Configuring Clear QAM on the Hauppauge 2250

For a TV tuner, both Ian and I have the Hauppauge 2250. It's a dual tv tuner that can pick up two HD channels over the air simultaneously. I bought an antenna (two, actually) in order to cancel all of my cable services; it turns out the bill is actually cheaper when you have basic cable added anyway. In this case, there are some options, to recover broadcast HD from your cable provider. The benefit here is that you don't need to spend money on an antenna, you don't have to worry about the positioning of the antenna, and your cable bill will likely be lowered in the end as a result.

I followed the directions here at this website, which were really helpful in figuring everything out (thanks to Ian for pointing me to this):

To configure this in Windows Media Center:
1) download the Clear QAM beta plugin for WMC here:
2) go to the "Set up TV signal" menu under the settings submenu, under the tasks menu.
3) Update your TV setup options, then say "No" to the automatic signal setup.
4) Pick "antenna" as your tv signal.
5) Pick ATSC as your signal type.
6) Just go through the rest of the menu, pay no attention to the lack of signal strength indications.

After this, go to your WMC guide, go to the "Online Media" menu and select the Clear QAM plugin from the program library. Complete the scan, it may take awhile.

Note! If you have trouble with a "case13" error here, just click with your remote instead of your wireless keyboard/mouse. I went to a lot of extra trouble in order to avoid these errors when I didn't need to.

After you reboot, go back to the signal strength area and see what you get. Write down the channels which you don't get, and head to the guide setup in order to remove them. Now you're getting HD over your cable and you can return your antenna!

Power Consumption of Media Center

I got the latest energy bill for my apartment.  I saw and increase of about $5 due to the media center that is running 24 x 7 x 365.  Because I don't think I've had the machine running for the full billing cycle, the actual added cost might be close to $7.50 or so.

This isn't much, but it is am important factor to consider when deciding if going cable-less will actually save you money.

Please keep in mind I decided to use a year old gaming desktop as my media center, this is probably the least energy efficient route.  The power supply is about 2x to 3x bigger than what would be found in a standard desktop.

It could be assumed if you used an average computer for your media center, your energy bill will increase by less then $10.

Where to Find Streaming TV Online

*Note* I will be updating this post as I find new sources to stream TV, so please check back often to see what is new and exciting.

I wanted to put together a simple list of where you easily find TV shows online that is both quick and legal.  I plan to add a new source to this post every day or so, but that might be a hard pace to keep up :).

Hulu.com

This is probably the single greatest site on the next for stream TV and movies.  There are too many sources to name, it has a collection of current hits and some good oldies.  A quick rundown of what I found interesting:

• Most NBC Shows
• Most FOX Shows
• Links to abc.com and cbs.com for their content
• The Daily Show and Colbert Report
• Mojo

To see what they are showing (full episodes, by network) check this link.

Buying and Off-the-Shelf Computer for a Media Center

Before I decided to stick my desktop in my living room, I was looking at buying a cheap PC from Best Buy and throwing that in my living room.  There are a lot of nice computers for under $500 that are in pretty tiny cases.

If you don't have any computer equipment that you can dedicate to this purpose, in my mind, this is the best way to go.  While building a machine might be another great option, I often find that with low price equipment, you can't always beat the major manufactures.

So here is what I think you should look for in an off the shelf computer.

• Running Vista Home Premium - You wouldn't want to get it home to find it running Vista Home Basic and not being able to use Windows Media Canter. *Bonus Points if it has Vista Ultimate Edition*
• One Free PCI Express Slot - This will be used to hook up an optional TV Tuner Card.  While the older PCI standard will work with some of the older TV Tuners, I would strongly suggest PCIe.  *Bonus Points if it also has a PCI Express 16x slot*
• The Proper Video Connection - This one is a little ambiguous, it really depends on what your TV has.  If your set is Standard Definition, then you will want to look for S-Video.  If you have a High Def Set, then it depends on what your HD set accepts.  I would suggest DVI or HDMI and then VGA in that order.  DVI can easily be converted into HDMI.  Those two cannot be turned into VGA as easily.
• A Bunch of USB ports - Just always handy.
• At least 2GB of RAM and 2 Cores on the CPU.

The one machine that caught my eye was the Acer AX1700-U3700A.  I cannot comment directly about the hardware, but if it is all of the pieces I was looking for in a media center.

Good Luck!

Mark Cuban's Argument

Mark Cuban and Boxee debate over at their blog: http://blog.boxee.tv/2009/03/21/a-lively-debate-with-mark-cuban/ I commented on the exchange, I'm re-posting here. There are lots of words but this is an important debate. Most of what I say below will make more sense if you read the full exchange over at Boxee.

Cuban offers a few good points, some better than others. I don't understand the outright dismissal yet, because if you go oint by point, there is validity to both sides here.  

There is no reason why something like Boxee couldn't convert a significant portion of cable subscribers. What you have right now is cable television providers charging consumer a lot of money for a ton of services, most of which go unused. The main reason why I switched to using a central media center instead of continuing to pay $230 per month for television is because I can get the vast majority of my content online. There are some shows that are on channels like HGTV, where I can't get them from their website or purchase them on an episode by episode basis on Amazon.com/vod or iTunes, but we basically decided to stop watching them.  

Cuban raises an interesting point here: "The concept of “users always want choice” really really sounds nice. It makes for a great panel argument. But the reality is that its not true. Ultimate choice requires work. Consumers like to think they have choice, but their consumption habits say they prefer easy." He goes on to use youtube as an example, which doesn't really apply. I think the core problem is that there are end users who sit down on the couch and flip through the channels or read through the guide. With an antenna you pick up a handful of broadcast channels who offer a bunch of content, but it's not that much. It takes some effort to go to hulu and search for shows. The advantage that Boxee has here is that they can simply implement that functionality and deliver content to the user in a passive manner. They can do this faster than the cable company can. 

Another concern that I share with Cuban is the saturation of bandwidth because we're going to be watching so much television. While I think it will be awhile before we reach this point, consumers who want to go this route will need to be prepared to spend more money on a higher bandwidth line, if it's available.  

What we have here is two extremes (one free, one expensive). After people start switching to a central media center and watching these shows on a web browser or through Boxee, the providers of that content will monetize it by sticking in advertisements. Boxee and other media center software providers will probably need to charge users (monthly or a licensing agreement) in order to facilitate the deals with the content providers. Cable companies will be forced to reduce their fees to stay competitive and both will implement the features that end users want.  

An example here is when the RIAA was able to make their CD prices stick, simply because there weren't really alternatives. When CD burners were cheap enough, consumers stopped purchasing CDs (despite the legality). Now that iTunes provides a fairly priced song, more and more people are purchasing those and the CD prices have come down since the 90s. I think we'll see more and more content being offered through amazon video on demand and iTunes. When the revenue falls enough, cable companies will be forced to change their offering. The challenge for them is to make sure they can still pick up the $22 billion per year in subscriber fees.

First Impressions of the Cable Alternative

The first night worked out pretty good overall.  We took to the guide and set up series recordings for our favorite Thursday night shows (30 Rock, The Office, Hell's Kitchen) and my wife wanted to record Grey's Anatomy (which I am not watching).  Since we have a dual tv-tuner, we could record two shows at once, in high-definition.  

We still had a conflict for an hour of prime time TV during the 30 Rock / Office hour, so we opted to not record those two shows and watch them later on Hulu.  Hulu is an awesome service.  I'm on the Boxee windows alpha list right now, awaiting a build, so in the meantime I have to actually bring up a browser and go to http://www.hulu.com.

Hulu has been great for two reasons so far.  First, my wife can find full length shows (supported by advertising) to put on as noise, where before, she would have picked some random cable channel.  I think there is enough content there to keep her satisfied on that front.  Secondly, I started watching the Daily show regularly over the last week, where I had basically stopped watching it over the last year.  

As a side note, if you are thinking there are some channels that you can't live without (CNBC being an example), shows like "Mad Money" have full length, advertising free video podcasts posted.  As another example, we had HBO and all the shows we were watching had ended the new episode runs, except for Bill Maher's show.  I found out he also has a podcast with full length audio only episodes, which suits me just fine.

Pulling up the video podcast section of iTunes, I can wander through the "News & Politics" section and find full length episodes of "Meet the Press", MSNBC's "Rachel Maddow" show and "Countdown with Keith Olbermann". 

Converting a Desktop Computer into a Media Center

The computer I currently have hooked up to my TV is my old desktop.  I built it about a year ago for gaming, but have since replaced it with a gaming laptop.  Because of this, the specs on the machine are still really good and made it a good candidate for a media center PC.

The PC was running Windows Vista Home Premium which gave me access to the awesome Windows Media Center.  When I originally built it, I put a 2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a NVidia 8800GT Video Card into it.  These specs are more than enough for what I want to do with media.

One thing about turning this PC into a media center, is that when I built it, I really didn't care about how loud it was, but more importantly, how cool it stayed.  Because of this I picked a pretty open case and threw a lot of fans into it.  When I first put it out in my living room, it was pretty loud.  Because it had so many fans, I was able to unhook a few of them and quiet the beast down a little bit while still letting it stay cool.

It is still a little too loud for my taste, but it will work for now and allows me to recycle a machine that I already had.

With the machine creating less noise, it was time to focus on a TV Tuner Card to allow my machine to record TV.  I did some searching on Newegg and found the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250.  This card allowed me to record two streams of HDTV, beautiful.  Setup was a snap, instead of using the Driver CD, I went to Hauppauge's website and downloaded the latest drivers.  A reboot later and Windows Media Center was able to pickup channels.

I currently have the machine hooked up with HDMI, which is what I would strongly recommend.  However, because I only have two HDMI ports, I will be switching it to component so I can have my 360 and PS3 hooked up.