New Toy, New Headaches

When I got up this morning I contemplated spending the whole day not doing anything, but my thoughts kept going back to something I’d seen at Best Buy yesterday when I’d bought the new case for my cell phone, and this thought, coupled with the realization that I once again have a steady paycheck, which means that I can once again make the occasional gadget purchase, led me to set aside my plan to have no plans for the day.
For a while now, especially since I bought the HDTV, I’ve wanted to have something that would allow me to stream content from my computer to my TV.
I also want to be able to do the reverse, which is why I plan to eventually buy a Media Center PC with Cable Card tuners so that I can do things like make screen captures from HD content.
However, that’s down the road (maybe tax time), so in the meantime, I decided to pick up one of these, along with an HDMI cable to connect it to the TV.
I got home, took it out of the box, hooked it up via the HDMI cable, turned it on, turned the TV on, set the TV to the correct HDMI input and waited.
And waited.
The TV kept insisting that there was no input detected. I kept insisting that there was.
The TV won the argument.
In a “Duh” moment, I realized that since the device didn’t actually come with an HDMI cable, it was probably not set by default to send a signal out via HDMI. I hooked up the attached S-Video cable, and voila!
It was a minor irritation, but proved to be a pale harbinger of what was to come.
The next step was setting up the network connection. This was guaranteed to be simple on the box, as all I needed to do was run the Wireless Connection Setup Wizard on one of my networked PCs and save the resulting information to a USB drive, then hook up the USB drive to the Media Lounge, which would read the configuration data and connect to my network.
That was the theory, anyway.
For the next several hours I attempted to put theory into practice with no success.
The Media Lounge was copying the configuration data, and my network could see that it was trying to establish a connection, but no connection was being created, and the Media Lounge was failing to grab an IP address from my router.
(I should note here that even if I never got it set up to work with my network, it would still be worthwhile, as in addition to being able to stream media wirelessly, the Media Lounge can also read media of a USB drive, and copying a file to a thumb drive or an external hard drive and then plugging into the Media Lounge is still faster and more efficient than burning a DVD. However, I really, really wanted to get it working with my network and was getting really, really pissed off.)
In desperation, I actually called tech support. The guy who answered started off okay, but as the call progressed he became more and more Indian and thus harder and harder to understand.
By the time I’d called I’d managed to get the Media Lounge to acquire an IP address, but I still couldn’t access my network.
After first telling me that there was something wrong with my router because it wasn’t assigning an IP in the correct range, which I dismissed because my computers work just fine with the IPs they have, he eventually concluded that the problem was an encryption mismatch.
(Also, per the instructions on the phone when I’d first called in, I’d installed Network Magic on Hugin. The network map it provided showed me that the Media Lounge was part of the network, even though it couldn’t access my network.)
He wanted me to check my router’s configuration to see what encryption level it was set at.
This was a problem because the last time I had a Verizon tech out, he changed the log in information for the router from the default and neglected to give me the new information.
From D-Link’s perspective, this was where the call ended, as there was nothing he could do.
From my perspective, this is where I found myself up a creek.
It was possible that I could reset the router to the default settings, but I was reluctant to do this, as the last time I’d done so I totally killed my Internet connection. Of course, that was actually not the direct result of the reset. When I reset the router it wasn’t able to reconnect to the Internet because my connection wasn’t built properly in Verizon’s network. The reset simply revealed this problem.
Even so, I was reluctant to attempt it, but finally concluded that it had to be done.
So I broke out a paper clip and pressed the reset button on the back of the router, then walked away for ten minutes, hoping to find a lit-up Internet light when I returned.
Luck, for once, was with me, and the Internet light was glowing green when I returned. I logged into my router, confirmed the encryption level, rebooted Hugin to force it to reconnect to Internet, and then prepared to call D-Link back to tell them that the encryption levels matched.
As I made my way downstairs to pick up the fully-charged phone (the other phone’s battery had died shortly after I actually got through to D-Link), I noticed that my TV, rather than telling me that it couldn’t find a DHCP server, was instead asking me to select a DHCP server from the list.
So I did, and when I clicked on the Media selection, I saw a list of all of the available media on my computer, and when I ran the Internet Connection Test it was actually successful.
So somehow amid the resetting I resolved whatever issue was preventing the Media Lounge from connecting.
And the whole “simple” process only took about 4 and a half hours.
But at least it’s working now, and it works very well.
Of course, the thing that had really gotten me to thinking about buying the Media Lounge is that I’ve invited Scott to come over tomorrow, since we both have the day off, to hang out and watch some DVDs.
I had something on my computer that I wanted us to watch, and I didn’t feel like burning a DVD, and didn’t want us to have to crowd around my computer to watch it.
So here’s where the bitter irony comes into play. After taking a break from messing with the wireless settings, I decided to simply copy the file onto my thumb drive so that we could plug it into the Media Lounge and watch it from there. However, when I tested it, the Media Lounge could only play back the video, as apparently the audio codec was unrecognized. I ran the file through Windows Movie Maker to create a new WMV file, hoping that it would correct this problem.
It did – kind of. When I watched the file (via streaming), the audio was present, but was choppy and weird sounding (people’s voices had sounded phlegmy and distorted), and as a bonus, the video was now messed up.
So in the end I had to burn a DVD anyway.
*Sigh*
Still, the end result of it all is that I can finally stream video, audio, and pictures to my TV, so I guess I need to take my victories where I can find them.