Be Excellent To Each Other

Hey y'all, it's me, your ex-high volume poster, now reformed to lurker/occasional poster status. I'm going to talk to you about Media Center, Microsoft's way of filling my life with joy and pain.

*swirly effect*
It's 1999 and I've got a new graphics card. It's the first one I'd owned with a proper TV-out port. I buy a very long phono cable and connect the PC to my TV for watching avi movies and the like whilst sprawled in bed. This is good.

*jump cut*
It's 2003. I've obtained a 'Black Gold' DVB-T card for the living room PC and a copy of "XP Media Center Edition". I spend hours wrestling the fucker into submission, but finally I can junk the freeview box and get some TV pausing and recording action going on! The future MrsDavPaz is fond of the result, but not the process.

*whip pan*
It's 2007. A shiny new Vista disc sits in the drive of my painstakingly researched and assembled HTPC. It's visually appealing, powerful, dual tuner-ed and virtually silent. 3 days later, a usable version of Vista Media Center appears on the screen. The patience of soon-to-be-MrsDavPaz has run dangerously thin, but the result is pleasing to her once again. It's is an improvement on clunky old MCE2005. SUCCESS!

*wibble effect*
It's may 2009, MrsDavPaz is away for the evening and my degree is finished. SPARE TIME + NO MRSDAVPAZ = TINKERING. I download the Windows 7 RC and decide to upgrade my very stable and reliable VMC install. I am a fool. The wife returns expecting to watch the latest adventures of Greg House MD but instead finds a swearing DavPaz trying to get BluRay playback to work. The Media Center portion of Windows 7 is functionally identical to VMC. I think tonight will consist of me re-installing Vista. *sigh*

Does this seem familiar to anyone?

I would be very surprised if anyone else had installed Windows 7 over a stable Vista install

In my defence, I don't actually own a copy of Vista, I've just been using the 30 day trial (extended by 90 days using the 'slmgr -rearm' trick, fact fans) for the last 2 years. When the trick stop working I have to reinstall anyway. I do like to tinker.

(the thread necromancer strikes again)
Anyone tried media center in windows 7 yet? I have. It's ace

Apparently W7 is poo for playing Blu Ray. It's something to do with the codecs. A friend of mine mentioned it...

I have been using WinDVD. Hilarious part was I got PowerDVD blu ray ed with my drive but it wouldn't work on my computer

I know how painful it is to lose your Media Center or get screwed when you try and upgrade. Been through it all.

Right now I don't even have it and I'm using GBPVR. It's a nice substitute but WMC it ain't.

Looking forward to my W7 in October

Hello!

Did a straight upgrade at the weekend. Worked flawlessly.

Would I? No I wouldn't.
When did I say that?

[edit]Oh right, May. Yeah, things were a little different back then

*sigh* The carefree days of youth

lol.. I am about to change my stable Vista install to Win 7,,,

Is anyone able to recommend an ITX motherboard with some proper graphics hardware than can accelerate and output HD video over HDMI?

I'm not sure about the Intel Chipsets and their HD decoding abilities.

Scoff-a-scoff-scoff.
(sorry)

Quiet, you.

The Egg recently set up one of those Acer nettops (this one) with the nVidia ION chipset and an Atom 330 CPU. Running Ubuntu, and with the drivers hooked up right, it can decode all the MKV we threw at it with about 20-25% CPU consumption (thinking on, I'm not sure we had any 1080p to try, but it's supposed to).

From what I've read, ION seems to be the top dog in this market at the moment. I'm not sure Intel can compete.

That's what I'm finding.

Sadly, I'm on a limited budget as I'm building a MCE setup for my brother. It works out slightly cheaper to build a Micro-ATX system with low to middling AMD parts.

Blimey, how tight a budget? The Egg's Revo was only £200 for the whole computer!

£200 would be too much. So, very tight. It has to have a TV tuner as well as he's replacing a load of creaking old kit.

I have a plan. I'm going to mash together my spare parts (ouch!) and see If I can build an acceptable PC. If I can, then I might only need a new case and some memory.

I haven't upgraded in years. Forgot how annoying it was.

Didn't you ever use that core 2 I sold you?

Yep.

Since I'm an adventurous soul, I've decided to see if I can build a HD capable PC from an Athlon 3200 with 1.5 gig of DDR1 and a Radeon 2400 pro.

I'm confident (although if the cpu can't do 64 bit, I'm buggered right out of the gate)

Why does 64bittyness matter? And as long as the GPU has support for whatever ATI call their hardware-assisted decode I think you'll be fine.

Good point. I can use the 32 bit versions. I'm really slow today. It takes too long for thoughts to travel through my huge head y'see

64 bit no worky.

Trying 32 bit

Defeated.

That's a pain chap.

Afraid I have no sage words of wisdom as a) I am geuinely a buffoon and b) it's been years since I've built a computer so have no idea what all of the numbers mean anymore so I wouldn't even know which component would need swapping out to get the oomph you need.

I'm assuming that it is the hardware causing you problems rather than software?

I can whole heartedly say though that for a reasonably cheap solution I would recommend the Acer Aspire Rever 3610 that I bought from ebuyer t'other week. At £200 and some fiddling* it finally looks like it's going to suit my video/music streaming needs. May be worth looking at. There is a cheaper single core version for 180 quid but I'm not sure that it will process HD files.





*I have neved used Linux but succesfully managed to; install Ubuntu 10.10 in lieu of the terrible Linpus distro that came presinstalled, install XBMC and a prettier skin, break sound over HDMI, call a nerd to fix it, finally get it fixed, break it again, fixe it on my own. I think it's currently balancing on the precipice of being a flakey p.o.s but so far we're holding steady Cap'n

I saw used PS3s (60gb Fats) for £160 yesterday - pretty servicable as a media centre with a bit of fiddling with file formats.

Again, obv appreciate it's 160 quid rather than formed from bits you already have.

I was going to suggest a second hand 360 for 50 quid or whatever. It's all I use for "media playing" (streaming from a mac), obviously it doesn't record stuff off the telly itself or anything though. And you need a PC switched on at the same time)

Thanks for the advice man, but it specifically Windows Media Center we're going for. He's replacing a creaking PVR.

My media PC runs 1080p mkv's from a 2400 radeon thingy.

By default it craps out about 720p, but if you use coreavc to decode, it makes a massive difference. My CPU usage on 1080p dropped from 100% to 30%. Can't remember what CPU I have, but it is nothing meaty at all...

I should elaborate: I was defeated by windows installation. The motherboard wouldn't register the SATA disk as a proper drive.

I've no doubt that the hardware can cope, as it's the guts of an older iteration of my main MCE box (probably from the Vista days)

I just gave up because it was tea time. I'll be going back to it

How much are you charging per hour?

Sadly, family rates. So £0 p/h

Just like every other PC that I've built for my family/friends

*grumble*

These days I charge friends and family in beer. Works very well, that does.

Related - Is Windows Home Server OEM only?

I believe so.

Dang.

Seems to be only 32bit for sale too.

If anyone's looking for a decent GFX card for a media based PC, I can recommend this one

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/222068

It's never going to be ZOMG TEH GRAFIX! but it's small, silent, cool and has HDMI out with audio.

And, annoyingly, seem to have gone up £5 since I bought it.

Has anyone heard anything about HD Freeview on a PCI or PCIe card yet? I can't even find a mention of one in the pipeline.

HP has pulled out of the Home Server market

That's that fucked then.

FFFFUUUU---

That's a real shame. I'm a big fan of the box I've got.

Having said that, I don't use a single bit of the Home Server functionality that's on there any more, or any of HPs value-add functionality. I could build the box vanilla Windows Server and it would be just as useful, if not more so.

Me too now you've bleached it.

Fairly sure the dynamic-extension semi-RAID stuff never made it back into normal Windows Server, and that's pretty important to me so I can hot add drives to the storage pool. Also, I've never really seen any hardware like the MediaSmarts; small, quiet, four hot-swap bays; it's perfect.

Edit -- and I use at least one piece of HP value-add software daily; the support for OS X's backup client. Although I do believe that's built into Veil.

Oh - the hardware I love loads. But I'm not that bothered about hot-swapping, I'll just shut the bugger down if needed, and I don't use the builtin backup.

That still leaves dynamic storage expansion as a key feature though.

Apple could own the home server market. I'm still convinced there's a market here for someone who gets it right.

Does OSX server support SMB/CIFS shares?

I think os x normal does, SMB at least.

Without that gods-becursed pile of shit that is Samba, I mean.

It uses Samba, which has settled down a lot in recent years; I've not had cause to swear at it for a while now.

Edit -- thinking on, my Airport Extreme base station can share USB drives to Windows clients, so it must also have Samba in it. And it's Extreme, too; it does all this whilst bungie jumping on a mountain bike.

You've not, but is it something that the home user can diddle around with easily enough?

Also, prime uses of home server are backups and media - which Apple already cover with the Timecapsule and iTunes/AppleTV. I'm not sure what they'd have to gain.