Cheap Media Centre Spec

[litrelord]

Hi,

Can someone help spec me a media centre pc so I can get an idea of prices. I’m hoping to make it quite cheap of course, otherwise I’d just buy a replacement PVR. Here are the conditions: -

-I want to be able to use two freeview channels at the same time e.g. record one and watch another or record two. I assume I’ll be able to record two and watch an already recorded program since it won’t be using the tuner for playback.

-I want to have it connected to the main PC so I can stream video from there. It will be near the router so I can plug it into there to join the network for now. Until I can stretch to another wireless card for it. The other PC is only connected via wireless.

-It needs to be as quiet as possible and as unobtrusive as possible or the nagging will render it unusable.

-For now I don’t really need to be able to burn DVDs on it as it’s networked with the PC that has the burners in it so if I need to (which is rarely) I can burn from there. This also goes for any editing etc of recordings so hopefully that should negate the need for anything too powerful.

-It needs a remote of course.

-It’s connecting to a bog standard TV so it’s needs TV-Out

-I assume I can just get a remote keyboard and have it stashed away somewhere and just pull it out when needs be using the remote the rest of the time.

-160GB hd space will be ample fir us to start with I think. I can always upgrade that as another drive lying around won’t hurt.

I think that’s about it.

Does anyone know how well windows MCE integrates with a dual tuner digital card? I’d like it to work as flawlessly as a bought product. If I have to explain to the better half that you can watch another channel but first you have to press this button then that and then the other it will never be used.

Any ideas on the cheapest way to get all this?

Thanks

 

[jellybeard999]

dual tuners on mce requires a work around via registry edit..

not sure how mce itself handles it though, i assume one is assigned to record, the other to playback, so you just do as normal, and it sorts itself out...

 

[litrelord]

OK, that's no problem. I can fiddle and tweak everything.

Any ideas on how to do this as cheap as possible?

 

[GuruJockStrap]

Don't forget you're not limited to just using Windows Media Centre Edtion.

Look at some of the open source applications like ProgDVB, MythTV, GB-PVR and Media Portal.

Check out the homepages of each and look up the documentation. You'll easily find the minimum spec required for each.

Good video on setting up MythTV here: http://revision3.com/systm/mythtv/

 

[litrelord]

I’d seen that vid on mythtv and was tempted. Reasonably comfortable with linux but I am a bit concerned about the other half. Windows she’ll be comfortable with although I haven’t decided for definite yet. Thanks for the heads up though. Shame they don’t have more of those vids, thebroken ones were good as well I thought.

 

[BigDom]

Hardware wise a second hand Athlon XP based system with a DX9 AGP card will be fine. Failing second hand this is one time I would reccomend a Sempron based system. Hard drive wise a Samsung Spinpoint is a nice quiet choice and a basic DVD reader will be plenty although spending the extra £15 or so on a re-Writer will potentially allow writing of saved programs to DVD ( not sure how MCE supports such things but should work fine ).

Case wise, as it's visible in your living room I would get a nice desktop case. Silverstone ones are popular but there are several to choose from. Or alternatively you could build your own case. This may sound bizarre but I recently built a wooden case as a bedside table. As a Media Center PC all you'd see at the front would be the DVD-Drive, the remote reciever ( which you can probably mount unobtrusivly somewhere ) and maybe a fan input
hole ( which would make it look a bit like a speaker ).

Graphics card wise I'm not sure of the capabilities of the 6600 Range, I use a X850 on my main PC with a TV card. My second box uses a 6600.