[dabhal]

anyone had any experience with media PCs?
Are they any good?
Are they worth the money?
Anyone any Ideas on building your own?

[Kali]

Theres usually a good lot of discussion on Media PCs and HTPCs at:
http://www.avforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=46

the HW Tweaking forum here might have a few ideas too.

[dabhal]

cheers , great link

[40coats]

I built a box and run Media Center 2005 and love it. Only thing it doesn't do that I'd like is PVR stuff as NTL don't have a guide setup for it. I can still record stuff by date and time obviously and pause live tv, but I like the idea of telling it to scan for particular shows and record them all.

[spartacus93]

Hi 40Coats,

Would you mind telling me what capture card you use with your NTL setup. I hope to build a similar system soon. And also how does it connect to your computer.

Thanks

[Graham]

Media Centre 2005 absolutely rocks, ours has been going about 2 weeks now.

I use a hauppage PVR350 but I understand there are a few cheaper MCE compatible cards available from hauppage.

Like 40Coats said there's no official EPG (electronic program guide) for Ireland yet, and microsoft won't even hint at a date. Forunately there is a way to grab data in XML format from the radio times website in the UK which you can then import into MCE, it's a bit convoluted to setup, but once you have it working it should all be fairly automatic. It's been working fine here for the last week.

You can buy MCE from ebay (or I could put you in touch with the ebay seller who supplied mine) just make sure you also buy the MCE remote control.

I can't reccommend MCE highly enough, everyone who visits us is completely blown away by it.

Just shout if you need any help.

[40coats]

@spartacus93 - I use a Hauppage PVR250, picture quality is excellent. I only have NTL analogue so it just connects to a standard bnc on the card.

@Graham - Do you have a link to instructions for the epg hack. I think I saw something about it on the thegreenbutton.com forums(very good resource by the way) but last time I checked it was still being worked on. Have you tried the My Movies add on which has simliar functionality to DVD Profiler and when you select Watch from the menu it mounts the movie to a Daemon drive and plays. Very cool if you rip your movies to your hard drive. You can get it here:
http://www.binnerup.dk/mce/

[dabhal]

Gramham and 40 coats
any chance you could list your specs and give it a bit of an idea of what you can and cant do with it at the moment?

Dabhal

[Graham]

Intel Celeron 2.8
1024MB Ram
Shuttle SFF Case
Hapuuape WinTV PVR350
37GB 10,000 RPM SATA HDD
300GB 7,200 RPM SATA HDD
DVD +/-R DVD Writer
802.11G USB Wireless Network Adapter
Windows Media Centre 2005
Windows Media Centre 2005 Remote Control
30" Thomson LCD Display
Yamaha Surround Sound

Can:
Watch/Pause/Rewind Live TV
Record TV (including scheduled recordings and record all episodes of this series)
Play DVD's
Play CD's
Play MP3's
Burn DVD's (video based DVD's created from recorded TV may require re-encoding to play on a normal DVD player)
Burn CD's
Create/Watch Photo Albums
Play streaming media (audio/video)
Play internet radio
Schedule recordings from any PC in the house via a web interface (still deciding whether to set this up for access from any internet connection).

Can't:
Make coffee (although there's a few very neat power adapters that may eventually let me turn on the kettle via the MCE remote control,hmmmmm).
Record from TV into plain MPEG format (requires an extra step to move from the microsoft specific encoding).

40Coats,
I've used the hack from the greenbutton to get our EPG working:

Webguide 2 How-To

Let's do SmartGuide on MCE2005

Thanks for the heads-up on the other hacks, although I must admit I don't have many DVD's to rip, yet.

[pwd]

Ordered one of these on Sunday:

http://www.leadtek.com.tw/eng/tv_tun...lineid=6&act=1

and arranged to sell my telly when it's here.

[40coats]

Grabbed these from Komplett
118126 Upgrade Kit AMD 64 3200+, Motherboard, 512mb, CPU Fan
123408 Thermaltake Venus Silent Boost CPU-Cooler Socket 754/940
302975 Sapphire Radeon 9600PRO Advantage 128MB AGP, ATI9600PRO, DVI-I, TV-Out, Full-Ret
301673 Lite On DVD recorder SOHW-832-01C IDE Retail Dual Layer
124273 Western Digital Caviar 160GB S-ATA 8MB cache 7200RPM - 2 of these
Case from pchealth.ie - Overture/DT Quiet Media case 380W ATX Black
Hauppage PVR250 and media center remote from somwhere I can't remember.
All in just over €1000 at the time.

Thanks Graham, I'll give it a go at the weekend.

[Graham]

Lovely looking card pwd, I wonder if it's MCE compatible?

Looks like your putting together a lovely system there 40Coats is the PVR250 a 2nd tuner card for your MCE setup? I'm trying to work out how to cram another one into my system.

You just made me realise I forgot about my graphics card in my earlier post, it too is a Sapphire Radeon, don't think its a 9600 like yours though. Could be a 9200, I remember the first card I tried didn't work at all but thinking back now that could be because I forgot to install the mpeg software decoders :-S

I'm thinking of getting a new case for the whole lot too, I've seen some lovely ones here:

[url]http://www.quietpc.com/uk/htpc.php#ht400[url]

[dabhal]

Originally Posted by Graham

Can't:
Make coffee (although there's a few very neat power adapters that may eventually let me turn on the kettle via the MCE remote control,hmmmmm).

Damn

[pwd]

http://oem.microsoft.com/downloads/M...s_for_MOSB.xls

MCE hardware compatibility list. Not compatible with MCE alright

[40coats]

Originally Posted by Graham

is the PVR250 a 2nd tuner card for your MCE setup? I'm trying to work out how to cram another one into my system.

Just the one tuner at the moment but I'm getting another 250 for €30 from a guy I work with. I've no shortage of expansion slots so it's not a problem. He's upgrading his to a PVR500 which is a dual tuner. (we get deals in work on this range of tuners btw)