Simultaneous Recording Test

On foot of a discussion on boards.ie, I did a quick test last night to confirm that the Octopus / DuoFlex set up supports multiple channel access on the same transponder/multiplex.

I managed to set up MediaPortal to successfully record 3 channels simultaneously and watch a fourth from a DVB-T feed (Saorview).

The channels I recorded were RTE Two HD, TV3 and 3e while I tuned TG4. As I've only got a single DVB-T card in my set up, giving me two tuners, this proves that the card is capable of accessing any additional channels on a tuned transponder/multiplex.

This is good news.

HDMI Switching HTPC

Interesting feature on this ASRock motherboard: HDMI Input that allows for HDMI switching to a connected display - even when the PC is powered off.

This would permit the connection of, say, a games console, to an HTPC and use the computer for HDMI switching. Nice for those of us with outdated receivers ;-)

Here's a video showing it in action;

'Free' Receiver Upgrade

My venerable Pioneer VSX-D2011 has served me well. It’s a 7.1 receiver with 100W per channel but is firmly rooted in the analog age with no HDMI support and no HD audio decoding.

As part of a general home theatre upgrade, it’s marked for replacement (I have my eye on the Marantz AV8801 processor) but with new projector and speakers also on the cards, funds are tight.

I drive my theater from an HTPC and have recently migrated to MediaPortal as my media software of choice. MP has support for BluRay playback and I have an old M-Audio Delta 410 multichannel PCI card available. Hmmm. I wonder…

Two Steps Up, One Step Back

For no particular reason other than intuition, I’ve ditched Windows 8 Storage Spaces and reverted to unRAID.

I had storage spaces running on MediaServer8 for several months but when unRAID 5 finally went final, I installed it on my old XEON box and started playing with it again. I remembered how much I loved it’s simplicity and inherent security and just went back to it.