Recently I decided to install TV Pack and after an evening of tweaking I had the HTPC up and running again. I won’t go into details about what’s improved (you can find that all over the net), but I would like to make you aware of the fact that if you’re running WebGuide and don’t want to part from it: do no install TV Pack, since WebGuide won’t work anymore…
Having a Home Theater PC is real fun. The ‘one system for all media purposes’ really does it for me. All content is available in my entire network on all my machines. But nowadays you’re connected to the internet almost 24/7 through desktops at the office and mobile internet. So I’d like to have my content available wherever I am! Like a World Theater PC. That being said, I went to work last weekend and things look great 
To accomplish it, I first had to open up my local network to the outside world. I have a Linksys WRT54G (router and wireless access point) which is accessible through the internet. It has the ability to forward ports to machines but lacks the feature to wake up my media center. Therefor you need a wake-on-lan option, which ís available in third-party firmware like dd-wrt. Why do I want to do this? Because I don’t want my htpc running al of the day. It’s bad for the environment and not that good for my electricity bill as well.
Now I can ‘wake-up’ my HTPC from all over the world and by having WebGuide installed, it gives me access to Media Center content. Also I can schedule recordings wherever I am. Now isn’t that good fun?
If you have installed different codecs packs and applications over time you will probably wonder what codecs are installed on your system. I found a tool a while ago wich displays all the codecs on your system. That’s a big shock I can tell you, the program discovered 345 diverent codec parts on my system! The tool can enable and disable any codec you want. This helps to get a better idea of codecs. You can find the download here or view a screendump.
Today I was searching google about the new vista mediacenter update fiji. I discovered that the actual name of the final update wil be ‘Windows Media Center TV Pack 2008′. After a half hour I found a recent hands-on on engadgethd.com. Because it took me a while to find it here is the link. As soon as I get my hands on it my self I will post more about it.
Today we decided to continue our blogging-activities in English instead of Dutch, to reach a bigger audience. This also means that we will translate our previous posts to English in the coming days.
cheers!
Please see this page for details about our home-grown plugin to mount iso and image files in Media Center. It’s a small, simple but powerfull add-in that you can download and use for free!
Feel free to leave a comment or ask questions when you have problems installing or running the add-in!
Without spending to much words on it, I’d like to post a quick link to a very usefull I came across tool to create and edit matroska-files (mkv): MKVToolnix.
This week I downloaded a matroska-file with included Swedish subtitles and frankly, my Swedish isn’t that good 
. So I searched for the Dutch subs and using MKVToolnix the Swedish were removed and the Dutch added.
De zaak waar ik mijn mediacenter onderdelen heb gekocht is sinds een tijdje failliet. Ik wilde namelijk kijken welke onderdelen ik precies in mijn mediacenter had en ging naar www.pczaak.nl waar ik 8 mei 2006 (zo lang alweer!) mijn onderdelen heb besteld. Daarna de bekende foutmelding in mijn browser: Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage…. Op google gezocht en de tekst www.pczaak.nl levert als eerste hit www.internetoplichting.nl op! Vervolgens heb ik gekeken wat er aan de hand was en volgens mij zijn ze gewoon failliet gegaan ondanks mijn mega-order.
Je hebt nu eenmaal codecs nodig om al je content te kunnen afspelen, maar liever bestond er gewoon één codec die altijd werkt. Zelf ben ik geen fan van de vele codec-packs die er bestaan, maar toch zijn er veel mensen die ze wel gebruiken met alle ellende van dien. Bij voorkeur installeer ik alleen die ene codec die nodig is om dat ene bestand af te spelen waarmee ik ‘problemen’ heb.
Er is voor mij maar één codec-pack die ik wel kan waarderen, namelijk de Combined Community Codec Pack.
