I went to Fry’s during my lunch break yesterday, but I was disappointed to find that they had absolutely nothing that I was looking for.  I’m so glad MicroCenter is just up the block.

I left there with an Antec Three Hundred case, a WD Caviar SE 160GB SATA HDD,a  Cooler Master Extreme Power 500W PSU and a 120mm Silverstone fan.  The PSU isn’t what I was looking for (they had ThermalTake 430W on sale for $31), but I’ve found the CM PSUs to be fine for standard duties (it will replace the temporary junk PSU in my bedroom HTPC).  The WD OEM drive will be added to my RAID-0 array, giving me three 160GB drives, when I move to the new board next week.  I don’t really need that much space, but I need the extra throughput with all the muxing/demuxing I have going on.  The fan will be for one of the intakes on the Three Hundred.  It’ll take two, but I don’t think I’ll need it.  Plus I can only imagine what this thing is going to sound like.

The board I’ve decided to go with is the Asus vanilla P5Q.  I don’t need all the bells and whistles of the various versions of it, but it looks like a good board and I should be able to do a little overclocking with it.  I’m going to grab a couple GB of G.SKILL DDR2 1066 memory and one of those 8-pin molex adapters to satisfy the 8-phase power plug.  I’ve heard too many conflicting reports that it will take a 4-pin and that it won’t, so for $5 – I’ll just play it safe.  I plan on ordering today, or tomorrow at the latest.  Hopefully, I’ll get to spend next weekend putting it all together.  I think the thing I’m looking most forward to is being able to put my bedroom HTPC in standby at night.  Neither of the Asus boards that I’ve used will do it – and I’ve tried everything.

I’ll post my progression, so check back often – even if I don’t post all that often :)

Not a whole lot been going on for me lately on the HTPC front.  Since I’m not so much of a news-worthy guy either, I know I’m not much good for that on this site either.  I’ve pretty much just been updating things to accommodate my transition to the Video Browser plugin.  Everything worked out fine and I have very little regret.  However, I have been refreshing all the (now dead) links in MyMovies.  I don’t want to be left out in the cold when the MCML interface is put out to those with enough contribution points to give it a try.  I’m sure that will leave me with plenty of room for regret, so I want to be prepared.  Even if the database is a pain to keep up with, I have too much time invested in it to give it up.  It’s export ability may also provide useful if other plugins become more attractive.

I do get to upgrade my primary system though.  I decided not to get the 26″ KDS monitor.  I just don’t need it and my 20.5″ Dell is still a great monitor.  I figured I’d be better off getting a newer motherboard, memory and a new case.  That old Antec full tower is close to 10 years old.  I will be getting my first black case…sad, eh?  I plan  on going for a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R motherboard, 2GB of G. SKILL PC2-8500 DDR2 and some decent case.  The case I’ll buy locally to save on shipping.  I’m probably going to grab a power supply as well.  Not sure what yet, but my Blue Storm is close to 3 years old.  It still works perfectly, but my bedroom HTPC PSU blew a couple of weeks ago and I think it would do well to be retired to that light duty.  I’d like to save a few bucks in the PSU department if I can, but I don’t want to shortchange my quad either.  I’ll have to see what I have and what I can do with it.

I’m probably going to end up getting an Antec Three Hundred case.  It’s only $60 at MicroCenter and is fine for me.   I’m probably going to go to Fry’s today and see what they have it for.  If I can’t get it for the same or better, I’ll head out to MicroCenter tomorrow or Friday.  I’ll be sure to post here when I figure things out (maybe this afternoon, so check back!).

…but I redid my entire directory structure of my movie collection, effectively making my MyMovies database useless since all the links are broken now.  After some consideration, I decided to go with a file-based video information system so that I could use Video Browser as my library manager in Media Center.  It’s not as fully-featured, from an information standpoint, as MyMovies, but it’s coded in MCML and is much nicer looking.  I also find managing my collection easier since I don’t have to worry about forgetting to link a movie in MyMovie’s Collection Manager.  Not to mention I find it much faster than browsing MyMovies’ HTML-based interface.

Don’t get my wrong, I think MyMovies is a fabulous program and I’ll probably be sorry once the MCML frontend comes out.  However, I’m just tired of managing that database.  Anyway, here is a screenshot of the poster view within Video Browser:

Nice, right?  OML is looking nice also, but it uses a localized database for each client and doesn’t support directory structure XML systems, so until it does, I think I’ll stick with this.

That’s about it for now.  Re-doing all of that took most of the past week, which is why I’ve been AWOL.  I’m hoping next week I’ll get to order my new 26″ KDS LCD.

I finally got around to getting the new port multplier adapter, enclosure and drives added to my unRAID set.  Everything went pretty smooth except I had found that all of my TB drives were jumpered for 1.5Gbps operation (default on the Seagates and new Maxtor drives).  You’d think this would be a good find except that after removing the jumper, enabling them for 3Gbps operation, the server would hang during POST.  I tried countless times, but no luck – always with a 5B BIOS POST code, which is within the range assigned to the I/O buses.  5B is specifIc to ATA.  I’ll mess around with it some more later as all the 500GB drives I added hum right along at the 3Gbps setting.

I’m now trying to get everything rearranged to best utilize the new space while also cutting down on the need to move files down the road again.  I want to be able to just upgrade a 500GB and not have to do all this moving between disk shares again.

I’ve also started using a new Media Center plugin called Video Library+.  It’s an XML metadata-driven (from theTVDB.com and movie-xml.com) MCML-based plugin for Vista only that was designed with TV series in mind, but also does movies.  It requires some fairly specific naming conventions due to the ruby scraper embedded, but it’s not all that bad.  I had to rename most all of my TV episodes, breaking them in MyMovies, but I never used MM for that anyway.  If renaming episodes scares you, then check out EpNamer – it’s the greatest little application ever (for this purpose anyway).

I had some difficulties getting it to work with my movie collection and eventually gave up, but if you’re just starting out or have a small collection, it’s definitely worth a try.

Although DHL delivered to the wrong address, I received my new enclosure and PCIe card yesterday. DHL notified me via SMS that my package had been delivered at 4:30pm EST yesterday. However, upon arriving at 5:30 – nothing was there. Nothing at my in-law’s (one neighbor) and nothing on the doorstep at my other neighbor’s (DHL notes stated it was left at the front door and, as far as I knew, my neighbor was at work all day – so it should have been there). I called DHL and they said they would contact me within 2 hours. Not long afterwards, my wife asks me if I’m blind and tells me there’s a box on the front porch. I also noticed my neighbor was now home – coincedence? Nope.

Anyway, I unpacked and inspected everything and it all looks as expected – very nice construction and quality products from PC-Pitstop.  The enclosure is pretty much the same as my first 4-bay enclosure, except that it includes a 5-in-3 hotswap cage, as opposed to the 4-in-3.  Here a couple of shots of the enclosure:

The PCI-e card is pretty standard and smaller than I expected, but I can’t really say what I was expecting otherwise.  It’s an unboxed/unbranded item based on the Sil3132 chipset, which is required for operation with the Sil3726 port multiplier in the enclosure.

Other than that, PC-Pitstop did include an eSATA cable (3ft or 6ft…I haven’t really looked yet) which is nice and a standard power cable was also included.

I’ve been really busy the past few weeks so I’m hoping I can get this stuff going by the weekend.  Hopefully I’ll find a little time each day to complete a few of the tasks needed (I still need to take the drives out of my old server – blah).

More to come, so check back often!