PC Media Center, possible?

[Beev]

Hi guys,

I read through a review for the VideoMate TV Gold Plus II (http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=602825) in a magazine.

This gave me the idea of using a PC as a home media center.

I was thinking along the lines of using a BareBones system, something similar to this:

http://www.aria.co.uk/ProductInfoComm.asp?ID=7156

with the above mentioned TV Tuner Card or one similar (the self booting capability is what interests me about this card, tho I do understand that it will not be the most ideal card for timed recordings, as im in the UK, and it gets its program Listing from the US!), with a Large Capacity HDD and DVD Writer fitted.

Is this possible or am I being over ambitious? I was also thinking about using a large screen monitor too, rather than using a TV.

Thanks for your time.

[rallynavvie]

There are a lot of people doing the same thing. They're called HTPCs. Even MS made an operating system for them. You may want to check out Windows Media Center Edition 2005. You can now buy it and its remote without having to go through an OEM. That's what I'm doing with my old SMP workstation.

[offline]

Have a look at the forum link below. A true HTPC is
alot more than just a wintel mmc box with a tuner card and MS remote.

http://www.avsforum.com

Check the HTTPC forum.

[Faustus]

I actually use the Firefly remote, it comes with interface software for basic picture viewing and music playing on the TV and can be configured via XML to work for other applications such as whatever app your viewing TV with.

I suggest looking it up.

[rallynavvie]

I looked at using MythTV on FC2 for a while until I realized the Windows MCE is basically XP Pro with the MCE software built in. As such I see it as a lot more flexible solution than creating a dedicated HTPC. MCE is as functional as XP Pro is. At least then if you wanted to you could use that PC as just another computer. Another nice thing is you don't have to get used to different interfaces. XP is pretty familar territory to most. Also the open release of MCE 2005 will very likely garner a lot more user tweaks/mods to the shell in order to make it just as flexible as something like FFD. And again along the lines of familiarity it'll be pretty easy to set up a MCE HTPC.

I do sometimes think I should go the freeware route and build a Linux-based HTPC/file server. In my case MCE is the best way to go as I need an SMP-aware OS running both HTPC software and acting as a file server. And so far FC2 has been pretty rough to me in setting up just the file server portion.

[Faustus]

MCE is neat, but I've looked at many in the stores and one that was in my own home. The video quality of the capture cards leaves a bit lacking personally.

You could also checkout snapstream, personally I'd rather use a piece of software that would let me bring the signal in raw and encode it with software on the fly then the cheap mpeg encoders that are used with MCE.

[Dr. DOS]

Nice card but I don't see reference to a MPEG encoder built in... as such you need to have a software MPEG2 encoder... or, did I miss something ?

[rallynavvie]

You cna use MCE 05 with a lot of encoders on the market, the quality is left up to how much you want to spend on one. If you want really good hardware encoding you're looking to spend over $1k on a Canopus or Matrox capture card. You can even use software decoders, but then you need a system with specs able to handle encoding that fast which as pretty close to real-time if not faster. Both these quality options mean high-end systems, so for folks willing to spend the money for the quality it's still there for them. There are also other hardware remotes that work with MCE, you don't have to get the M$ one.

I'm curious to know why the media even has to be transcoded at all to MPEG2 for the quick playback features. As long as you have the hard drive space there are plenty of good DV AVI capture cards and the quality is generally going to be pretty good, actually better than MPEG2 in many cases.

The one thing that M$ really fucked up on with MCE is it still doesn't come with an MPEG2 codec, you still need to go get PowerDVD or something else that has the codec with it. I also wonder if MCE will be able to use the hardware decoding abilities a lot of video cards are coming with these days. Seems the decoder on my video card only works when using the NVDVD software player. Playing DVDs or MPEG2 files in WMP10 uses about 2% system resources where playback in NVDVD uses none. Not much I know, but any little bit helps. And since the decoder is there why not use it whenever possible?

[Faustus]

You cna use MCE 05 with a lot of encoders on the market

I'll have to look into that, because as of 2004 it was still very limited to a very sucky set of cards.