Dugie’s Pensieve

I still get the occasional email from people asking about my "Media Center story".  My MCE took about a month to plan (thanks must go to Stephen Ed, and all the folks over at XP Media Center forum), a couple of days to purchase, and a weekend to build, and has been faithfully online since October 2005.

In summary, the media center has changed the way my family lives.  We now have a complete ban on live TV in our house - this means we actually watch more television, but we spend less time watching the TV.  We also listen to more music, take more photos and short videos, and the best bit:  spend more time looking at videos and photos of family.

So here is a cleaned repost, of my current configuration, and how I got there..

The Case

 First an foremost:  I hate computers at home anywhere but the study.  So when I am home and want to "unplug", I don’t want to go anywhere near the computer on my desk.   And the last thing I want is a "computer" in my lounge room. 

  So the hardest decision for me was to find a Media-Centre-computer-case that didn’t look like a computer; and preferably it had to match my Yamaha amplifier.  It also had to be big enough to hold a couple of harddrives, and a bunch of other stuff.  So I chose the LC14 Silverstone.  It looks good, has a LCD display, and control buttons on the front for when I can’t find the remote.  I am well pleased with my choice of case, if you google LC14 reviews, you will find other have been as well:

Inside the Media Centre: Cooling tuners and Storage

I hate noise, so all components needed to be cooled with large slow moving fans.  To read more about the research Paul and I did, check his blog post:  "Quiet PC Design Fundamentals".  By today’s hardware standards, the hardware I  chose is quite dated:

• Abit AN8 Ultra motherboard w/ SPDIF and fanless heatpipe
• AMD Athlon64 3200+ CPU w/ Golden Orb cooler
• 2Gb Ram
• 512 Meg Nvideo w/ Zalman ultra quiet cooler
• 2x tuner cards
• 1x 500 Gb HDD for OS and photos and music
• 1x 500 Gb HDD for recorded TV
• 2x Thermaltake Silent Cat 120mm cooling fans
• 1x fanless power supply

It has had over two years of faithful service, and the only hardware change, is swapping the second 500Gb drive for a 750 Gb drive.

Usability Hacks:  The little things

There are a couple of things I had to change for personal preference, WAF (wife acceptance factor, which is very high) and usability here in Australia:

• Turn off windows automatic updates - period!
• Buy a copy of the ICETV EPG - here in Australia we have some dumb laws that don’t allow Microsoft to publish an electronic TV guide.
• I installed just XP MCE 2005 - I didn’t install any applications, other than the codecs required to play media
• Change the "recording padding" - this is the amount of time to record before and after TV a show; I use 10 minutes
• If you have a lot of MP3/WMA music, use "Tag-n-remove" and "Album Art Fixer for MCE"
• Trivial, but I had to put some dark window tinting over the LEDs, and LCDs on the front of the case.  They were just too bright when the lights were off.
• An enclosed hifi cabinet, to stop my 12 month old toddler pressing the reset button :)

Using the Media Centre:  Enjoying the show

You need the media Centre remote.  The green button rocks.

As for the Infared keyboard, it helps to think of it as a second remote with a keyboard.  Don’t think of it a keyboard with a remote.  Performance as a dedicated keyboard is dodgy.

There is also an option to remove the "bleep" everytime a key is pressed.

It’s very easy, and even easier (most of the time) to forget you are even using a pc.   ….the way it should be.

Managing the DVD Collection:  with external USB Harddrives

Manually putting a DVD disc in the Media Centre wasn’t much fun.  So I purchased a couple of external USB drives.

I bout a couple of Western Digital My Books.  A very compact and clean design, 500 Gb storage, with both USB 2 and and  eSata conenction if I ever need to use it.

I bought the 500 Gb model, because it was the best bang for buck at about $200 each.

I can copy about ~110 DVDs straight up to a single My Book (see the photo of stacked DVDs above).  This is the complete DVD, with all the director’s commentaries and stuff, in the raw VOB format.

This way all our DVD originals are kept safe, and we can access any of them with the press of a single button.

The Extender:  Watching TV from the other Room

We use a XBOX 360, as "another front end" to you Media Centre.  My wife actually wanted the 360 as a birthday present (I know, how cool is that!), so she could watch recorded TV in the other room.  You need a copy of Transcode 360 allows you to watch any recorded media that isn’t native MS-DVRX format.  Divx, DVDs, Quicktime, etc, etc.

We have had the 360 for 18 months before we put our first DVD into the drive - it was Halo 3.

The Maintenance:  What I do to keep it running

Very little.  A defrag every 6 weeks using the Whitney defrag tool.  A reboot every three weeks, just because I can.

Extra Curriculum hacks:  Stuff that a Media Centre is not meant to do

Ok, so I’m a geek.  there is no denying that.  So there are some extra things I’ve got my Media Centre doing, that a Media Centre is not supposed to do.  The coolest thing by far is my Media Centre hosts a Virtual Machine.

The VM is a stripped down copy of windows used to encode video and run assorted scheduled tasks.  The Media Centre is on 24 hours a day and is near silent — my desktop is not.  This way I can RDP into the VM without affecting anyone who is watching the TV.  The VM is CPU limited with  threadmaster.

The next step - Vista of course

A long time ago I tried to upgrade to Vista, but I couldn’t get stable drivers for my TV tuner cards - so we rolled back (actually dual boot).  So, some time soon I’ll get new tuner cards, book a weekend and do the upgrade again.

…but before then, I need to finish one little pet project of mine.  The details of that, are in my next post which I’ll blog tonight.  I’m very excited.