The joy of XP Media Center Edition

author Black Marble calendar Jun 25, 2006 · 3 min read · Uncategorised  ·
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I decided to build a MCE PC for home (replacing a £200 DigiFusion PVR), I thought how hard can it be, it is just XP and a TV card.

I don't intend to go into the gory details of the build, suffice it to say one blown motherboard and a true understanding that this is an OEM product (for dedicated hardware) not for the home builder, but I can provide a few pointers:

  • My PC specification seems reasonable, an AMD Sempron 3100+, 1Gb memory, large IDE disk and an ATI Radeon 9600 AGP card. It averages out at about 20% utilisation, so little more than tickover
  • Firstly the MCE setup video failed to play, this turned out to be the wrong ATI drivers, make sure whichever card you are using you have MCE specific drivers, even if they are a bit old.
  • Initially I had jumpy playback on live TV and recordings, I was using a Hauppauge DVB card and the NVidia decoder. After much playing with drivers I fix this by, believe it or not, moving the PCI TV card to a slot as far from the AGP video card as possible.
  • On some digital TV channels on the MCE it was still jumpy, my Phillips integrated digital TV was better (but not perfect), a cheap TV ariel amplifier fixed the problems. Note that this is even though both the TV and MCE said the TV signal strength was excellent!
  • I had built the PC using an old case, but wanted to get something that was quiet and could be put in the lounge not a machine room. I fancied a totally passively cooled unit, but decided that spending more on the a metal box, PSU and heat sinks than on the actual TV could not be justified, so I ended up with a D-Vine D5 Case with PSU and a Zalman CNPS7000B Series Super Flower Cooler. The CPU cooler is really quiet, but the case PSU could be quieter, but it is certainly much quieter than a standard PC. The worst item for noise was the fan on the ATI card, I looked at passive heatskins, but as the card did not seem to be running hot I just disconnected the fan (all seems OK after a week, it is not even hot to touch!).  I may experiment inside the main PSU to see what can be done there with disconnections.

So has it all been worth the effort? I would say yes - MCE is a nice interface, the TV guide is excellent. If you buy a custom built system, or are a keen, experienced system builder and want a project it is perfect. However if you want an quick easy way to record digitial TV look at a PVR from Humax or DigiFusion.