Now we have the makings of our own Media Center.
Our 68cm TV is finally on it’s very last legs. Bec can turn on the PC in the morning when we get up and if we are lucky the picture may have come on by the time Blake gets home from school around 3pm.
Tonight, the DVD player stopped working. No matter which DVD I put in it, it just said "READ ERROR". *Sigh* It’s not that old either!
So… I had already partly set up the old server as a Media Center over the last few days. Today it was time to finish it off.
I got the old full tower box which used to house our server and whacked in an old 40Gb Hard Drive. I put in an old Sound Blaster card and a GeForce MX440 (iirc) card.
My good friend Brockie had sent back my PCTV card and so I set about getting stuff to work. I installed Windows 98SE. The PCTV card software seems to go well on that. I remember the old software having trouble on newer versions of Windows, although the new software might work on anything.
I installed all the drivers for the cards and the PCTV software. I ran the software and scanned all TV channels and found 9 which I put names on so in the future we know what we are watching.
The aerial socket on the card is a bit dodgy. It seems a tad smaller than all cables which can plug into it (I have about 6 RF cables) and so I have to squash the end of the cable plug with pliers so it won’t fall off the card.
I saw the card and the dvd player both have support for S-Video but I didn’t have a cable, so I just set up the RF aerial and hoped that’d do. While looking for a different cable, I stumbled across.. da da daddaaaah.. an S-Video cable (OMG!). I was excited and ran back to the PC and whacked the cable into it and the DVD player and put the RF cable back into the DVD player and turned it on. Hmm ok. We can see the DVD player screen.. switch to VCR (The player supports both). Hmm. Still has DVD on it. Check the manual. AH CRAP! Just about every OUT socket on the player is DVD ONLY!!! No TV and no VCR…. CRUD CRUD CRUD 
Hang on! I see the DVD Player has RF OUT! I can plug the aerial into the DVD player and another from the DVD Player to the PC! YAY! Try that. Hmm.. doesn’t work Back to plan #1. Plug aerial into PC and ignore DVD Player all together. Oh well.
Only problem now is the TV Card outputs audio only through it’s AUDIO OUT socket. I can plug the speakers into that, but then DVD’s playing from the DVD ROM player I took from my own PC and put into this one plays sound out the Sound Blaster AUDIO OUT socket. So, for now we have to swap the speakers from card to card depending on what we are watching. Now I need to buy an audio cable to go from the TV Card to the SB Card’s LINE IN. I used to have one but that was about 8 or more years ago when I bought the card in the first place.
Next, I need to play DVDs in the DVD ROM player in the PC. I get Bec to download Media Player 9 for 98 and installed it. Hmm. It won’t play DVDs on Win98. Says "No DVD in device" *SIGH* 
Not my day at all. I grab my old Cyberlink PowerDVD XP 4.0 CD which came with a DVD player and install that on the PC. Okay, DVDs now play on the PC. So we can watch TV and DVDs on it.
I also noticed while looking through the TV Card software that it can be programmed to record a TV show at a certain time and save it in MPEG format. Nice. I might test that out soon and see what I can record. No more VCR tapes ever again. YAY!
One of the guys at work had a couple of Dell 15" monitors he no longer wanted so he left them in the office for anyone to take. I grabbed one today and plugged it into our Media Center.
If I ever find someone giving away a 19" or 21" monitor I’ll grab it and plug the PC into that instead.
Unfortunately, we can’t use the remote control any more. This PC TV Card does not have a remote and does not have an IR port to receive signals anyway. At least it will get us out of trouble for a while and increase our geekiness hehehe 
September 14th, 2005 at 11:00 pm - Edit
I really need to set up a MythTV box… the XBOX makes a reasonable substitute, but the ability to browse the TV guides from the remote and record stuff to the hard disk would be worth it… though, I have no idea how it would change the channel on the cable box.