I was doing some encoding this weekend and since it takes several hours for one to finish, I’m rarely at my office PC even a portion of the time it’s working. On three occasions, before I decided to give up and try it on another system, I was met with a powered off PC. I had assumed that it choked on some bad data or something and blue screened, although it is supposed to come back up afterwards. That’s when I decided to download CoreTemp and do a little more digging on the issue.
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Although many of you probably pull multiple duties with your HTPCs, there are just as many that use their HTPC as a dedicated device. It’s not used for day-to-day web browsing, home office tasks, etc. It’s used for multimedia playback, program recording and other home entertainment purposes. For a dedicated system like this, it only makes sense to start off on the right foot when loading Windows 7 (Media Center-equipped) and “trim off the fat” that it typically comes with. This can be done quickly and easily using 
I have two HTPC setups in my home that have complete surround sound systems – one in the living room and one in the bedroom. For the most part, I get to enjoy true digital surround, as provided by AC3 or DTS audio tracks that I maintain with my movies. However, I still have a lot of older content that I ripped and used MP3 stereo audio with. I still use MP3 with probably 99% of my TV series. I’m going to show you how to use ffdshow audio codec profiles to detect and transcode that MP3 stereo audio into multi-channel PCM for full surround sound goodness.
Microsoft has put a new tool out for beta testing that allows for low-level system scanning of a system that will no longer boot due to virus, malware, rootkits, etc. It is 
As you may (or may not) know, Media Center uses the Windows Media Player as its internal player. You may also have experienced some less-than-stellar streaming performance out of it if you do a lot of Internet-based playback or have your media library on a network server. I’m going to help you make a very quick change to a single setting if you would like a little more stability in your streaming performance.
This isn’t related to HTPCs so much, but I guess someone out there using a Windows 2008-based server as a file server could be experiencing this issue if the hardware matches up. Anyway, I’ve been seeing these 2012 events in the event log for some time and they have been causing a lot of grief where I work. Searching around on the Internet just led me in circles, more or less, so I decided to try a couple of things and found a solution for our situation.
This is not a guide or walk-through. This is simply a short post to, hopefully, clear up a very common confusion or misconception about using Media Center on the Windows 7 64-bit platform that I continue to come across. The issue arises from the default handler of multimedia files and codecs used and the way Windows 7 is designed to handle them. To the typical user, it can cause all sorts of grief and even stroke-inducing anger. I can only hope to explain what’s going on and give you a little insight so that you can find out how to fix your issue.
I have been encoding my DVDs for as long as I can remember, well, ever since I started buying DVDs, I suppose. I have never stored an ISO or direct DVD folder structure for as long as I have been using an HTPC. I often get asked for help on how I do my encodings, so I thought I would write this guide. I have changed software several times throughout the years, but I have been using RipBot264 the longest now. I find it has the most ‘middle ground’ covered when taking available options and simplicity into account.
Some time ago 
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