Paw Paw Dog

In Remembrance

11.11.11

In Remembrance

If you not getting any sound or only getting stereo sound, check the following,

You need to completely remove the old graphics and HDMI drivers. This is especially true if the motherboard has ATI chipset with HDMI such as MSI 785GTM-E45 that uses Realtek audio chip and you have loaded Realtek’s HDMI driver. The Realtek’s HDMI driver does not work with ATI 5450 but if Realtek’s HDMI driver is present, Windows may use it instead of the ATI’s HDMI driver.

If you are not sure, check the device manager to see which driver is loaded for the ATI 5450. If it is the Realtek’s HDMI driver, you need to change the driver.

If ATI’s HDMI driver is loaded but you only have 2 ch. sounds, check the Windows’ sound manager under control panel. In Windows 7, the sound manager will show a list of sound devices. If ATI HDMI is not the only one, set it as default. If on the other hand, you don’t see ATI HDMI here, you don’t have the right driver loaded.

There is an obscure “configuration” button at the bottom of the sound manager. Whit ATI HDMI selected, click the configuration button. A new box will show up. The default is 2 channels. Select the proper number of the speakers and arrangement.

Once you get the right settings, the ATI 5450 works great. But since some Windows applications can and will make changes without inform the user, don’t assume these settings just need to be set once and forget it. If things worked for a while but switched back to two channel sound, double check these settings again. I have encountered a few times the settings been changed after auto Windows updates.

Also note, it is better to switched on the HDMI devices downstream from the HTPC such as receiver before the HTPC. If you turn on the HTPC first, the ATI HDMI audio driver may not be loaded and end up with no sound at all to the HDMI port.

Assuming we are building a HTPC mainly for playing A/V media, not playing games, the most important thing but often overlooked or not emphasized by most the review on motherboard or graphics card is the ability to support HD audio such as DTS-HD MA or DD TrueHD bit stream.

Am I saying audio is a more important factor than video in HTPC? No. Not really. But consider today’s new generation of graphics chips from ATI, Intel or Nvidia all supports HD video playback that off loads from the CPU. Even new IGP on motherboard chip sets such as ATI 4200, Intel X4500 or GeForce 9300, they all able to play the HD DVD or Blu-Ray smoothly without the need of high power CPU. In fact, even older CPUs such as AMD Athlon 64×2 5200+ or Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 can play Blu-Ray nicely with those IGPs.

The HD audio that is part of the Blu-Ray experiences on the other hand is very different story. One can not assume just because the motherboard or the graphics card has a HDMI port on it and the manufactures mentions audio pass through, they will support DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD. In fact, none of the current IGP chipset supports in.

The AMD’s ATI 4200 from the current 785 and 890 chipset is the worst as it only supports 2 channel PCM audio through HDMI. By itself it would not even support the pass through of basic 5.1 DTS or DD core! It require additional s/w and/or h/w support to do so.The new AMD 890 chipset is particular disappointing as AMD clearly do not want it is used as HTPC motherboard without the need of adding additional graphics card.

The Intel X4500 or the GeForce 9xxx (including the 9400 used by the Ion platform) is only marginally better than the ATI 4200 on audio. While they do support 8 channels LPCM output, they don’t support DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD. Again, external h/w or s/w decoding is needed to decode the HD audio bit streams to LPCM. If s/w solution is used, it will place a heavy burden to the CPU which requires more powerful and more expensive CPU and possibly memory too. In addition, although some people argue that LPCM conversion done right will preserve the lossless nature of the DTS-HD MA or DD TrueHD, but that will be putting a lot of faith to who ever is implementing the decoding in h/w or s/w to do the right thing not to cut corners to cut cost or gain performance or both. I for one rather want to see the original bit streams pass though the HDMI port to the receiver.

If none of those motherboards with built-in IGP can support native HD audio bit stream, then none of them, at least not by themselves is suitable for HTPC application. Built-in IGP or HDMI on the motherboard is therefore not a factor or even desirable when choosing a motherboard because of possible higher cost and power consumption for the parts that are useless.

While some of the new Intel i series CPU had built-in GPU that do support DTS-HD MA or DD TrueHD, The CPU plus motherboard combo is far more expensive than necessary. A better or less cost solution is to use older or lowly motherboard and CPU combo that using older DDR2 memory can be had around $50 is adequate.

When it comes to add-on graphics card, the real sections are between ATI and Nvidia. I was very surprised to find out none of their new generation of graphics cards from GeForce 240 on down supports native DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD. They all require conversion to LPCM. As stated before, I don’t consider this conversion is acceptable for today’s HTPC at all. I did not bother to look Nvidia’s line above the GeForce 240 as their costs are way beyond what I have in mind for good budget HTPC.

On the ATI side, I did not look at their older 3xxx or 4xxxx series as the ATI 4200 did not give me a good impression. The ATI 5450 is the current entry model for the 5xxxx series and it is prefect for budget HTPC. First and foremost, it supports DTS-HD MA and DD True-HD pass through. Second, it and no fan and therefore no fan noise. Third it cost less than $50. While ATI 5450’s game playing ability is questionable, it plays all HD video files smoothly and with minimum demand to the CPU.

The advantage of using low power graphics card, CPU and motherboard means there is no need for high wattage power supply too. I used a 500W power supply not because I need one but rather it was no sale for $20. Some people may say these cheap power supplies’s real wattage does not even come close to the advertised number. But even if this power supply’s true wattage is only half of the 500W advertised, it is still more than enough to power my HTPC. The entire setup with ATI 5450, AMD Althon II x3 440, MSI 785GTM-E45 motherboard, two 1.5TB hard drivers, two optical drivers and uses less than 140W when playing Blu-Ray movies. My older CPU and motherboard combo uses even less power.

Speaking of AMD Althon II X3 440 and the MSI motherboard combo, I got them on sale and at the time I thought the MSI motherboard hat uses AMD 785 chipset will support DTS-HD MA etc. If I knew what I know now, I would have just added the ATI 5450 to an old PC setup that has AMD Althon 64X2 5200+ CPU as it can play the HD media just as smooth as the real work is done by the ATI 5450.

For HDTV tuner, I used a USB external tuner from Kworld. While I can never get the QAM tuner to work, it is not a great lost as the Windows 7’s MCE doesn’t support QAM and the local cable’s QAM offering is worst than ASTC any way.

The total cost of building this HTPC is very low as most of the components came from existing PC. As I have mentioned before, if I had know better, all I really needed to change the existing PC to HTPC is the ATI 5450 card that cost $40. Even in case I need to start from ground up, the cost would be about the same as a TVIX 6620N or Dune Prime but capable to do more than either of them can provided.

For people who do want to assemble a HTPC from ground up, they can get a decent desktop PC for around $300 from many retail places as long as the PC has empty PCIe slot to put in a ATI 5450 and that’s it.
As for media player software, the Media Center that came with Windows Vista and Windows 7 although not great but is more than functional. If you buy a retail version of the Blu-Ray drive, it is also likely to be bundled with player software that can play both Blu-Ray and DVD.

Bottom line, there is no need to get latest greatest CPU or GPU to build a great HTPC. Video play back for HD content is widely supported even by entry level GPU or motherboard IGP that came to market in the last year or so. HD audio support on the other hand is different story. Most of if not all of the current motherboard IGP and low end to mid range Nividia solution is not capable of full HD audio support. Some thing to watch out when building a HTPC.

I assembled a HTPC using MSI 785GTM-E45 motherboard and AMD Athlon II X3 440 CPU. I choose this combo mainly because it was on sale but also because I thought the MSI motherboard supports HD audio formats through on board HDMI port. Although reading about the AMD 785 chipset elsewhere indicates clearly the chipset is not capable of supporting HD audio, I thought by reading MSI’s web site which claim “True Blu-ray Audio Support”, MSI may implement some off chipset solutions. Well, as it turns out, they just meant they support “True Blu-ray Audio” thought analog outputs. While not exactly false advertisement, I don’t think they are really hones either. In fact, not only the HDMI does not support HD audio, the default driver that came with the board only support 2 ch. LPCM output. Talk about disappointment. Even after download different driver from Realtek, the HDMI port only supports the basic none HD audio DTS and DD core. Not really an acceptable solution for today’s HTPC.

To solve the lack of HD audio problem, it is obvious I need to add a graphics card that has the following features,

• Has HDMI port.
• Has hardware HD video decoding function so playback of HD video contents such as HD DVD or Blu-Ray or HDTV will not burden the CPU.
• Support HD audio streams, DTS-HD MA, DD TrueHD and 8 ch. LPCM in particular pass though HDMI port.
• Cost less than $60

Being able to play PC games on the other hand is not a requirement to me. None of the current Nvidia cards in this price range meet the requirement. The best they can do is to support 8 ch. LPCM which is not acceptable. The ATI on the other hand has a number of cards fit the requirement. I choose the PowerColor AX5450 with 512MB of DDR3 memory because ATI 5450 is a newer chip that consume less power and fanless which means no fan noises. Priced around $40 is also a big plus.

The package of the card looks more like a video game box than graphics card and the content is bare minimum. Even the CD looks like a generic ATI CD without any PowerColor added content.

Installation does require either temporary adding a second monitor or switch connection from the TV to regular monitor. This is because my TV only supports 1080i and that is not in the Windows’ generic monitor resolutions. After the first boot up and sign on to Windows, in this case, Windows 7 will pick up the card and associated it with the right driver, including the HD Fury driver I made for the 1080i resolution. Once this is done, the second monitor is not required.

Windows 7’s Aero score jumped from 3.8 of motherboard’s ATI 4200 to 5.0. But compares to GeForce 9300’s 4.7, this really wasn’t that great. HD DVD and Blu-Ray video play back are smooth as expected are smooth but then even the motherboard’s ATI 4200 is capable smooth playback of HD videos.

Audio playback through HDMI however, did not go well. The A/V receiver’s light indicates I only got 2 ch. LPCM out of the new card. Some thing was not right. As it turns out, it was motherboard’s Realtek HDMI driver is interfering. I need to completely uninstall the Realtek’s HDMI driver and then install ATI’s HDMI driver. Once set correctly, my receiver now receives the proper DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD streams over the HDMI.

As a side note, some people complained that if HDTV resolution is selected, the ATI driver will default to scale the graphics image to 95% to compensate possible overscan. While I did not encounter this problem, I actually tried manually to scale the image down a bit to see if I can use this function to compensate HD Fury’ left shift problem. Well, it sorts of works but in return I now have a sizeable black bar on the right and less noticeable on top and bottom. Not very desirable tradeoff to say the least so I change it back and just to resign to live with HD Fury’s lift shift problem.

The ATI 5450 is a great low cost solution for HTPC.

Pro:

• Low cost. Current retail is about $40-$50.
• Fanless. No fan noises.
• Have HDMI, DVI and VGA ports.
• Low power consumptions. Does not require additional PCI power.
• Support HD audio format such as DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD pass through HDMI port.

Con:

• Performance for none media video related regular graphics function is on the low side. 5.0 for Windows 7 Aero score is just a little than IGP like GeForce 9300.
• The PowerColor version is very barebone.

As whole, I am very happy with the ATI 5450 for HTPC. In fact, because most of the A/V decoding job of a HTPC is handled by this card, a lesser motherboard and CPU will do. There is no need or even desirable to get a motherboard with on board video for example. The Athlon II X3 is overkill for the job too. Even an old Althon 64 5200+ will do. ATI 5450 is the core of an inexpensive yet flexible and powerful modern HTPC.

I “upgraded” Quicken 2010 from the 2008 version for a few months now. I very sorry I did not the “upgrade” as the 2010 version not only offers VERY LITTLE improvement over the 2008 version, in many respect it probably is going backwards as it seems being not only slower but also more buggy.

I have been using Quicken since the good old DOS days. At the time it was relatively fast. When Windows comes along the early Windows Quicken seems improves with each version. But things start to change around the 2007 version as it did not offer much improvement and 2008 was even worse as it has become VERY SLOW.

I have decided to skip the 2009 version as it did not appear to add any improvements. When the 2010 comes along, again from the list of “features”, I don’t see any improvements either. But I was growing inpatient with the speed of bugs of the 2008 and thought if those greedy Intuit people can not add features from year to year, at least they should improve the speed and get rid of some bugs. Well, I was very very wrong!

While it seems fixed the UTF bug for none ASCII characters, this version seems has more bugs than ever! I have already encountered the update bug that auto update failed. Recently, I even found out this supposedly money management program can not even count correctly! I have noticed the supposedly same net worth chart on two different panels is different! When I go in and check out the report it was even worst as I have no idea how it got some of the numbers. I first thought it was some how I change the setting on one panel but after exam every settings and make sure they are at default, I still got the same result. In fact, when I added a new net worth chart to the same panel, I got two different charts on the same panel and both of them disagree with the net worth report to boot!

Bugs aside, this version also getting slower and doing certain things on its own. Take download account transactions for example, in the past, if I want to update one bank account and one bank account only, I can go the bank web site and down load the info to the Quicken and that is it. But now after the down load from the bank is completed, the Quicken 2010 will go off on its own to connect, down load “financial institutions” information that I did not initiate and do not know what exactly were down loaded! Manually update stock price is also getting worse as it takes long time for it to bring up the screen and then again take a long time to update after the new prices were entered.

Beyond been buggy and slow, the Quicken 2010 also retain all the greedy trademark of Intuit that it will without asking for consent install whole bunch self-serving advertising icons on your desktop trying to sell more Intuit junks. I would have not problem for the advertisement if Quicken is a freeware or even shareware. But when I paid for a buggy and slow software that have close to zero improvement over previous versions, unwanted ads without consent just to show how bad and greedy this company is.

Many people don’t like Microsoft. But I think Intuit is even worse. Far worse. Too bad Microsoft decided to abandon Money as I really want to abandon Quicken.

The bottom line is if you have Quicken 2008 or even Quick 2007, don’t bother to upgrade. I wish I did not.

The good old Mitsubishi VS-60111 is a 1080i RPTV that predated HDMI or even DVI. HD video sources came from component and RGB inputs. In order to update to old TV to the modern age, I used a gizmo called HD Fury.

There are two main problems with HD Fury. First, it has a left shift problem that shifts video images to the left a little. While the maker of the HD Fury has a later version claimed to have solve this left shift problem, they cost too much and most of time I don’t miss the “missing” left side so I just live with the problem.
The second problem has to deal with something called EDID. EDID is a data stream format used by HDMI devices to report its capabilities to sources so that the source will only send material such as 1080i video that the device is capable to handle. The problem is since the old TV predates HDMI, it has no EDID to pass on. HD Fury instead passes 1080p as its capabilities and therefore the problem as the TV can only handle 1080i. A source like Blu-Ray player will think the TV can handle 1080p and therefore sending 1080p to the TV. It is very easy to see things will fall apart quickly. Again, the maker of the HD Fury has a later generation that suppose let user select the right resolution to report instead of fixed on 1080p. Luckily, most, if not all the Blu-Ray players have a manual resolution override to send 1080i instead so this has not being a big problem to me up until now.

Connecting a HDMI based HTPC to HD Fury on the other hand, is problem as there is no easy resolution through remote or front panel on the PC. If HD Fury reports the TV can do 1080p, at initial startup, Windows will read the EDID from HD Fury and set the resolution to 1080p and the TV screen will be all scrambled. One solution of course is attach another monitor via DVI or VGA to the PC and change the resolution but this is not very practical if needs to be done every time to turn on or reboot the PC.
The maker of the HD Fury offers a solution to re-program the HD Fury’s to report 1080i instead of 1080p. To do this, one needs to download the new EDID data and use software called PowerStrip to program the HD Fury. While PowerStrip is available as trial shareware, only the paid registered version is capable to program the HD Fury as an “unofficial” function and there is not guarantee it will work. If it doesn’t the software is none refundable.

Luckily, there is an alternative free solution to the HD Fury EDID problem if the reason to re-program the HD Fury is to connect a HDMI HTPC. The PowerStrip’s maker also makes a free utility called MonInfo. I used the MonInfo to read the 1080i limited EDID file from HD Fury’s people and output it Windows INF file. On the first time the HTPC is to connect to the HD Fury, a second monitor will help to ensure the right INF file is pickup by Windows when it sees the HD Fury as new device and trying to install drive for it. It is important to get Windows to install the INF file we just made as the driver for HD Fury. Once the right driver is loaded, we are all set. Removed the second monitor, that it.

It needs to be mentioned that HD Fury’s left shift problem now is more of an issue with the Windows than previous with HD DVD or BD movies. It also need to mention that a 1080i display is not suitable for anything other than media file play back as regular Windows fonts become too small and too blurry. Windows’ MCE on the other hand works quite well as it uses much bigger fonts.

Download

• MonInfo
• EDID file for HD Fury

I have been using PC with a USB tuner to record HDTV for some time. But my old RPTV Mitsubishi VS-60111 only has component or RGB video inputs for 1080i signal; it is tough to connect it to the PC. I have tried various Nvidia’s solutions in the past; they all failed because the way they support component 1080i resolution is through scaling and re-encode whatever the resolution settings to 1080i. The result was very blur images on this old TV. The other problem is that at in the past not many motherboard has digital audio output for decent audio.

After I updated the TV with the HD Fury to accept HDMI signal and the Yamaha RX-V665 for the new HD audio formats such as DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD, it is time to revisit the HTPC setup. Before jump into a new HTPC setup however, media players has gaining popularity in recent years and it certainly has its advantages being more like consumer electronics than PC and possible easier for day to day use in a home theater environment.

After looking into the many available media players on the market such as WD TV Live, I was disappointed to found out none of the sub $200 players are capable to act as DVR. In other words, if I get one of these players, I still need the PC to record TV program. Another problem these media player is most of them are not capable to handle HD audio formats. Take TVIX 6620N for example, I have considered it because it can function as DVR. The problem is the TVIX is not only very expensive but also not able to pass through DTS-HD MA and DD TrueHD. For something cost close to $400, I expect more. In addition, TVIX’s local dealer has a rather unfriendly return policy and all the unhappy user feedback on the web make me to give up even give it a try. Then, there are the equally expensive Dune players that seem to be able to handle the DTS-HD HA and DD TrueHD but there is DVR option available. For the price those TVIX and Dune guys ask for, I can build a HTPC and be able to handle both DVR and HD audio.

While it is true, the HTPC can have a lot of issues, lacking proper remote friendly UI is just the most obvious. On the other hand, all those media players seem have their own set of problems too. One just has to search the web to see for example so many unhappy users about them too.

At the end, I went back to the HTPC option. After the failed trial with XFX GeForce 9300, I have settled with MSI 785GTM-E45 motherboard but only to find out it cannot do HD audio either. The great thing about HTPC is it is expandable and I am not depends on the media player companies to make good on their product. In this case, I added an ATI 5450 graphics and now my HTPC can do both DVR and handle HD audio. To me, this is a better choice by far than any media player on the market today.

Follow up:

• As of 4/15/2010, TVIX now has an “updated” 6600N+ selling in China using an “updated” Realtek 1283+ chipset that they “hint” will support HD audio down the line but as of today even this “new” upgraded 6600N+ still does not support DD TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. People who brought the “old” 6600N seems out of luck ! If you think TVIX’s customers got short change, the US dealers did not even mention this “new” model!
• Also as of 4/15/2010, it seems models from Dune has problems with many Blu-Ray disc.