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
(jump break - things that sucked up next)
Things that did not work so well:
- 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
Other miscellaneous thoughts:
- 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
My upgrade is coming soon...