The Dopefly Tech Blog

My Media Center experience

posted under category: General on July 10, 2008 by Nathan

A couple years ago, I wrote about my experiences with building my first Media Center PC - a low powered, half-purchased, half-constructed PC, DVR, file server and entertainment center based on Windows XP MCE. Since then, I've discovered a few things that have been working really well, and a few things that have not. These are my experiences.

Things that worked really well:

• Low powered CPU - budget-wise, has been nice on the electricity bill, considering this PC is on 24/7
• Purchased instead of built the core components - this gave me rock-solid stability, rebooting mostly just for an occasional sound glitch
• Recycling old IDE HDDs - gave me about 750GB of total storage
• DVD cataloging - We just put unwatched or often-watched movies on the HDD so we don't have to relocate the discs
• uTorrent's WebUI - I can access it from my desktop PC, which is only on occasionally, and have my media center download torrents 24/7
• MCE's movie library - allows us to access DVDs, Divx and home movies across multiple HDDs
• File server as a central location for our gigantic digital photo library
• 6 channel audio - even though our receiver supports 7.1, we only have a 5.1 speaker setup anyway

• Low powered, single core CPU - clocking in at 1.4GHz, I have roughly enough CPU to record 1 live TV show and, just barely, watch another
• Single TV Tuner - I want to record more than one show at a time - Windows can handle more, the CPU can't
• Nero software - burning shows onto a DVD was incredibly time-consuming. Again, this is probably CPU related
• Inability to play HD content - my plasma TV loves it, but the CPU is too weak - I get low frame rates, then the audio stutters, then the video
• IDE HDDs - No SATA support means I maxed out my available IDE channels with 3 HDDs and a DVD drive
• 802.11g with a cheap USB 1.1 adapter - it is online, but moving files across then network is slow
• Web Guide - Microsoft's free software to access MCE functionality over HTTP has CPU and network bandwidth requirements beyond my setup
• Media Center music library - my hundreds of albums slow the library to a crawl while they are fine in Windows Media Player
• Access permissions between users and PCs is annoying with workgroup networking, and having a domain server is overkill

• I have about 640MB of RAM, which doesn't seem to even matter; I rarely use more than 300
• The Windows MCE license came from an MSDN subscription, and I did do some development and testing with it, but I'm probably using it for more than the license permits
• I had originally tried to use Ubuntu + MythTV, but gave up in compatibility and configuration frustration
• Thanks to my CPU issue, I can't even consider upgrading it to Vista