Pulp Free

Today is a good day. I like it when putting together systems just works. My upgrade to 4 TB of online storage went swimmingly well for the Claymark datacenter. Sure it’s easy now… Newegg put their 1 TB WD drives on sale this weekend and I told myself once it hit $99, 4 new ones would make it into my storage system. Used to take 8 or 16 drives to get that much storage…

Any takers on when THAT amount will be filled up? And yes, Joe… It’s one 4 TB file system… Not 4, 1 TB file systems like you put together! Now it’s time to get all that data restored from my backup file server and add in those old drives.. Too many hard drives laying around in my basement for sure…

I also installed Microsoft Windows Longhorn Server 2008 on instead of Windows XP 64-bit. A few days will test how long I keep that system on there.

To quote one of the all time famous lines from TopGear’s Jeremy Clarkson:

“How hard can it be?”

Now really - I’ve had my personal HTPC humming along nicely for about 5 months now. I’ve been blown away by:

• Very low noise
• Fantastically smooth 24 fps 1080p HDTV playback
• Vista Media Center (don’t use it all that much - but for the Olympics it was pretty nice…)
• HDMI goodness

So happy in fact that a few months back I sold off my Sony STR DE-945 Dolby Digital Receiver on Craigs list and turned around and purchased the new Sony STR-DG920 7.1 HDMI fully loaded receiver. I wanted to be sure to get the Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD and while I was at it DTS-HD for good measure. Really - those formats are needed since some of the new Blu-ray movies have decided to leave off plain-jane Dolby Digital for some reason…

Problem is, no matter what I do with drivers or software updates or configurations - my GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard will just not pass-through the newer audio formats. The control panel will only show Dolby Digital and DTS as options for “supported formats”.

I’d love to think that my tried and true forum thread on this topic would be of assistance… but after some 126 pages of somewhat random and unorganized thoughts - I can’t get a definitive answer on if it’s even supposed to work!

So since you’re here reading this and you happen to come across an answer to this totally frustrating situation - please come back and share with me how you got it to work.

And yes… I could go purchase the new ASUS Xonar HDAV1.3 Deluxe or perhaps a new video card… But that’s defeating the purpose of this fantastic motherboard and low noise requirements… And of course - $$$!

So if you:

1. Have this motherboard
2. Are running Windows XP or Vista
3. Have HDMI connected to your audio receiver (doesn’t have to be a Sony)
4. Are getting your PC to pass the new Blu-ray audio formats

Please share your configurations!

Thanks,

_frustrated

(Thanks to ABCnews.com for the image…)

Since the whole election (should) be wrapping up tomorrow, I thought I’d take a final moment to add another campaign item that I’ve found interesting. Obamabats is a font that has 24 dingbats of Barack Obama along with some other patriotic design elements that you can use in making your own Obama media art.

Without any real effort you can now make lasting images for any use… From Jeff Domke’s Web site:

If you walk through Brooklyn, you can find several massive Obama paintings/graffiti pieces on garage doors and old brick walls. Inspired by this notion (and time between freelance projects) I decided to create a collection of dingbats that would allow anyone to easily build similar artwork.

Honestly - even the Obama campaign has done an excellent job at having downloadable media assets available… logos, signs, posters, 4-color EPS files… McCain’s Web site… Not so much… If anything it does show a bit of how the each of the candidates have embraced technology for their campaigning efforts…

Now it’s off to go make some more posters…