Building a cheap Media Centre

FrankGrimes

I built a Windows Media Centre PC about 1.5 years ago (got some great advice on here at the time) and use it as a normal PC in an office and have an Xbox 360 running as an extender in the living room. We love Media Centre but find the lack of Divx playback (Transcode 360 just kills the host PC resources) a major downer, and the remote is just so unresponsive it gets annoying (even though I forked out €30 for the full remote).

So I'd like to investigate getting another PC (existing one is a tower case, noisy, and not suitable) in to act as the Media Centre in the living room, and maybe sell the Xbox 360 or use it in another room. Browsing the web, email, youtube, etc. on a HD tv in the living room would be a major bonus with this approach.

I'd like to be able to have both Media Centres share their data with each other through my LAN - will sharing Network Drives allow this?

I'd like to get a machine that will just run Windows Media Centre and allow web browsing and not much else, and will run very quietly. A decent appearance would be a bonus. What are the cheap ways of doing this?

I have 2 x 200 GB hard-drives on the existing PC, but would like one more 500GB drive. I also have PVR500 dual TV Tuner and if I need another would be inclined to go for that. What are the barebones that I need to get by? I guess I could look at an alternative to Windows Media Centre if I get rid of the Xbox, though I do love the way WMC works:D

Thanks

adrian.s

FrankGrimes wrote:

I'd like to be able to have both Media Centres share their data with each other through my LAN - will sharing Network Drives allow this?

I'd like to get a machine that will just run Windows Media Centre and allow web browsing and not much else, and will run very quietly. A decent appearance would be a bonus. What are the cheap ways of doing this?

I have 2 x 200 GB hard-drives on the existing PC, but would like one more 500GB drive. I also have PVR500 dual TV Tuner and if I need another would be inclined to go for that. What are the barebones that I need to get by? I guess I could look at an alternative to Windows Media Centre if I get rid of the Xbox, though I do love the way WMC works:D

Thanks

Hi there,

How about building your own, these guys have a really neat case http://www.psile.com/ and put in a quiet drive and stuff. Might not take a capture card, but these give out quite a lot heat and in my mind are best kept out of the living room.

Of course if you were to investigate MythTv your options will open up immensely on this, but there's the cost of having to learn how to set it up and stuff. But you'd be able to build thin clients with no disk and fans that would do all you mentioned above, while keeping all your existing hardware.

A.

SouperComputer

I'd like to be able to have both Media Centres share their data with each other through my LAN - will sharing Network Drives allow this?

Its possible but messy and troublesome as MCE is not designed to work in this way. Can you outlay exactly what aspects of MCE you want to share?

Ill second the vote for MythTV. Its going to be harder to setup though. You can eve use an origianal Xbox or a Hauppage MVP as a client for it.

Mediaportal and GB-PVR can be networked. The interface may not be quite as slick as windows MCE, but if you want multi-room and dont want to use linux, I would suggest spending some "quality time" working with these applications.

Otherwise, be prepared for a lot of messing around with MCE.

FrankGrimes

Thanks Adrian – the Psile looks good, but the £200 price tag means it’d only come into play if I get a pay rise I’m hoping for – for the moment

If I had one media centre PC in the living room and another in the office, I’d either like both to have TV Tuners and be able to share the recorded tv and videos on the harddrives with each other. I could also only have a TV tuner on the one in the living room and be able to share recorded tv and videos with the one in the office. Likewise for music and photos. I was hoping this could be achieved just by sharing a network drive on both machines and connecting the machines through my LAN. I’m not into using media centre for DVDs (I prefer electronic files) so I can avoid the complexities associated with that.

Any advice on how to build the 2nd media centre on the cheap? Again, hopefully the pay rise comes through, but if not I just want a basic machine so the graphics card, RAM, and CPU would just need to be enough to play media centre and allow net browsing. It also needs to be quiet so heatsinks and quiet drives would be great, and having it look like hi-fi equipment would be great but not essential. I guess it would also need a good soundcard to power surround sound?

Just took a look at the features on the Myth TV site and it looks good (can you remotely schedule recordings using a 3G phone?) – how slick and intuitive is the UI? The missus loves Media Centre so anything that’s a step down would be a hard sell, but Myth TV seems to be at least as good – is that right? I had very basic Unix back when I was doing computer science in college but installing and using Linux I haven’t done – how hard would it be to get this up and running? I also really like the Media Centre keyboard with the (dodgy) mouse built int

Thanks again.

adrian.s

Frank,

I'm going to have to offer you the Linux solution to this. @SouperComputer can follow up with the MCE stuff if it's possible (I'm not sure if it is).

You're best bet is not to build a second media center, rather put something small and neat into your living room, and concentrate the bulk of your spend on the main machine. With this, you will put in loads of disks, and as many tuner cards as you need into your backend. Get Myth up and running and start to schedule it to record all you material onto the local drives which will be nfs accessible to all other machines in your network.

Get yourself a cheap front end. I use this: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/store/Mini_ITX_Systems/Mini_ITX_BareBones_Computer (bought it from mini-itx.com). All it has is 512MB of RAM, it netboots off the main machine, and runs a thing called MiniMyth, which is amazingly easy to setup. This case is stuck behind my wall mounted plasma, so is completely invisible.

One weird thing: DVD's are played over the network. So when I want to watch a DVD, I have to pop it into the drive of the backend machine in the study. Takes a bit of getting used to, and people do find it a little strange

It's tricky but not impossible to setup. If you have patience, and some good google skills, it's doable. It's used pretty much all the time here, herself is well able to use it, and it looks pretty slick (if I do say so myself!).

Cheers,
A.

Tivoli

STOP

before you spend spend spend,



the 360 will work a lot better if you pull off its face plate, and sadly you have to have the ugly remaining mess facing you

its still not perfect, infact a modded original xbox does a pretty nice job for free, gui is a lot more basic, but the normal xbox dvd remote can access almost all the features (no telly text or menu button)

and a modded original can play all your divx movies (over the network with xbmc)

FrankGrimes

Adrian - thanks for all that info. That mini-itx yoke looks like it might be perfect. Would it let me browse the internet? I really want to have the ability to browse the net in the living room so that's a high priority. Would I need to hook this thing up to an amp to power 5.1 surround sound?

I've included below the relevant parts of the spec of my existing PC - if I installed Linux and MythTV and MiniTV would I then have everything I need to allow 2 mini-itx's to run in other rooms while someone uses the PC itself? Would I be able to keep XP installed so the missus could boot into it?

Tivoli - thanks for that - do you mean taking the faceplate off the 360 will make the remote more responsive? The 360 is too noisy as it is and I hear the original Xbox is noisier - is there anyway around that problem?

Abit AN8, nForce4, Socket-939, ATX SATA,GbLAN,Firewire,DDR,Sound,PCI-Ex16.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz Socket 939, 512KB, BOXED w/fan
Antec Sonata Miditower, Black w/380W PSU
Hauppauge! WinTV-PVR-500MCE, Tv-card w/radio and 2 tuners, Bulk
2 x Samsung SpinPoint P120 200GB SATA2 8MB 7200RPM
Sapphire Radeon X700PRO 128MB GDDR3, PCI-Express,Tv-Out, DVI-I,
TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB CL2.5 KIT , w/two matched PC3200 512MB DDR DIMM's

Tivoli

FrankGrimes wrote:

Adrian - thanks for all that info. That mini-itx yoke looks like it might be perfect. Would it let me browse the internet? I really want to have the ability to browse the net in the living room so that's a high priority. Would I need to hook this thing up to an amp to power 5.1 surround sound?

I've included below the relevant parts of the spec of my existing PC - if I installed Linux and MythTV and MiniTV would I then have everything I need to allow 2 mini-itx's to run in other rooms while someone uses the PC itself? Would I be able to keep XP installed so the missus could boot into it?

Tivoli - thanks for that - do you mean taking the faceplate off the 360 will make the remote more responsive? The 360 is too noisy as it is and I hear the original Xbox is noisier - is there anyway around that problem?

Abit AN8, nForce4, Socket-939, ATX SATA,GbLAN,Firewire,DDR,Sound,PCI-Ex16.
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz Socket 939, 512KB, BOXED w/fan
Antec Sonata Miditower, Black w/380W PSU
Hauppauge! WinTV-PVR-500MCE, Tv-card w/radio and 2 tuners, Bulk
2 x Samsung SpinPoint P120 200GB SATA2 8MB 7200RPM
Sapphire Radeon X700PRO 128MB GDDR3, PCI-Express,Tv-Out, DVI-I,
TwinMOS PC3200 DDR-DIMM 1024MB CL2.5 KIT , w/two matched PC3200 512MB DDR DIMM's

yeah just rip the face plate off (it wont effect your warrenty), have a look at how the infra red windows is designed ...muppetts

the orignal is a lot quiter, another thing to note, the original xbox uses 47watts, and the 360 uses 249watts, you can use it as an electric heater

adrian.s

FrankGrimes wrote:

Adrian - thanks for all that info. That mini-itx yoke looks like it might be perfect. Would it let me browse the internet? I really want to have the ability to browse the net in the living room so that's a high priority. Would I need to hook this thing up to an amp to power 5.1 surround sound?

I've included below the relevant parts of the spec of my existing PC - if I installed Linux and MythTV and MiniTV would I then have everything I need to allow 2 mini-itx's to run in other rooms while someone uses the PC itself? Would I be able to keep XP installed so the missus could boot into it?

Yip, you can surf the web, I rarely do it so can't say how good it is, and it uses MythBrowser.

Regarding running the two min-itx's and keeping access to the PC, that should be fine, you wont really be taxing the cpu while playing back TV. Commercial flagging is another story, but it takes a low priority so you should be able to use it fine. You can dual boot alright, but then while it's in XP, you wont be recording or playing back TV.

HTH,
A.

FrankGrimes

Thanks for all that Adrian – it looks like MythTV with a mini-itx netbooting MiniMyth over my wiredLAN is the way to go for my needs (might sell the xbox 360), though I couldn’t find screenshots of MythBrowser.

I’m planning on buying the M61G here as you suggested, with a 512MB DDR RAM card – I don’t need an IDE flash card do I? It’s not actually all that cheap but should give me what I need – a silent media centre that will allow me browse the web like normal too. And in the rare times the server needs to be used while the itx is acting as a client, the user can just do their browsing using a Linux browser, or use OpenOffice for word processing etc.

I just have a couple of questions to figure out before I do decide to go down this route and am hoping you can help:

-how can I get 5.1 surround sound using the M61G min-itx?
-can I use the Windows Media Centre Keyboard with MythTv/MiniMyth (or is there an alternative keyboard with built-in tracker ball or mouse that would be suitable for web-browsing).
-what remote control options do I have (will probably be using basic NTL cable and don’t have a remote for my Hauppage PR 500 MCE card, though I do have the Windows Media Centre remote)?
-will it be possible for the server to be in standby and auto-boot when I try booting the client with MiniMyth (or logging into MythWeb remotely), or will I have to manually switch it on?

I definitely need to keep XP installed on my existing PC, so that seems to rule out the KnoppMyth and MythDora distributions. I have 2 x200GB hard-drives, but currently one of these is partitioned in XP (happened by mistake during setup). I plan on getting another 500GB hard-drive, not sure on internal or external. Seeing as I don’t know much Linux (though am sure I’ll learn fast), what would be the best way for me to approach the setup? Thanks.

adrian.s

Hi Frank,

FrankGrimes wrote:

-how can I get 5.1 surround sound using the M61G min-itx?

'Fraid you can't with this gizmo, analogue audio out is call you can get.

-can I use the Windows Media Centre Keyboard with MythTv/MiniMyth (or is there an alternative keyboard with built-in tracker ball or mouse that would be suitable for web-browsing).

You *should* be able to, haven't done it myself though.

-what remote control options do I have (will probably be using basic NTL cable and don’t have a remote for my Hauppage PR 500 MCE card, though I do have the Windows Media Centre remote)?

I use the MS Windows Media centre remote. Works out the box with MiniMyth.

-will it be possible for the server to be in standby and auto-boot when I try booting the client with MiniMyth (or logging into MythWeb remotely), or will I have to manually switch it on?

I'd start by keeping it on all the time, but using WOL you should be able to get it to restore itself from hibernation.

I definitely need to keep XP installed on my existing PC, so that seems to rule out the KnoppMyth and MythDora distributions. I have 2 x200GB hard-drives, but currently one of these is partitioned in XP (happened by mistake during setup). I plan on getting another 500GB hard-drive, not sure on internal or external. Seeing as I don’t know much Linux (though am sure I’ll learn fast), what would be the best way for me to approach the setup? Thanks.

You've got an interesting challenge ahead of you here Frank, cost wise it's not massively expensive but you're going to have fun with this configuration. It will be great when it's up and running but you're touching on a lot of stuff that will put your googling skills to use!


Oh yeah, you don't need anything other than RAM for the case. 512MB should be enough.
HTH,
A.

FrankGrimes

Thanks again for the info Adrian.

Lack of surround sound is a big pity, but may not be a deal-breaker. I'll look into it all a bit more to try figure out how difficult it would be to setup before deciding which way I'll go, but thanks a million for all the help.