I have been an early fan of the Windows Media Center. Windows XP MCE 2005 was the first computer I actually bought new because I could not get my hands on a used or do a build of an MCE. (It was not really new new since I cheated and bought a cheaper HP refurbished PC). It has been a few years since I bought it and it has been getting a little long in the tooth with the bloat that happens over time. Once we had our home wired (and figuring out that I could go in the attic and do more), I started looking into options for integrating and consuming our media.
Our main consumption of entertainment till now has been via Comcast Cable and a Popcorn Hour (PCH). Popcorn Hour has been an amazing device for playing any video file I have thrown at it. It also helps that it is a really small box and the only sound is the hard disk I put inside. It connects easily to the MCE 2005 machine and loads the thousands of digital photos and songs and play them. It is very hackable since you get a linux shell. I will have to write a separate post on all the things I have on the PCH.
However, the WAF of the PCH is low and takes a lot of effort to increase. I had to continuously update the scripts and download new versions of the interface libraries (tip of the hat to YAMJ). Also, the photos and songs apps are pretty minimal. PCH is mainly a video file decoding beast.
I had a couple of old PCs I had bought on a whim for ultra-cheap that were sitting around without a hard disk in them. When Windows 7 beta showed up, I got a hard disk and installed it assuming I would replace it with Ubuntu if the performance turned out to be crappy. The machine was an Athlon 64 3200+ single core processor (Socket 939) with an ASUS A8N-E motherboard. (Note that even my ultra-cheap used purchases are also AMD boxes. I got these boxes for about $30-40 from the fire sale when Transmeta was finally shutting down and selling the tables and chairs from the office). This processor was pretty close to the MCE2005 Athlon 64 machine that was 5 years old. The graphics was integrated nVidia chipset on the A8N-E mobo.
I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly Windows 7 ran on this machine and how stable the OS was on such an old board. The food on my table comes from selling to people who need the Quad-cores and Thubans but most of our home needs seem to be fine with old single core machines. Just so I could use the HDMI out to connect to a projector, I bought an ATI 3450 card with HDMI out for $15 off craigslist. I had to splurge for a Hauppauge 2250 because Tuner cards are notorious for problems and I wanted to stick to a battle-tested card.
I do get a lot of channels in ClearQAM from Comcast so I can record HD without the cable box.
I will add more details about individual pieces in the future. This is what I have in my W7MC setup:
Hardware
- ASUS Whitebox A8N-E with Athlon 64 3200+
- ATI 3450 Video Card with HDMI/DVI/VGA Out
- Onboard sound with SPDIF and Optical Out on the mobo!
- Western Digital WD10EADS 1TB Caviar Green
- Hauppauge 2250 Dual Hybrid Tuner ATSC/QAM
- Logitech 890 Remote with RF Extender (so W7MC can be in the closet)
- 30ft HDMI cable from monoprice to an Infocus Projector
Software
- Windows 7 of course
- Windows 7 Update with Netflix integration
- Silverlight and Flash
- Microsoft Security Essentials – free Anti Virus software
- ATI Catalyst Drivers
- Windows Home Server (WHS) Connector
- Auto Login User – so you do not have to get a keyboard to login when you restart for whatever reason
- Terminal Services patch to allow another user to login while media center is still running with a different user
- Registry Tweaks – debounce and DVD Gallery tweaks
- Media Browser – plugin for media center (and added MediaInfo)
- tubeCore – it was on sale for $1.99 so could not resist trying
- PlayOn – for my Hulu everywhere
- NControl – for remote control using iPhone
- Amazon Unbox – added this when the NASA When We Left Earth were a free download