All drivers were installed correctly and the onboard sound was disabled.

But when viewing the supported formats for the playback device, it only listed 2 channels. Unfortunately I have been unable to change this, although I have got full 5.1 DTS and DD sound coming through to the receiver, by selecting S/PDIF pass-through in all the applications (even through I was using HDMI, not optical). The only problem with this is music comes through stereo only as WMP doesn’t pass-through stereo sound through as 5.1 in anyway and foobar doesn’t support pass-through, although there is a component you can download, but this wouldn’t work for my sound card as I think the DVD-A disc rips are 6 channel rather than 2.

I think the only way of getting proper 5.1 surround sound out of music, will be to buy another sound card and use another audio input in to the receiver.

Driver wise, I used the latest Catalyst package (9.6) and the Realtek ATi HDMI Audio driver (2.28). At this point I would also like to point out that the download speed from Realtek is diabolical. I ended up getting the filename of the file and searching on Google to find a mirror. Don’t be fooled by the other driver download sites, as they just directly link to the Realtek driver rather than a proper mirror.

Server

Before with MediaPortal I was able to set up multiple shares on a file server running Windows Vista. This has now been changed to running Windows Home Server. The initial steps to install WHS (Windows Home Server) were not as straight forward as I initially planned as installation requires all connected drives to be wiped. So I unplugged the 2 1TB data drives leaving the 500GB OS drive to be formatted. Installation of WHS was easy, as it normally is with Windows. I have no CD/DVD drive in my file server, so I had to resort to creating a bootable USB stick with the WHS CD files on it. This installed without problem.

Once WHS was up and running, it is just a matter of plugging a new hard drive in and WHS adds it to the array. Unfortunately this wipes all the data from the disk, so I had to connect them to another computer, copy the data to the computer, connect the drive to the file server, then add the drive to the array, then move the files from the other computer to the file server.

This was time consuming but worth it. I now have a 4TB array with lots of DVD backups as well as music and a backup of personal documents, which can be recovered if there is a problem with the other computers in the house.

HTPC configuration

First step was to reformat the HTPC and install Windows 7 RC. This went smoothly and works pretty much as expected. The only problem being the sound, but I will get on to that in another post.

I chose to use Windows Media Centre as the UI rather than MediaPortal this time as it has better support for a remote in the future which means I can hide the keyboard and mouse.

Using WMC provides a few problems.

• Metadata
• Thumbnails/Images
• MKV/Avi support

Metadata

To get the meta data for my films, I used browser. This is a great bit of software that allows you to get the synopsis as well as actors/genre/director(s) of each film as well as a smaller thumbnail and a large image to be used as a backdrop. It has full support for TV shows as long as you store all your videos in the right folder structure.

Thumbnails/Images

I opted for MediaBrowser which plugs straight in to WMC creating a new entry on the main navigation. MediaBrowser is currently free but looks to be becoming a commercial product on a yearly licence, but assuming it continues to improve, it should be worth it.

MKV/Avi support

I initially looked at passing on MKV files on to an external player which you can do within MediaBrowser, but in the end chose to use the Shark 007 codec pack which allows WMC to play MKV H264 files perfectly, with the ability to rewind/fastforward pause etc within WMC.

On most start ups, explorer didn’t load at all, but could be manually by bringing up the task manager (Ctrl + Alt + Delete) and going to File –> Run and typing ‘explorer.exe’ (without the quotes).

I don’t know where the malware came from, but there were traces from Limewire, so one could hazard a guess that this was likely the cause.

Fix

To fix the problem, you will need some knowledge of the registry and navigating around Windows explorer. As well as the following tools:

• HijackThis – Download (mirror)
• ComboFix – Download (Read all the documentation of Combofix before you proceed with this)

Step 1: Get the command prompt and regedit to work

1. Navigate to C:\Windows\system32 in explorer
2. Copy the file called regedit32 (regedit32.exe if you have extensions shown)
3. Paste a copy of this file on your desktop
4. Rename this file to anything you want other than cmd.exe or regedit32.exe, something like somerandomfile.exe
5. Double click the file to open it.  You should now have full access to the registry

Step 2: Remove the malware

1. In the registry navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Drivers32
2. Under aux2 (maybe another entry) you will see a path like C:\DOCUME~1\USERNAME\LOCALS~1\Temp\..\esanx.igg
3. Copy the whole path excluding the file and open it in Explorer. You should see the file in the folder.
4. If so, open up HijackThis, and click the button for Misc Tools.
5. Chose Delete a file on reboot.
6. Navigate to the path of the file and select the file.
7. When you have selected it you will be asked to restart.  Say Yes and restart.

Step 3: Check it has gone

1. After you have restarted, disable any Antivirus scanners and run Combofix following the instructions.
2. Let Combofix do it’s thing and when finished, everything should be as good as it was beforehand.

Step 4: Remove any junk (to be on the safe side)

1. Either download CCleaner or ATF-Cleaner (Only for Windows XP and Windows 2000)
2. Clean out all your temporary files

HTTP request status

Your system or network configuration does not allow Drupal to access web pages, resulting in reduced functionality. This could be due to your webserver configuration or PHP settings, and should be resolved in order to download information about available updates, fetch aggregator feeds, sign in via OpenID, or use other network-dependent services.

It took a while to find the solution, but I eventually found it on drupal.org. The solution was posted by mrSjoerd.

1. Open up the hosts file which is located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc in notepad
2. You should find a line like the following at the bottom:
   ::1             localhost
3. Add a # in front of it to make it look like this:
   #::1             localhost
4. Save the file and close notepad.
5. Refresh the status page in Drupal and the error should be gone.  This should work without a restart, but if it doesn’t work without a restart it is worth a try.

Some others that have come up:

• 94.102.60.43
• 94.102.60.77
• 94.102.60.39

Hardware wise it is identical to a normal PC with CPU, RAM, motherboard etc etc but generally put in to more stylish cases specially built to fit in most TV stands.

Case

I opted for an Antec Fusion Black HTPC case which is a fairly nice case, although it can be seen as quite costly at around £100 without a PSU. The case is steal with an aluminium front but even so it doesn’t weigh alot. There is space for 2 hard drives which are secured with rubber grommets to stop vibration and 2 5.25″ slots with one of these slots being used for the LCD display that comes built with the case, but can be taken out. The case has a few ventilation holes around to keep components cool but only has 2 120mm fans which are located on the side of the case near where the CPU will be. Both of these fans are Antec Tri-Cools and as such have the 3 way setting for fan speed, low, medium, high. I have mine set to low which gives off a little bit of noise and gives more than adequate cooling for the rest of the components.

Motherboard

After reading many good reviews I bought the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H AMD 780G Micro-ATX. The GA-MA78GM-S2H uses the AMD 780G chipset which has onboard audio and graphics. The onboard audio is a Realtek chip with your standard analogue in and outs but also has a digital out. The onboard graphics is called the Radeon HD 3200 which is said to be equal in performance to the Radeon HD 3450. The HD 3200 has AVIVO and allows for full hardware acceleration if the software supports it. The HD 3200 gives you VGA, DVI and HDMI which also carries sound. The motherboard also has a feature called Hybrid Graphics Technology. This allows you to put in another graphics card in to the PCI-e 2.0 slot which will be used in a crossfire like situation although AMD refuses to call it crossfire due to the performance levels not being the same. Unfortunately you can just shove any card in there and get this performance. It is obviously limited to AMD/ATi cards only and even then it will only use the power equivalent to the onboard graphics. In this case the best card to put in would be the HD 3450.

CPU

Keeping to an all AMD affair, I got the AMD Athlon X2 4850e which is a low power CPU said to consume only 45W. This also reduces heat which is a top priority in an HTPC as it means you don’t need a noisy fan on it, and this CPU is more than capable of processing any HD media or x264 rips.

RAM

RAM isn’t used that much in an HTPC compared to a gaming PC so I just got 2GB (2x 1GB sticks) of Corsair DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX. Of course you can easily change this to 4GB if you want.

PSU

As I was happy with my current Corsair PSU in my gaming PC I chose to keep my loyalty and got the Corsair CX400W which is more than capable of powering the HTPC with room to spare if I ever wanted to add a new sound card or new graphics card.

Hard drive

Being a Samsung fan due to the low noise from their Spinpoint harddrives, I bought another Samsung SpinPoint F1 500GB to join my growing collection of them. This drive isn’t particularly slow, but obviously won’t keep up with a Western Digital Raptor but is a hell of a lot quieter. This only used up 1 slot, so I still have another slot spare to add another drive in the future if I wanted to.

DVD Drive

Originally I was just going to buy a £20 DVD drive. But then I saw the LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray Reader & HD-DVD ROM. For only £45 more I now have the ability to play Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Although HD-DVD has been beaten by Blu-Ray there is still a lot of HD-DVD stock out there with stores trying to get rid of it. So when you have the choice of getting HD films for as little as £3 it seemed obvious to get a dual player. The only thing I forgot to check about this drive before purchasing was the noise, but I was gladly surprised with in once it was installed. Although not quiet, it wasn’t too noticeable, so when you have a film on you are unlikely to hear it.

Software

At the moment, I don’t have any dedicated software for my HTPC but I have got Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit to install, then I can test with further software to expand the HTPC to be the optimum it can be.

and
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The site has both Akismet and Project Honey Pot protecting it and isn’t detected by either.

Add to the ban list.

Other IPs that have been spamming the site alot are:

78.110.175.15
94.102.60.43
94.102.60.77
94.102.60.39

In Firefox and IE, you get the same text:

Make note of the first paragraph. Now if you open up the same javascript window within Google Chrome, you get this:

Once again, note the first paragraph again.  Within Google Chrome it mentions the Safari menu. Safari is not installed on this computer so there is no reason for Safari to appear there other than Google Chrome being related to Safari in some way.

Also take note that yesterday, typing Google Chrome in to Google search, the results were very different.  In less than 1 day Google appears to have got it’s Chrome site to #1.

WMP, SMPlayer, VLC, PowerDVD 7 and PowerDVD 8 fail to play it.

Opening the ISO in WinRAR displays an empty file.

EDIT: I found out away in my post [How to] Convert AVCHD ISO to MKV.

But I thought that things may have changed, much like the ease of graphics card driver installation.

Previously I have ended up enabling on board sound and using that with ALSA within Linux, but not anymore.

I found a post on the Ubuntu Forums. Which explains how to install OSS in Ubuntu Hardy Heron which just happens to make the X-Fi work.

Instructions

Go here: http://www.4front-tech.com/download.cgi
Get the Linux 2.6 DEB package for your architecture (use x86 unless you have the amd64 Ubuntu) and save it to your home folder (i.e. the ~/ directory)

0. Get necessary packages

sudo apt-get install gcc gcc-4.2 gcc-4.2-base make build-essential binutils linux-headers-`uname -r` libssl-dev libssl0.9.8

1. Copy these directions to a text file so you can view them from a terminal, or print them out/write them down
2. Remove ALSA:

sudo apt-get -y remove alsa-base alsa-oss oss-compat

3. Reboot, but don’t log in
4. Change your session (clicking the icon in the lower left of the login screen) to failsafe terminal.
5. Now Log In
6. Navigate to where you have the deb file saved (e.g. if it’s your home dir, cd ~/ ). Note the name of the file will be oss-linux_v4.0-1015_amd64.deb if you downloaded that version

sudo dpkg -i oss-linux_v4.0-1015_i386.deb
sudo soundon

7. Just issue the exit command and when it goes back to the login screen, log in as normal.
8. OSS uses it’s own mixer GUI (ossxmix). You’ll need to right-click on and remove the Gnome mixer/volume control icon from the panel.
9. Add a new custom application launcher to the panel that runs the command: ossxmix – That’s ossxmix, not ossmix, Name the launcher whatever you want and pick an icon. I named mine “Mixer” and chose /usr/share/icons/gnome/32×32/status/stock_volume-med.png as my icon.
10. You’ll have to tell applications to use the OSS output plugin instead of ALSA. Some applications (like Audacious) have user-friendly controls for this. Others require command line input or configuring a text file. See: http://www.4front-tech.com/wiki/index.php/Configuring_Applications_for_OSSv4

Software needed:

• VirtualDubMod – as of time of writing, v1.5.10.2

VirtualDubMod is an enhanced version of VirtualDub and is completely OpenSource.

First of all you need to locate the videos you want to join together.

Open up VirtualDubMod. If this is the first time you are running VirtualDubMod you will need to say Yes/Agree to the messages that appear then Start VirtualDubMod.

Once within VDM click File > Open. Select the first part of the video, the opening sequence.

You will get 2 preview screens in the program. The left hand one is the original, the right hand one is the one that has any filters you apply, these don’t really matter for joining videos.

Now, go to File > Append Segment. Select part 2 of the video. Press OK to append it. If you move the slider at the bottom across you will notice that the 2nd part has been put on.

Now go to Video, and select Direct Stream Copy.

Then to save the video go to File > Save As. And save the new video whereever you want to put it.

Job done.

I thought there can’t be that much wrong with them, I am sure they can’t be any worse than the old drivers.

Ha ha ha. I really am stupid.

The beta drivers really are shit. They are even worse than the “stable” yes I said stable about Creative’s drivers. And after 3 BSOD’s from various DLL’s from the new beta drivers I thought it was time to stop trying to install them. That’s right, I hadn’t even got to the point where I could fully install them.

So a couple of restarts later and a little bit of help from the good old Driver Cleaner Pro, I was able to reinstall the old Creative drivers which in some ways work…well I can hear sound.

32 Bit DX10 Windows Vista x64

64 Bit DX10 Windows Vista x64

As you can see from the figures look very similar between the 2 and no correlation seems to appear from any of the results. I could look further in to this and come up with some shitty reason why which no one would care to read or understand, but I would say that they just run around the same as each other and they both have standard variance that you will get everytime you play it.

A Direct Comparison

The following graph shows the performance of 32 bit Crysis over the 64 bit Crysis. 64 bit Crysis is set to 100% on each setting. The resuts take in to account the average FPS throughout the whole of the benchmark, not the min or max.

Conclusion

Well there isn’t one. They look identical in game, performance is roughly the same. The game isn’t made any more playable at any setting with either modes so use which ever one you want.

If you have problems with 64 bit Crysis running, you shouldn’t find any performance problems dropping to the 32 bit client. If anything you may see a slight increase in performance, but nothing to write home about.

I won’t do a comparison of DX9 vs DX10, because I think virtually every other website already has.

The PC in question is the following specification:

• Intel Core2Duo E6750 overclocked to 3.2GHz
• 4GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM
• 250GB SATA 7200RPM HDD
• Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB overclocked to 560MHz core, 850MHz memory

This including case and PSU etc, excluding monitor and speakers can be bought for around £700-£750, which isn’t really a lot, bringing it around £1000-£1200 with speakers and 22″ widescreen monitor.

The benchmark was carried out on Windows Vista 64-bit edition in DirectX 10 mode.

The benchmark tool used was the Crysis Benchmark Tool made by the team at Crymod and can be downloaded from Crymod or Guru3D.

I ran the benchmark using the 4 different quality settings; low, medium, high and very high.

And at 5 different resolutions; 800×600, 1024×768, 1280×960, 1680×1050 and 1900×1200.

All tests were run in 64-bit mode and Vsync was disabled. No AA was set and the time of day was set to 15:00 (3:00PM).

Screenshots:

Low

800×600

1024×768

1280×960

1680×1050

1900×1200

Medium

800×600

1024×768

1280×960

1680×1050

1900×1200

High

800×600

1024×768

1280×960

1680×1050

1900×1200

Very High

800×600

1024×768

1280×960

1680×1050

1900×1200

I don’t know what happened to this one. For some reason the tool didn’t make a screenshot. I imagine it was because it was so slow.

Benchmarks:

Conclusion:

You are going to have to spend more than £1000 for your whole computer to be able to play this game on High at anything above 800×600. If you are going to spending that much on a computer you won’t be playing at 800×600 anyway. If you were playing on a computer only capable of low settings you are likely to be playing at a low resolution so it doesn’t really matter than it drops in performance a lot when the settings are changed to 1900×1200 on very high.

If you have a similar system or are looking for a similar system then you will be fine for playing on Medium settings and that is all you should look at playing. High will need an SLi or Crossfire setup and even then you have to hope it scales properly.

At the moment Nvidia and ATi (AMD) have brought out new graphics cards on to the market which offer better value then the 8800GTS 320MB. If you are looking for a new graphics card, I would point you in the direction of 3 cards:

• ATi HD 3870 512MB or 1024MB
• Nvidia 8800GT 512MB
• Nvidia 8800GTS 512MB

Note: The second Nvidia 8800GTS I have put down is the new 512MB version not the old 320MB or 640MB versions.

Upon recieving my copy of Bioshock, I installed which all went fine, then the installer tried to download a patch, so I allowed it. The patch failed to download properly, so I retried….and retried.

At this point I clicked cancel, which resulted in the whole installation being cancelled.

I restarted the computer and tried again, same thing happened again except this time, rather than closing the installer down, I went to the start menu and tried to run Bioshock.

STOP!!

AVG has spotted a virus.

Obfustat.JXR to be exact.

Turns out AVG is throwing up all Securom games as virii.

I had then disabled AVG and let the installation continue. This time it went through fine and the game was installed.

Upon the successful installation of Bioshock I re-enabled my virus protection and run Bioshock.

STOP!!

Bioshock.exe is a virus.

Not again. Right so now I can’t play a game and have my anti-virus running.

In the end I resulted to adding the 2K games folder to my AVG whitelist so it wouldn’t scan files in there.

Perfect.

So who is to blame for the problems?

So who really is to blame for problems.

Is it Sony for making a shitty piece of DRM software that is seen as a virus and detected by Microsoft’s own root kit detection program?

Is it 2K Games for fault for paying for this shitty DRM software to put in to their game?

Is it AVGs fault for detecting a problem that could cause serious problems to your security?

I think the 2 former options are the 2 most likely. AVG is a brilliant piece of software and correctly see’s the threat to the consumers PC. Sony on the other hand have made a devious piece of DRM software. They should of learnt their lesson from their music DRM problem a while back. I would of thought 2K Games would of researched about the different possible DRM solutions.

ID Software and Epic both release their games with just a serial number and requiring the DVD to be in the drive. A couple of patches later and the need for the DVD is gone. That is what I like to see. Oblivion has no DRM and sold like hot cakes because it was a brilliant game.

Bioshock is a brilliant game but it has had too much negative publicity caused by some bad foresight in to the future.

The only thing that will kill PC gaming is companies insisting on putting DRM in to their games. They will be cracked so it doesn’t matter how much money you spend on trying to make them so they can’t be cracked. People that buy the games legit are the ones that get fucked because of it. Is it the pirates fault? Well slightly, if there were no pirates there would be no need for DRM….yarrr.