onkyo amp
  
• Tivo HD (was SA 8300 HD PVR)
  
• Left side:
  
• Speaker switch box
  
• Slingbox AV
  
• Linksys 10/100 Switch
  
• Right Side:
  
• Wii
• Leapfrog with wireless keyboard
  

Instead of running exposed wires, we spent a long time running cables in our crawl space and attic. I also had to put in a new power outlet for all the components. The wiring into the wall includes:

• HDMI cable (35 foot to TV, online for ~$75)
  
• 7 speaker wires (R, L, Center, Sur L&R, Back L&R)
  
• 1 RCA for sub
  
• 2 Coaxial for cable (1 unused)
  
• 1 Ethernet
  
• 2 speaker wires for deck
  
• 2 speaker wires for kitchen
  
• 2 RCA for audio from TV to amp (hooked in, never used)
  
• 2 RCA for backup video from amp to TV (hooked in, only used for amp setup)
  
• 5 RCA for HD to TV (RGB+RL, never used, not hooked up now)

For a grand total of 25 wires going into a little 2 inch hole in the wall. Some go up into the attic, some go down into the basement. After spending a few weekends last year doing this project with my wife, I am proud that we are not divorced after completing this task. It looks very nice now, IMHO and it is a nice project to stand back and look at. If you pay someone to install your wires in the wall, whatever you pay is insufficient. This is a terrible job to have to do.

We ran the amp-tv cables down to the crawl space and up the wall to the alcove over the fireplace. Luckily, the original room wiring showed me where to run wires near the fireplace. We bought a stiff fiberglass rod for poking and pulling wires, this helped a lot. The flexible snake was useless. We devised a system where we would run a nylon rope up with a knot. One person would tie a cable onto the rope then the other would pull the rope up. We did this repeatedly as needed and left the ropes in place in case we ever needed to pull more cable.

Speaker wires and Cat 5 Ethernet went up into the attic area. Some speaker wires (rear surround, sub) went into the craw space along with the coax for cable. Once the holes in the framing were cut and the rope was run, running the cable was easy. Figuring out where to cut the holes in the floor and wall was the scary part. Luckily, we did not have any disasters (yet). Wires run into the wall in a nice fashion and I put a big plate on. You could put pro plates on, but with 25 connections it would take a lot of plates. As it is now, 25 wires go through a plate into the wall. Power is nearby as well.

Note, exterior walls are difficult to deal with. They have insulation, so we avoided using them completely. This made running a rear surround wire difficult in one case.

Here is an old picture of the wiring from the side:



Update 12/31/07: We decided to try and run Cat5 from the switch to the bedroom through the crawlspace, so we had to pull a cable up from the crawl space. That actually went very well, but my splicing of the existing cat5 cable was not so good...

Component Setup

So last year, I got a promotion. My wife and I decided to celebrate by upgrading our AV system.

We ended up getting a 52 inch Aquos LCD with 1080p, an Onkyo amp, and some speakers from Orb Audio. The cable company supplied a SA 8300 HD PVR. After a four hour wait in the parking lot of a Target on a cold morning in February, we also had a Wii. We wired up everything on the dining room table to test and tweak, then we started to install...

The TV just perfectly fits over the fireplace in our den. With about 1/4 inch on each side (if that) it is the perfect width. This is also nice, since we had an alcove over the fireplace, so all the wires can go behind the TV and it is pretty flush to the mantle. Also, with a mantle, there is no crazy wall mounting to do, it just sits there and the wires are all easily coiled behind. We put painted board in above and below to hide the void space behind, it looks pretty darn good IMHO.

We have a corner of the room that is near a window and walkway. The area is about 2x2 feet, so it is about perfect for components. We could not find suitable furniture to fit, so we decided to try a shelf for components. Also, this may keep the kids out of them a bit. After two iterations, we found a TV shelf on a swivel arm that would support 100 lbs. The problem was the metal shelf they provided was flimsy, but we propped the system on there anyway. I finally made a new shelf out of four layers of 1/4 inch MDF glued and bolted together. After routing, filling, priming and painting, the new shelf looks ok. The nice thing about this setup, the arm swings so I can get access to the back of the components pretty easily. We mounted the 17x17 inch shelf at an angle, so the wires are also hidden pretty well. You don't notice them from the front or either side. This should be great until the kids pile up something and pull down the stack of components.

Tivo HD for Christmas!

I went ahead and bought my wife a Tivo HD for Christmas. I asked her if I could give her something I wanted too, and she was worried about what she may be getting. A new drill? A band-saw? She appeared totally surprised and actually cried when she opened it.

Setup was initially fine. Took a while to download everything and reboot, but eventually it all worked. The cable guy came the day after Christmas to install cable cards, but after about an hour only one appeared to work. It never actually got authorized, so it was not working.

I called two or three times to tech support at time Warner, but they could not activate it. They sent out another group of techs. This time, they brought a M card as I had requested. This time, it actually paired up but I still could not receive a lot of the channels. Some digital came in and some HD, but not everything. Very odd. The card says no EMMs are received, so maybe it is not really working? Or maybe they broadcast some channels without encryption ? Why would they broadcast ESPN (works) in the clear but encrypt ESPN 2 (does not work)? Very odd... More later.