BruceHartman.net

I think the 300GB drive I bought for the HTPC is already crapping itself. I’m getting repeated NTFS errors, which I think is crashing the computer when trying to capture video. I was planning to buy a second drive anyway, so I’ll go ahead and order a new one in the next week or so and send this one back for a warranty replacement.

On the software front, Meedio is the overall front runner in the full HTPC front end department, though I prefer BeyondTV’s DVR functions. A half hour show saved from BTV is only 1.5 GB in size, where Meedio’s is nearly 4 GB, plus the playback on the plasma television is much better looking. The other major drawback with Meedio, in my eyes, is that it seems a little buggy and prone to crashing, though this could be a further manifestation of the hard drive issues I think I’m having.

The other route would be to build my own front end. It’d be easy enough to do it with Director, which would allow me to use BeyondTV and any other app I’d want to satisfy any functions I could come up with. If I finally decide on the rolling my own front end, I might give Xlobby a shot first. Decisions, decisions.

One thing I started thinking about yesterday was moving the HTPC and the home theater receiver into my office. One of the next projects after putting in the balcony addition will be to address the closets in my bedroom and the office, and I was thinking that it made sense to move all of my computer equipment into one place. I’ll set up a rack of some sort and run the wires out of through the floor and distribute them under the house.