D-link 200MBs Homeplugs

After my last post which sounded a bit like an advert for the Harmony 600 I felt a bit worried that this post will do the same.

I have a problem in our new house... Wifi barely gets through the walls which are made of thick brick throughout.  Coverage was limited to the living room with the router and reduced speed wifi in adjacent rooms.  Half the house had no wifi at all and mobile reception teeters on 1 bar.

I plumped for the 200Mbs homeplug as a good compromise between speed and cost.  The newer faster solutions at 500Mbs and 1000Mbs sound good but would appear in a few cases to not give the speed advertised in a lot of houses.  Less than perfect wiring seems to be the main cause of the reduced speeds.

I purchased a D-link 200mbs AV homeplug and setup was as easy as it is possible to be.  I plugged one end into my router and the other into my macbook pro.  Then I pressed the only button on each plug.  My safari lept into life and that was it.  No need to read the manual.

As to speeds, I am running much faster (approx 5x) than on my wireless N airport when in adjacent rooms.  I haven't been able to conduct a fair test yet because my router is only 100Mbs.  However, I can stream 720p movies with no problems at all.  I have a NAS box and gigabit switch in the post so I shall update this post when that arrives..


requirements
stream internet

Why EyeTV still doesn't work for me in a mac mini media center

I have been running a homebuilt media center since 2005 starting with a large box in the living room running Media Center 2005.  As I've said before, I think the MCE is very well designed.  Since I got my first mac in 2007 I have been impressed with the design that goes into everything.  Well, almost everything.  Frontrow was a bit of a jarring experience after coming from the MCE.

The Mac Mini seemed like the perfect solution to run a media center from.  It was quiet, small, discreet and reasonably powerful.  The only viable TV solution was EyeTV from Elgato.  It is a great solution whilst on the road and running from a university dorm.  Unfortunately as a living room experience it is left lacking.  The control via the remote is clunky to say the least, in part due to apples insistence that everything can be done with a 6 function remote.  I haven't found the program to be the most stable and would often find recordings weren't made.

I recently reinstalled eyeTV a year after trying it last.  For any recording setup I think that two tuners as a minimum is essential.  For some reason the programs that we want to watch are always on at the same time.  On the MCE this is handled flawlessly.  If you select a channel to record and then try to watch another, it will seamlessly select an unused tuner.   EyeTV handles this situation by throwing up an error saying that until the recording is stopped the channel won't be changed.  The only way to get round this is to delve deep into the menu structure to manually change tuner.

Elgato have done a lot of amazing work on EyeTV but don't seem to want to add this simple bit of functionality.  If you are only running a single tuner it will do what you want.

Harmony 600 Remote

"Why didn't we get one of these before" was the shout from my wife when I handed the Harmony 600 to her for the first time. Such praise for a piece of technology in our household is glowing indeed. Indeed I myself regret not having taken the plunge earlier. In a bid to save money I had put up with a multitude of remotes.


My system is heavily centred around a Mac Mini with windows media centre installed on it. Once everything is turned on, all control used to be via a MCE Remote. Of the remotes I have used I believe this is one of the best ever designed. All functions rest within easy reach of the thumb and it is very comfortable to use. It amazes me what a good job the Microsoft engineers have done with windows media center and yet that doesn't propogate to the rest of the organisation. Like wise, why can't I get a livetv media center setup on a mac?? Unfortunately, the remote finally ceased to work and so the search for a replacement started.

I could have got another MCE remote from ebay for £20 but I decided to eliminate the need for all the remotes in the living room.  After much googling I decided on the Harmony 600 as it is reasonably priced and has enough devices for my needs.  Remember to check if your kit is covered by the remote.  I briefly considered the Harmony 650 colour version but it costs £58 vs £42 for the effectively the same piece of hardware.

The setup 
From the box, the remote needs to be plugged into your computer and registered on the logitech site.  Silverlight will probably need to be downloaded for your browser, but this will be under direction from the logitech site.
From there, you will be able to add your devices and activities.  I found it fairly self explanatory and was pleasantly surprised when my default watch tv option powered up the amp,tv,media centre and also setup the correct AV channel.  I had to alter one button from the default setup to make it do what I wanted.

Use
First reactions where positive.  It feels nicely weighted in the hand and is solid. As with any remote it took a short while to get used to the button layout.  My wife loves the ability to point it at my mountain of tech and watch it all leap into life complete with the AV channel on the TV.  The main buttons provide access to most of the functions I require and the screen mops up the more obscure functions that I need to access.

Verdict
I am very pleased with my purchase.  It has proved easy to setup and use and is reasonably priced.