Media Center Update
Our big screen TV karked it a month back, so I haven’t done much with the media center experiment up until recently. We had an extended warrantee on the TV so ended up getting a totally new unit. It’s definitely worth paying a few hundred dollars on big ticket items to get the extra warrantee period. The new TV (Samsung) even has this large stowaway area to put video recorders and the like in. The section is as wide as the whole unit but only 12cm high – so you need a slimline case for a PC to fit. This is great as the better half doesn’t like the idea of a butt ugly PC case in the lounge room.
At the same time I had to use the PC intended for the media center experiment (P4, PCI Express. SATA) as a replacement for an over-heating old Athlon system. The old Athlon system got turned into a Sempron 2700 system with an nforce 2 motherboard. The cost of the Sempron process and the new motherboard was incredibly good value. The price/performance ratio of current hardware is amazing. The converted system then had Media Center 2005 installed and hooked up to the TV. My problems/annoyances with the media center so far have been:
- Fan noise.
- Having to buy a DVD decoder. Power DVD 5 came with the DVD player, but that didn’t support media center. Currently I’ve been in the eval period for a couple of decoder packages.
- Occassionaly stutterring/pauses when viewing live TV.
- The remote control crapped out for a while. A solution was found on thegreenbutton, but it was disappointing to have the failure in the first place.
- The lack of an EPG (Electronic Program Guide). I found a small package that adds EPG functionality for Australian TV. Its very rough around the edges but does work. An annoying problem is that the times for programs are occassionally wrong.
All of the above is frustrating. Apart from the “lack of EPG madness”, the rest of the problems could be accredited to the general approach of combing arbitrary components rather than using an approach where the hardware is fixed (game consoles, tivo etc.). I’ll keep looking at problem resolutions at quarter-pace for a while as a side project. Overall, I get the impression this is really an area for the home entertainment vendors to own and for a media center pc to be a small niche. All it would take is a reasonably priced PVR with a DVD player, EPG support, a basic UI and a hard disk for me to chuck the PC out of the lounge room. Actually, it would be nice if the Xbox 2 had this sort of functionality.