Linksys DMA2100/2200 Installation Tips and Tricks - Page 2

philzgr8 · **26th February 2008, 08:33 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by logifuse

I don't think DVR-MS supports DTS (AC3 or MPEG only).

Justin

lol... That makes sense.

In the meanwhile I have updated my first post with a link to a shareware tool that provides advanced user management under Vista Home Premium. This may be handy for setting up logon scripts.

At this point I am finding nothing to help me with my power management problem whereby Vista freezes when it reaches the idle timeout. For now I have disabled the timeout but I might try uninstalling the latest MST beta and setting options with the older version which does not require installation. It's only a hunch but it's possible it might be linked to this problem.

philzgr8 · **28th February 2008, 08:07 AM**

OK here's the promised power management update (or at least an interim one.)

Last night I uninstalled MST and reverted to the older version which did not require installation. The main reason I had installed the new version was that I wanted more reliable idle detection since I was not 100% sure that my VMC box was completely reliable in going into standby. The upshot is that it seems the VMC box no longer freezes after the set idle time out although I have done very limited testing to prove this. This seems to be a major improvement but I'm not sure I am completely out of the woods yet. The fact is that when I woke up this morning the VMC box was awake and although not frozen it was very unresponsive. This was so bad that I found I had to reboot to get any semblance of reasonable response times out of it. To complicate matters a little more, unfortuntely I must admit that my practices at home are not quite what they ought to be since I had reinstalled SP1 as well after realising that it was not the cause of my freezing problems but it's possible that it is contributing to the slow response times. I will monitor this over the next few days and report my findings.

P.S. I noted that WOL is working fine.

saxnix · **28th February 2008, 11:13 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by philzgr8

Well this is very similar to what I'm doing except I use DVD shrink to rip the DVD to the hard disk (extracting only the main title and preferred audio stream) and then use VideoRedo to remux into a DVR-MS file. This seems to work fine for me although I haven't done mountains of testing at this stage.

Man, there is so much I don't know. Sorry this is a little OT, but this is the first I have heard about Video redo. Are you saying you can turn a backed up dvd into a DVR-MS file? If so, how does the file management of it work? What I mean is once the file has been converted to DVR-MS, can I leave it in the same folder (as the DVD - so it has folder art)? Or do you need to save it into the recorded TV folder so it will appear there? It would be great not to have to constantly transcode the movies the wife and boy watch over and over.

philzgr8 · **28th February 2008, 11:25 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by saxnix

Man, there is so much I don't know. Sorry this is a little OT, but this is the first I have heard about Video redo. Are you saying you can turn a backed up dvd into a DVR-MS file? If so, how does the file management of it work? What I mean is once the file has been converted to DVR-MS, can I leave it in the same folder (as the DVD - so it has folder art)? Or do you need to save it into the recorded TV folder so it will appear there? It would be great not to have to constantly transcode the movies the wife and boy watch over and over.

Yes you can. Personally I just delete the VIDEO_TS folder leaving the DVR-MS file there with all of the metadata and folder art. It works like a treat.

saxnix · **28th February 2008, 01:17 PM**

Thanks for that. I will give it a try and see how I go.

philzgr8 · **29th February 2008, 07:30 AM**

OK I haven't had lots of time to play with the Media Centre or the Extender this week but last night I did get time to uninstall MST, reset the power options and watch a bit of TV on the extender. Unfortunately all is not especially well with it. It seems that uninstalling MST has not really made much if any difference.

Firstly I find that with WOL enabled my VMC almost never seems to be able to sleep. If I force it into standby it sometimes wakes within a few minutes (even withjout other machines on the network being awake) and it seems that it is always awake when I get up in the morning. It's a bit hard to guage thus far but I'm suspecting that WOL in the end just isn't a great option.

The other issue is this freezing the I had found with the VMC box after using the extender beyond the standby timeout and it seems that this had nothing at all to do with MST. What I have discovered though is that it is not the entire machine that is frozen, it seems to be just the MCE front end. The only way I can do anything with it when this happens is to use the keyboard to bring up the task manager and then forcibly close the app or restart the machine. This is very odd behaviour and leaves me with not many options to test short of a clean install.

The good news in all of this is that none of it appears to affect the extender at all and I believe I have actually managed to resolve the live TV issues I was noticing. I found that I had typed in the wrong subnet when configuring the fixed IP and changing this to the correct value seems to have done the trick after a quick power cycle of all devices on the network including the router and switch.

logifuse · **29th February 2008, 07:44 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by philzgr8

Firstly I find that with WOL enabled my VMC almost never seems to be able to sleep. If I force it into standby it sometimes wakes within a few minutes (even withjout other machines on the network being awake) and it seems that it is always awake when I get up in the morning. It's a bit hard to guage thus far but I'm suspecting that WOL in the end just isn't a great option.

Hmm, WOL on my old mobo was hopeless - with it enabled the PC wouldn't even shut down. Maybe a higher end NIC is the answer?

Quote:

The other issue is this freezing the I had found with the VMC box after using the extender beyond the standby timeout and it seems that this had nothing at all to do with MST. What I have discovered though is that it is not the entire machine that is frozen, it seems to be just the MCE front end. The only way I can do anything with it when this happens is to use the keyboard to bring up the task manager and then forcibly close the app or restart the machine. This is very odd behaviour and leaves me with not many options to test short of a clean install.

Sounds like you have found out why there is the "when sharing media" setting in the power options.

Justin

philzgr8 · **29th February 2008, 07:50 AM**

To be fair, I don't think I've ever had heaps of success with WOL. It always seems to me that the slightest bit of activity on the network at all will wake the machine and then the question has to be asked as to why you would bother letting it sleep at all.

I have always had the "when sharing media" option turned off since it meant that my machine never went into standby. I'm not sure how this affects things but in the end it's pretty clear that Microsoft never expected a Media Center to be capable of going into S3 while configured with an extender. For the life of me though I can't see why the interface becomes unresponsive. I'm not even sure it has anything at all to do with power management.

logifuse · **29th February 2008, 03:51 PM**

My DMA2100 arrived today!

It's tiny - 6.5"x6.5"x1.5" (in the old money).

Playing with my HVR2200s first, but I'll try & get it online this arvo.

Justin

merovingian · **29th February 2008, 04:25 PM**

Yeah mine was apparently plonked on the doorstep a couple of hours ago as well. So I should also have some feedback this weekend.

logifuse · **29th February 2008, 11:39 PM**

A quick wrap of my install:

Getting initial video output happening was the biggest challenge - I had to unplug/replug the component leads in to my TV several times before the TV synched up to the signal. Once that was done I got it set to HD (576p) & then 720p pretty easily.

I connected up via wired & ran through the initial wizard & took down my numbers to enter on the VMC.

The VMC had seen it & was ready to go, but I ran the CD (there was 200+MB of stuff it installed - what was it?), it downloaded updates & rebooted.

Connected up on the VMC side of things fine.

Went in to MCX - quick launch (I've now set the DMA2100 to go straight to MCX - pretty quick). Played live TV & had the previously mentioned HD pixellation - VMC was plugged in to a gigabit switch, so I changed it to the router that the Linksys was plugged in to & that cured that (there's an add in in the box that mentions a KB article about it - I'll have a proper look later).

Menu navigation is jerky (as mentioned) - it responds to the remote well enough (you need good line of sight though), it just isn't that pretty.

Xvids played fine (once I added the watched folder), but they are slow to start. Does anyone else suspect that part of the 200+MB install package was a transcoding engine & we're not getting native Xvid playback? The CPU fan on the PC was working pretty hard while I was watching (couldn't look at CPU utilization as it's currently on the same TV). PQ of the Xvids was very good.

The main menu was back to the default start menu (& not the one I created by editing the dll) - I haven't had a chance to check the VMC itself, but I suspect the dll was overwritten by the extender updates. If so, I'll put the edited dll back in & see if it translates to the MCX.

Overall, reasonably impressed. A firmware update to cure the jerky menus (& a few other issues others have had) & it would be a 9/10 in my book (remembering that it cost $249). As it stands it's at about 7.5.

I'm going to try HDMI tomorrow as I'm lead to believe it's far superior to the Linksys' component output (wich wasn't great, but was better than any component out from a PC that I've tried).

That's it for now.

Justin

Edit: It's got a USB port - what for?

sfm · **1st March 2008, 10:15 AM**

Quote:

Originally Posted by logifuse

Xvids played fine (once I added the watched folder), but they are slow to start. Does anyone else suspect that part of the 200+MB install package was a transcoding engine & we're not getting native Xvid playback? The CPU fan on the PC was working pretty hard while I was watching (couldn't look at CPU utilization as it's currently on the same TV). PQ of the Xvids was very good.

I have my DMA-2100 set up and didn't let the install disk anywhere near my VMC. I would have thought that the delay wouldn't be transcoding but more likely caching of the video stream.