S/PDIFed offI

If you’re thinking of adding surround sound to your Media Center by outputting SPDIF from your computer… think carefully.

I have an AOpen i855GMEm-LFS motherboard, that I bought partially because it was promoted as supporting 5.1 sound via S/PDIF. However, on closer inspection, I found that while the Motherboard supports it, it requires an add-on PCI-slot plate, that connects to the headers on the board. And yes, you’ve guessed it – no-one stocks them any longer. I’m not sure they ever did.

Some digging-around reveals a possible compatible match from Asus, is actually incompatible.

OK – so scrap using the existing SPDIF support. How about a new sound card?

Well – Creative Soundblasters are an old, reasonable-value favourite. Do they support SPDIF? Well… again, not as standard: you need a PCI slot for the card, and a breakout box to plug into it. And to pay for both – the box is around £20.

How about another brand? Terratec make some value cards. But read closely (pdf) – you’ll see that the S/PDIF outputs (they refer to them by their TOSLINK name) only provide stereo sound – even on their 7.1 card.

So – I’m still looking. I might lump for a Soundblaster Audigy, and try harder to find a Creative Digital I/O module. But it’s not as easy as I was expecting.

From Strength to Strength

I now have my Bedroom ‘What’s up this morning’ screen much the way I want it; we’ll customise it a bit more no doubt, as we move it around.

I went through both Yahoo Widgets and Dashboard Widgets, looking for the closest fits to the functionality I needed. Yet again, it was the MacOS Dashboard Widgets that won out, making another case for running the Bedroom Media Center in MacOS rather than Windows MCE.

Now we can see time, date and weather at a glance: I can also see the local wind forecasts for kiteboarding (no Windguru widget in Yahoo); and in terms of travel, we can see live departure information for our two nearest National Rail stations, Tube station, and a trafficam from our nearest main road. The two screen can be brought up in Dashboard with a single click….

In terms of controlling the Mac, I’ve found the following:

Both Apple Remote and K610i handle Front Row fine. The Front Row Menu button was initially tricky – the SE editor works by asking you to press the required keys, but pressing Win-Esc (the default MacOSX Front Row shortcut) is a system combination and an app can’t capture this. Initially I fixed this when I found I could edit the SonyEricsson HID file (which is XML with an image appended), and mixed and matched the key combinations to get one that worked.

However – I then found that you can simply re-map the shortcut for Front Row in MacOS system settings – so I mapped this to f10, and used that on the phone. Much easier!

So that leaves Sleep, Wake-up, and Dashboard:

• Sleep is tricky on the SE – this time, the key combination includes Eject or Power, neither of which exist on a Windows keyboard, hence they can’t be recorded for use on the phone. There is also no mapping in MacOS setup. On the Remote, I was surprised to find, much easier: hold down Play/Pause for 2s, a little symbol comes up, and Mac falls asleep
• Wake-up is easy on both: for the Apple Remote, press a button – the Mini wakes up. On the phone, enabling Bluetooth Keyboard/Mouse can wake computer will allow the Mac to wake when the phone connects.
• Dashboard is easy for the SE – a keyboard shortcut – but not so for the Apple Remote. I’m currently looking at some MacOSX apps to send the keyboard shortcut for Dashboard using the remote.

MacOS wins again

I’ve spent the morning grappling with my bedroom media center. It turns out that while MacOS X on my Intel Mac Mini picks up my Samsung LE19R71 LCD TV fine, Windows MCE2005 has no such luck. That means that while I can run the display at 1280×720 on MacOS, Windows is limited to the ‘Default Monitor’ settings of 720×480.

I shall name it… Mini Desktop!

Another victory for Apple’s ‘real’ Plug’n'Play!

Also, part of the ‘Grand Scheme’ is to have the MacMini streaming live TV from my Media Center’s Nebula Electronics DigiTV card/app via WiFi – negating the need for an unsightly aeriel or cabling in the bedroom, and bringing full DTV streaming capabilities to the PC. Unfortunately, the raw MPEG2 stream has, as suspected, proved too much for my (admittedly rather weak) 802.11g network – for the first time, I saw my entire network grind to a halt as the Mac pulled in over 1000 packets/sec; and it still seemed to not be enough to get a video picture!

So – next step is to look for Powerline networking! I’m glad I put that trunking in now…

PS. Also, while on the topic of the Samsung LCD: another annoying feature is that it doesn’t go into power-save/standby mode when the PC cuts the signal (ie. goes into standby itself). Hence it’s not great as a fully automatic bedroom media center… although it does have a manual wake timer and sleep timer on the TV, so it can be configured to come on in the morning, and switch off at night (if you can be bothered to go through the menus to enable the sleep each evening!).