Niklas's Blog: HTPC status report

Things are starting to look good now. Let's get the problems out of the way:

I've had one recording with no sound. Not sure what it is and the thread I found on greenbutton did not help.
This morning the system had not gone back to stand-by after a recording during the night. The show was properly recorded though.
My VFD (physical display) is not only dim as some users have reported - its not working at all. Will contact support about that and see if they can help.

What is working at the moment?

I can playback 720p matroska files. And the quality is brilliant. Playback even works within MCE.
I can record TV shows and entire series very easily. With good quality.
I can pause live TV up to two hours.
I can get 5.1 audio (although I have to manually switch between audio through HDMI (to the TV) or through optical (to my surround system))
Thumbnails for all videos in MCE
Burning a recorded TV show to a DVD works. Somewhat. The aspect ratio for a show in 4:3 format became 16:9 which is not good.

What have I done, and what should you do?

What remains to be done?

Since finding all channels was a real nightmare I want to back up the channels file. Need to find where it is and back it up.
I hate the caps lock key and always re-map it to ctrl. Haven't done that yet for the HTPC, but will soon.
See if I can get the music library working with music stored on another machine (where I already have all my music collection and a slimserver running for my Squeezebox)
Do the same for images that are stored on the same machine where my music is
Fix aspect ratio for burning 4:3 TV shows to DVD
Test DVD playback and make it region free
Set up DVD ripping (DVD Fab Decrypter and Any DVD are main contenders), perhaps coupled with Handbrake to store to DivX immediately.
Get DVB-T subtitling to work
Probably tons of other stuff that will come to me eventually. But I'll leave something for future posts.

Niklas's Blog