To media center or not to media center

[mrtristan]

I'm in the planning stages of building a box that's going to sit by my tv and be mostly used as a pvr/capture machine. I'm going to transfer the files via the network that I can hopefully set up and encode on this machine.

As far as the OS goes, are there any advantages to Windows Media Center Edition, over XP?

[redwudz]

Some advantages. Mostly for people that have less familiarity with computers and programs. Probably the easy way to put together a PVR.
If you want a turnkey system, it's not a bad setup.

That said, you can do similar with XP and a fair understanding of what you want to do. Media Center is just a modified version of XP.

I may a bit biased, but it always bothers me when MS decides what I really need. Just my opinion.

[rallynavvie]

I'm running Media Center on my Tyan with dual 1900s so if you decide to build the new one for something else I know your current SMP rig will work

Media Center is pretty much just XP Pro with the Media Center application built in. Nice thing is it costs about the same as the OEM XP Pro CD so it's not a bad alternative if you want a little more functionality built in. And with more and more third party support for MCE it's becoming a better option for those who want to not only try having an HTPC, but customizing it. Downside is it has a limited number of tuners that work with it, but since you don't have one already that's not a problem since the price range on all the good ones is about the same anyway.

What's with all the Media Center questions lately in here? Suddenly had a glut of them in the last week

[reboot]

MCE is the devil incarnate!
Do a basic XP install, trim off the fat (shut off all unnecessary services), and install your PVR software.
MCE is just too fussy about what card you get, has proprietary DRM recording format, a fussy remote that only half works with some cards...

[rallynavvie]

Downside is it has a limited number of tuners that work with it, but since you don't have one already that's not a problem since the price range on all the good ones is about the same anyway.

That's been covered already but apparently I need to reiterate the point. If you don't already have a tuner then it doesn't matter if you go MCE or not since there are plenty of great tuners on the list of approved hardware. If you already had a tuner that wasn't on the hardware compatability list then I could understand going another route entirely. And the DVR-MS media format that MCE encodes to is basically MPEG2 with added header information so that you can see all the metadata that was taken with the recorded show on any other Windows PC. There was an update for Windows, I don't know how many versions it goes back though, that will allow WMP to play DVR-MS files back. If that isn't good enough for you there are freeware apps that will strip the extra data and leave the MPEG2 behind, though I think the audio format may need encoding because I think it may record in AC3 or similar.

I can make a hearty recommendation against purchasing one of the nVidia NVTV tuners for your system. I never got one of those to work on any machine I own except my main workstation and there's no way I'm turning that into an HTPC... yet

[glockjs]

wait for vista

[mrtristan]

rally - My SMP rig is down right now. I replaced the board, cpu, and RAM with an AMD 64 3500+. The newer chip is quicker, but the pair of MPs encoded video faster. I'm thinking about rebuilding it as a dedicated encoding machine, while using this one as my internet access machine. I kind of miss my MP box. That thing was a beast, when it came to cpu intensive tasks.

[rallynavvie]

I found I could use mine as an HTPC and run it as a file server as well with no problems during video playback. Of course I've got it set up so that the OS is on a 15k SCSI drive, the temporary write space for video playback is on another such drive, the file server (or sometimes game server) is run from two 74GB SCSI drives (only 10k ones), and the stored video is on one 250GB IDE drive. Since the only parts using the IDE bus are that one hard drive and the optical drive and the SCSI drives are on two different channels on my PCI-X HBA it seems to work out rather well.

And I do still use it for encoding, that's one of the reasons I went to GbE at home. Still, it doesn't get much use beyond recording TV when I'm not around (I can even RDP in and tell it to record something if I forgot) and being a file server. It is still suprisingly fast for only having two 1900 MPs in it.

[TooLFooL]

also, microsoft isn't the only people making media center apps... there are other options available.

[rallynavvie]

However they are the only ones making one that any idiot can set up and get started with right away. Though the Linux ones have a lot of third-party support not a lot of people are going to want to learn a new OS just to have an HTPC.

However it'd be nice to see someone get a solid build of MythTV and make a standalone HTPC install of it (so MythTV becomes your OS completely). I think people might go for that. But the allure of having another Windows PC around is hard to beat too.