January 24, 2009 at 6:51 pm | Home Theater
- Posted by Chad Dyess |
When we’re entertaining guests, gathering everyone in my theater for a demo is always a crowd-pleaser. But before I built my home theater PC, I would have to dig out a DVD, load it into the player, then get it cued up to the right chapter. Not only was this tedious, but it tended to bore everyone.
One of the primary reasons I built my HTPC was for watching movies. I wanted to have my movie library available online, with a nice interface for exploring my collection, without the need to shuffle through shelves of DVD cases trying to find a movie to watch. That’s how I found My Movies. The interface is great, and it has all the features I wanted, and then some.
Once I ripped my DVD collection to disk, my next step was to set up a quick and easy way to show off my home theater by playing specific movie scenes using My Movies. What I ended up with worked great, and has been a huge success, so I’m outlining the steps here for anyone who may be looking for a similar solution.
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January 19, 2009 at 12:57 pm | Computers
- Posted by Chad Dyess |
When I first got my Asus Eee 900HA, I thought about installing Windows Vista on it, but after doing some research, it turned out the performance was less than stellar, as you might imagine. Then the Windows 7 Beta was released, and I found several articles where people had installed it on their netbooks, and were very happy with the results. From the sound of it, Microsoft is getting Windows 7 right where Vista went wrong. So I downloaded the Windows 7 Beta and decided to install it.
That’s where it got tricky. Netbooks don’t have an internal DVD drive, so the only way to install it is from a USB flash drive or USB hard drive. The Windows 7 Beta is well over 2 GB, but the biggest USB drive I had lying around was only 1 GB, so that wasn’t an option. I have an old 200 GB USB hard drive though, so I dusted it off and went to work. Unfortunately though, this was the most difficult part of the entire installation. For some reason, I had a nothing but trouble trying to get my netbook to boot from the USB drive. It took a few hours, and I had to try countless methods from various Google searches, but in the end, here are the steps that worked for me.
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January 16, 2009 at 10:26 pm | Home Theater
- Posted by Chad Dyess |
A few weeks ago, I installed DirecTV2PC on my main HTPC so I could watch shows that were recorded on my DirecTV DVR downstairs. The program worked great, except that it doesn’t integrate with Media Center, which forced me to get out the keyboard and leave Media Center in order to run it. I know there are some applications that will let you add a program into Media Center, but once you launch your application, it’s usually not very easy to close the app and get back into Media Center. After a bit of searching though, I found a handy program called Media Center Launcher that was exactly what I was looking for.
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