A little over a year ago, we built a new computer to use as a home theater PC (HTPC) in our family room.  The PC runs Gentoo linux, with the MythTV front end  - we use it as a DVR.  We’ve made a couple of improvements since we initially built the computer to set it up with a wireless-N ethernet bridge for streaming content from a server and to set up an RF remote control so we don’t have to use the keyboard for navigation.

One way in which our MythTV setup wasn’t quite ideal yet, though, was that we still needed to open the TV cabinet to turn the HTPC on and off separately from the TV.  We’ve done some reading on how to set the system up to power up/shut down based on key presses from the RF remote control, but it’s a rather complex setup.  Tonight while we were walking through Sears, though, we saw this Craftsman Automatic Power Switch that is intended for use with power tools and we got the idea to give it a try with our MythTV system in the family room.

Automatic Power Switch

We have the TV plugged in to the outlet labeled “Power Tool” and the ethernet bridge & HTPC plugged into the two “Accessory” outlets. After updating the BIOS settings on the PC to have it boot on power, the computer now starts booting as soon as the TV turns on.  When we turn the TV off, we also cut power to the PC and the ethernet bridge to avoid any parasite draw from those devices.  I suppose it works similarly to a stereo receiver with plugs on the back for other components to turn on and off at the same time, but since we don’t have a receiver in the family room, the power switch does the trick.

We were a little concerned that using a device intended for power tools wouldn’t work correctly for a television because the TV might either not pull enough power when the it was on or the it might pull too much power when it was off.  Luckily, though, that turned out to not be the case.  The whole television set-up is a lot more user-friendly now that we don’t have to separately turn on and shut down the PC and we like the fact that it’s a lot greener solution than what we had before because it eliminates any power draw from the ethernet bridge and HTPC when they’re not in use.  For about $20, we think it was a good buy.

Almost a year ago now, we built a new Home Theater PC (HTPC) that we’re using in our family room so that we can watch the content recorded by MythTV on the television.  When we built the new PC, we didn’t worry about getting a regular remote control working with it immediately … we figured it would be something we could add later on after we had the PC up and running in the family room.  So, for the last year or so, we’ve been using a wireless keyboard and mouse to control the HTPC rather than a remote control.  It’s worked out ok except that it means we have to have a keyboard and mouse out in the living room … and the wireless keyboard we have is exceptionally bad at transmitting key presses from the keyboard to the RF receiver when they’re further than about 4 feet apart, which is really frustrating.

We’d been talking for a while about what an improvement it would be to get a remote control, but just hadn’t done the research to know what would work with Linux and MythTV.  So, for one of Chad’s Christmas gifts, I decided to figure out what it would take to get a real remote control working with the HTPC and buy whatever components we needed.  When I started reading up on the options, I was really surprised by the number of different remotes that would work with Linux and MythTV.  The biggest thing for us, though, was that the HTPC we built is only a MythTV front end (the back end runs on a different PC), so it doesn’t have a tuner card in it, meaning that we didn’t have the IR receiver that would normally come with a tuner card (which is what we’d used in the past for setting up remote controls).  So, whatever we bought either needed to include a receiver or work with one that could be bought separately from a tuner card.  For our situation, it looked like one of the easiest solutions was to use a remote control that was intended for use with the Media Center Edition of Windows.  Most come with their own IR receivers and it sounds like most (if not all) will work with MythTV as documented on the MythTV wiki site.

StapStream Firefly PC Remote Control

One problem with using an IR remote control, though, is that the remote control needs to be used within line-of-sight with the receiver that is connected to the computer, but we prefer to keep the computer (and all of its wires) hidden in a cabinet so that no one knows it’s there.  We’ve solved this problem before with an IR repeater, but that means there still has to be a receiver set out in front of the TV for it to receive (and retransmit) the signal to inside the TV cabinet.  Once I thought more about that, I started looking for RF remote controls that would work with MythTV so that we wouldn’t have to maintain line-of-sight to the computer and also wouldn’t need a repeater sitting out on the TV cabinet.  What I found was the SnapStream Firefly remote.  It’s designed to be used with the BeyondTV DVR software sold by SnapStream, but can also be used with a variety of other applications, including MythTV.  Initially, I was a little concerned that we would have the same problem with an RF remote that we have with our RF keyboard where the range is really limited, but after reading reviews that said it had tremendous range through walls and floors, I was sold and I ordered one for Christmas.

Getting the Firefly remote to work with MythTV wasn’t all that complicated either.  There are step-by-step instructions on the MythTV wiki site that guide you through most of the process and provide the lircd.conf file that sets up the configuration for using this remote with MythTV.  The only snag we ran into with the installation was that we had initally compiled MythTV without Lirc support (since we weren’t using a remote control), so it took us a while to figure out that it needed to be recompiled with Lirc for everything to work correctly.  After that, the remote started working with MythTV and just needed a few adjustments to the repeat sensitivity in the lircrc file before it was working perfectly.

MythTV

So far, we’re pretty happy with the Firefly remote.  The only minor complaint we have is that its shape makes it easy to pick up and start using upside down without realizing it, but I think that’s something we’ll get used to over time.  The next step is to set up the HTPC to sleep & wake on button pushes from the remote control so that we don’t have to keep booting it up and shutting it down.  For now, though, just having a real remote is improvement enough!

In our kitchen, we have a Mac Mini with a small 15″ monitor that we use mostly for surfing the web and watching television that was recorded on another computer using MythTV.  For as long as we’ve had the Mac Mini, we’ve always used a wireless connection with it, which has worked pretty well for the most part, but there are times when the wireless signal is so weak we aren’t able to stream television or music to that computer, which can be pretty annoying since all of our multimedia content is stored elsewhere.  Using a wireless connection also has the downside of being interrupted every time the microwave runs, which is equally as annoying.  Recently, the network connection problems seem to be occurring more frequently, so we decided it was time to think about running a wired connection to the kitchen.

The New Network Jack

Of all of the rooms where we have computers located, the kitchen is actually the easiest location for fishing a network cable.  Even though it’s an insulated wall, the basement below it has an unfinished ceiling and there was already a coax cable running into the box where we wanted to locate the network cable, so we could use it as a guide.  We started by tying (and taping) multiple strings to the coax cable that had already been fished through the wall where we wanted the network cable to be and then we pulled it back down into the basement so that only the strings were left in the wall.  We then tied (and taped) a network cable to one of the strings and tried pulling it up from the basement.  It took a couple of tries (and we broke one of the strings in the process, which is why we were glad we’d thought to run several through the wall), but we were eventually able to fish the network cable into the electrical box in the kitchen.  Once we had the cable in place, we wired it to a network jack & face plate that we bought at Radio Shack and fixed the plate to the wall.  In the basement, we ran a long (30-foot?) cable across to “server room” on the other side of the house, where we plugged it in to our router.  (Our next project will be to neatly tuck this cable up into the rafters …)

When we first plugged a network cable into the new jack and the Mac, we had trouble getting the computer to detect the wired connection (it was giving an error message that the “Cable for Built in Ethernet is not plugged in”).  We thought maybe it was because we had used a standard Ethernet cable (rather than a cross-over cable, which is required for some Apple products), but after spending way too much time checking that we had wired the cable to the jack correctly and researching the problem online, we finally discovered that there was a problem with the Ethernet port on the Mac Mini.  One of the little “wires” used to make a connection with the Ethernet cable was bent down and kind of wedged behind another of the “wires”.  We think it must have been a manufacturing defect that we’d never noticed in the 4 years we’d had the computer because we’d never tried to use it with a wired network connection.  Luckily, we were able to use a couple of small needles to delicately pry up the wire that was preventing the computer from detecting the network connection and it now works fine.

The "Wired" Mac Mini

As always, the project took a little longer than we anticipated, but it was worth it to be able to play music or watch tv while we run the microwave.  We’re still noticing the playback skipping sometimes, but it’s much reduced from before and we’re blaming what’s happening now on the fact that the Mac is continually running more slowly and probably needs to be rebuilt …

Over the last couple of weeks, the furniture we ordered for our sun room back in January has trickled in and everything has finally been delivered. We’re really happy with everything, with the exception that the couch should have had three cushions instead of two. We’re working with the store on it and it sounds like they’ll be re-ordering a new one for us next week, which we should hopefully have in another month or two. Here are some pictures:

We also wound up buying a new LCD television for the room last weekend. It’s a 46″ Sony, model # KDL-46XBR4, which we’ve been really happy with so far. The picture looks pretty good, even without an HD signal, and there’s only a minimal amount of reflection on the screen, which is something we were pretty concerned about given the large number of windows and doors in the room. We currently have the TV hooked up to the home theater PC we built a few weeks ago and it’s been working out well so far. The wireless-N network we’re using to stream our recorded television content has been performing really well, with no skips. We still need to get a remote control working with it (so we don’t have to use the keyboard to drive the TV anymore), but it’s pretty much done otherwise.

We still need to hang some pictures on the walls and I’m planning to get a bunch of green plants to fill in the corners of the room that are basically empty now, but we’re excited about the transformation so far and about spending more time in a room that we basically haven’t used since we moved in last fall.

Last weekend, we finally decided to order the components for and build a new home theater PC (HTPC) for running MythTV (DVR software). We really have a need for two computers to perform this function: one for the home theater on the third floor and the other for the family room that we’re setting up in our sun room, but we decided to start with building just one and see how it works out before buying the parts for a second.

Ideally, we would have preferred to run all of the AV cables from the server in our basement straight to the televisions (eliminating the need for the frontend PCs like the one we just built), but our TVs were just too spread out and fishing wires through the walls of our nearly 100-year-old home presented too great of a challenge, so we had to give up on that idea. A couple of weeks ago, we found a feasible solution for wireless networking that we decided to go with for streaming the video recordings from the MythTV backend server in our basement to a frontend PC located nearer to the TVs, but we still needed the frontend PC(s) to make it all work. And that’s what we built last weekend.

Here’s a picture and the specs for the new computer we built:

• CPU - Intel Pentium E2200 2.2 GHz Allendale Dual-Core
• Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H with on-board:
  • nVidia GeForce 7100 graphics chipset with HDMI out
  • gigabit ethernet
  • 8-channel surround sound output
• System Memory – 1 GB
• Storage – SYBA SD-CF-2IDE-U IDE to Compact Flash Adapter and 4GB Compact Flash Card
• Power Supply – Antec earthwatts EA340
• Case – Silverstone Silver Micro ATX GD02S HTPC Case

The computer is actually pretty low spec, but there are a couple of cool things about it. First, it’s housed in a case that’s meant for home theater PCs, so it looks less like a computer and more like a stereo component. Even though the plan is to not have it be visible, this should make it blend in with the rest of our AV equipment a lot better. Second, we used a 4GB compact flash card in place of a hard drive, which cuts down on heat and noise … and it turned out to be a bit cheaper too. Since we’re running a trimmed down Linux install, we really didn’t need that much space and this provides a neat, solid-state alternative that the computer doesn’t even have to know about since the adapter plugs in just like any ordinary IDE hard drive.

Assembling the components was pretty straight-forward. The only challenge we really ran into was getting the button on the case for the DVD drive to line up with the button on the drive itself. We wound up super-gluing another piece of plastic to the case to make it work better. It wasn’t a big deal, but it would have been nice if the case had been designed to work with a larger selection of DVD drives. As far as the software install, on this and all of our other Linux computers, we run the Gentoo distribution of Linux, which has always worked pretty well for us. With this build, though, we had trouble getting the LiveCD to work and wound up having to install off of the system restore disk to get support for some of the hardware components – like the SATA DVD drive – which we thought was pretty weak. The difficulty we had with Gentoo on this build will definitely make us consider a different distribution next time around.

So far, though, we’ve been testing the new PC out on the third floor (in the home theater we’re using as a family room until our furniture for the sun room arrives) and it’s been working pretty well. We still need to tweak a couple things with the boot loader (GRUB is giving us error 25 randomly on start-up), set up a remote control to work with it so we don’t have to be tied to the keyboard, and get it moved into the cabinet with all of the other components. For now, though, it’s up and running … and we’re really enjoying being able to watch all of our favorite television programs without all of the skipping!

We think we’ve finally found a feasible solution for getting a network connection to our home theater on the third floor of our house … without fishing cat-5 cable through our walls!

So, here’s the situation: we have a Linux server located in our basement that we use mostly as a file server and the back-end of our MythTV DVR system. The server is located in the basement primarily to keep the noise and heat out of our living spaces, but also because we’d eventually like to locate a service panel for structured wiring (home network, video, audio, etc.) in this room next to our electrical service panel, so it seems logical to to co-locate the server with the rest of our network equipment.

Now the challenge: to watch the television recorded by MythTV in our home theater on the third floor, we need to be able to stream the recorded video files from the server in the basement to a PC with a network connection that will be physically located nearer to the television (and connected to it via standard audio/video cables). Since some of the content we record will be in HD format (once we get the HD antenna up and running again), we need a fairly speedy network connection. Our first choice would be to have a wired connection, but that means running cables up three floors, most likely through insulated walls, which won’t be a small task. So, we’ve been exploring wireless alternatives, with limited success.

This weekend, though, we tried something that appears to solve the dilemma. The Netgear WNHDEB111 HD/Gaming 5 GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit comes with two access points/bridges. One gets plugged in to the router in the basement via a network cable and the other gets plugged in to the MythTV front-end PC in the home theater, also with a network cable. They communicate with each other over a wireless 802.11n network (that’s configured with the touch of a button) … and, so far, they seem really quick. We were able to stream two non-HD recordings and download a 2GB file over the wireless-N network at the same time without the playback skipping or stopping (something that wouldn’t be possible on our wireless-G network). The data speeds we calculated indicate that it should be able to handle transmitting an HD recording (approximately 10 GB per hour) without a problem. Although the network speed is somewhat slowed down when we place the access point for the home theater on the third floor, we get a really fast connection when it’s located in our second floor office and running cat-5 network cable from the office to the home theater on the third floor is no big deal, so we think we’ve found a winner.

Since we moved in to our house last September, we’ve been trying to figure out how to set up our network to deliver HD content to televisions and computers throughout our house (using the open source MythTV DVR software). In our previous home, we were able to run the whole bundle of wires (audio cables, video cables, coax, etc.) from our MythTV server through the drop ceiling in our basement to all of the rooms we needed to access. This house, however, is presenting a much greater challenge. Our computers and televisions are spread out over three floors without a single drop ceiling in the house.

We’ve realized it’s probably going to be too great of a challenge to run the full bundle of cables to every television in the house, so we’ll probably have to switch to a setup where we have separate client PCs near the televisions so that all we’ll have to run is network cable to provide a way for the clients to talk to the server (conveniently located in our basement). Even running just Ethernet cable, though, is no easy task, so we’ve been looking at other options.

Our first attempt at setting up the network was to run everything over wireless. It’s great for surfing the web, but even non-HD television skips. So, this weekend, we were at Best Buy and saw the Netgear Powerline HD network adapters that promise to provide a network over a home electrical system that runs at 200 mbps, capable of streaming HD content. We were both pretty skeptical, but thought we’d give it a try since it sounded like the perfect solution to our problems.

The adapters are easy enough to set up: one gets plugged in to an electrical outlet near the cable modem & router, with a network cable connecting it to the router. The other gets plugged into an outlet near the computer with a network cable connecting it to the computer. It takes about a minute, but the two eventually boot up and the blue light comes on, indicating they’ve “found” each other. Since setting them up, though, we’ve run a bunch of tests and been rather disappointed in the performance overall. On average, it appears to operate much more slowly than our (802.11g) wireless network and we weren’t able to achieve anything near 200 mbps unless we had both units plugged in to the same outlet (which of course isn’t practical). We aren’t sure if the poor performance is due to our wiring situation or if it’s typical for them to perform slowly, but even moving the two to outlets that are physically no more than 6 feet apart and clearly on the same circuit degraded the performance dramatically.

I think it’s fair to say that the power line adapters would perform fine for surfing the web, but come no where near performing well enough to transmit HD content from our basement computer to the television in the attic. So, it looks like they’ll be going back to Best Buy and we’ll continue to look for a way to snake Ethernet cable throughout our house.