Media centre

Snake Rogers · Post by **Snake Rogers** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 12:43 pm

I'm after a media centre so i can watch all my movies on my 32inch lcd in the lounge.
It needs to be done on the cheap… J
What do I need?
Any advice welcome

Prometheus · Post by **Prometheus** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 1:48 pm

Many options

Do you want to just play stuff, or do you want to be able to watch / record tv ?

PC wise.
* dedicated machine
* video card for output to tv
* loads of hdd space
* networked to be able to dump all your movies across
* video in of some sort for your aerial to plug in for watching tv, or if you're running Sky digital or Freeview.

Mine : I have a pentium something in a case that sits in the stereo cabinet., with Sky digital and an old vhs machine for dubbing down old recordings the kids have made, going into the box. A couple of hdd's, one for tv recordings, the other for music and movies. OS for playing everything to the tv.

I'm running Vista Media Centre, using the MS remote for controlling everything (changes Sky channels, mutes and does a nice thing of teletext when the tv is muted).

The machine is wirelessly networked so anyone can listen to music on their pc's anywhere in the house. The EPG downloads whenever it needs to, and we record everything and very little live tv, and there's the very nifty advantage of pausing live tv.

In short, it was a pain in the arse to setup, but once it is, its been running 24/7 with very few hiccups. It has a high WAF (wife approval factor) as stuff has been set to record series automatically, etc. It's easier to run because it's a stand alone machine solely dedicated to being a media centre. Gissabell if you want to view it in action, or chat to Lisa to see if she likes it / hates it.

Your second option and easier is to use an XBox media extender. Or wait for the tuner package to be available for a PS3 in 2008.

Viking · Post by **Viking** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 2:12 pm

Mines a Linux based box (was Fedora, now Ubuntu) using MythTV, but its hard to setup if you don't know Linux. Windows has its issues as well I believe, but is the easier option.
GB-PVR (its free) sits on top of windows, or ya can get the Media center version of windows which just adds what GB-PVR does, but maybe a bit better integrated. There are other pay options out there too.
If ya have a sat dish, then grab a Sat tuner card so ya can get Freeview and EPG that way, otherwise a regular one for plugging your aerial into with EPG off the net. Hauppage is the brand of choice for tuners, as it does the encoding on the card instead of CPU, so ya can use a slower CPU.

Mines just a AMD 2200+, 512mb ram and a cheap video card, and a Hauppage PVR-150. Then add lots of HD space.

Tom · Post by **Tom** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 2:41 pm

Another good free solution for windows is mediaportal. Been using it for a while on several boxes and it's much better than windows MCE which offers next to no customisability.

How are you looking at linking it to your LCDTV? I have found with most HDTV's that trying to go the DVI-HDMI route is much more hassle than it's worth and for most HDTV's you won't be able to get the resolutions to mesh properly. You can get cards with HDMI output but I'm still not sure this will solve the issues relating to overscan and sloppy standards.

VGA works perfectly on my 32" LCD and cheaper motherboards have this onboard so no need to spend money on a separate card, just make sure it's DX9 capable (pretty much all should be these days).

The price of hardware at the moment is dirt cheap, CPU's, DDR2 ram and Hard Drives are very nicely priced at the moment so it's a great time to build something.

Snake Rogers · Post by **Snake Rogers** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 3:15 pm

Well i just thought that i could plug the pc straight into the back of my tv.

I might try and set it up using my current pc and see how i goes

Tom · Post by **Tom** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 3:37 pm

just make sure you set the resolution to match the TV

Should be 1366x768, by default the nvidia drivers only allow 1360x768 (which looks fine, just has very tiny pretty much unnoticeable black stripes down the sides) but the newer drivers allow a custom resolution of 1366x768 I think.

Also if using VGA make sure to use the auto adjust function on the TV to gain the best possible quality.

Viking · Post by **Viking** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 5:52 pm

Snake Rogers wrote:Well i just thought that i could plug the pc straight into the back of my tv.

I might try and set it up using my current pc and see how i goes

Well, yeah that'll work.
All the thing that have been mentioned above add the ability to do cool stuff with TV recording, and add a nice User interface to it all.

Tom: that MediaPortal looks great, plus it has what MythTV has - the ability to have a "Backend" PC with all the tuner cards, HD space, etc. And then have as many "Frontend" PC's as ya like connecting to it.

Tom · Post by **Tom** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 6:49 pm

Yea the features and customisability are great. It's nice to see free solutions that have features you would think would be standard and which Windows MCE lacks, things as simple as changing the way files are listed, marking which video's have been watched etc.

Another thing worth grabbing is a decent remote, the Microsoft MCE Remote is a nice bit of hardware for $60ish.

Bold · Post by **Bold** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 7:11 pm

Another solution is to get something like this

This will be much easier to setup, but wont be quite so flexible. There's quite a few different ones these days that will hook up to your network and play any media on the tv/stereo.

wide load · Post by **wide load** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 7:11 pm

Snake Rogers wrote:Well i just thought that i could plug the pc straight into the back of my tv.

I might try and set it up using my current pc and see how i goes

Thats what we have done, just plonked the old PC behind the TV and plugged it in.. And brought a wireless keyboard. Works fine. Just cant to any fancy stuff like record TV. But as for watching movies from the pc no problems. Also good surfing the net from the lazyboy on a 55" TV.

Snake Rogers · Post by **Snake Rogers** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 8:25 pm

wide load wrote:
Snake Rogers wrote:Well i just thought that i could plug the pc straight into the back of my tv.

I might try and set it up using my current pc and see how i goes
Thats what we have done, just plonked the old PC behind the TV and plugged it in.. And brought a wireless keyboard. Works fine. Just cant to any fancy stuff like record TV. But as for watching movies from the pc no problems. Also good surfing the net from the lazyboy on a 55" TV.

yeah thats all i'm after is something to use for watching movies.
i don't really care about recording tv as whats on telly is mostly crap anyway