It’s been some time since I last updated my blog. At the moment I’m back home in Lakselv for the holidays. I left Trondheim Sunday afternoon, so I’ve been home for a couple of days already. It’s great to be home at my parents place. My two sisters are also home, so the whole family is gathered for Christmas.

So far I’ve spent the first day of my vacation playing Xbox 360 on our new 37” Dell HDTV, messing around with Live.com Gadgets and putting together a simple HTPC for my parents. Dad brought home an unused computer from work. The specs are a bit outdated, but not to bad, so I figured I’d try to build something useful out of it. The computer is a PIII 500 MHz, with 384MB ram, 3 GB hard drive and a simple graphics card. The first thing I did was replacing the hard drive with an 80 GB Samsung disk, which is really quiet. That’s one of the cool things about the computer, it’s really quiet by default, and with the new hard disk it doesn’t make a sound! I replaced one of the 128MB ram chips with a 256MB chip, so now the computer have 512MB of ram. I decided to run Windows XP home edition as the operating system and some free/cheap HTPC front end on top of that for easy access. My dad primarily wants to use the computer to display landscape/art pictures to lighten up the living room (the HDTV is wall mounted in the middle of the living room), displaying family pictures and playing music.

The first issue I ran into was finding an HTPC front end able to run on the hardware I had available. I found a forum post over at htpcnews.com titled “definitive list of front end software”, so I figured that this was the right place to start. I worked my way tough the entire list (!), testing all the free front ends. I’ve heard lots of good things about Media Portal, a front end written in C# for the .NET 2.0 Framework. How ever, the hardware requirements for Media Portal where way to high and it wouldn’t even start. Most of the other front ends where in an early development stage and where all slow and buggy.

Since I didn’t find any usable free front ends I had to check out the commercial once. Before I installed Windows Media Center Edition on my own computer I ran a front end called myHTPC. The guys behind myHTPC started a new commercial project called Meedio, and I actually ran the beta 1 before installing MCE2005. I downloaded their latest version, and man was I happily surprised. It ran perfectly on the 500 MHz computer, and the setup and configuration procedure was easy to follow. The overall impression of the software is great, it’s clean and professional. You can download and install third party themes and add-ins directly from the front end. Currently the HTPC is running picture library, music library, RSS feeds, Weather, and web radio. Best of all, Meedio has a Christmas offer giving their Meedio Essentials, which has everything but TV support, for only 19.99$!

The next problem I ran into was screen resolution. The Dell HDTV runs 720P at 1366x768, which isn’t supported by the graphics card. I tried to install Powerstrip, but the card was too old to support custom resolutions. Luckily Sead, a friend of mine who works at the local computer store, had an old Aopen MV200-R graphics card lying around. I even got for free! Best of all, the latest drivers from NVIDIA supported the 1366x768 resolution by default with out having to use Powerstrip!