dogma13554u

I'm thinking about getting a computer with this new media center OS. I was just wondering if anyone had it or had heard much about it.

junglistic

what exactly do you want to do with this pc?

watching vids/music? recording tv? burning dvds?

Slavakion

From what I've heard, the Media Center edition is overpriced shite. But I'm not really qualified to tell you that since I've never used it.

For standard videos/music and burning DVDs, you can get that done with XP home. Don't have any experience with TV recording.

gmoot

I'll be honest that I haven't heard much good about it. But then again I haven't heard much of anything about it.

From other comments I have seen, I think that it might be hardware-picky and not play very nicely if you decide to swap some hardware later on (don't quote me on that though...do some research on it yourself to be sure).

Honestly, you could build a custom media center for much less than a media center pc and have it work just as well. My computer has been running as a digital video recorder for over a year now with great success (I use it just as a normal computer, with it recording television in the background most of the day). That is thanks to BeyondTV (www.snapstream.com). Best software purchase I ever made. But there is also their main rival, SageTV if you want to look into that.

I'm starting to sound like a snapstream commercial now probably, but they are also hard at work on a product called Beyond Media that is intended to be a Media Center-like interface for all of your digital media (music, dvds, tv, photos, etc). It is currently in beta.

My opinion? If you don't like to tinker with hardware, then get a Media Center PC. For the most part it should be plug-n-play and easy to set up. But if you like to be more hands on, put together a cheap pc (don't bother going over 2ghz processor, but put in at least 512 MB memory and a really big harddrive or two), throw it in a mini case like a Shuttle. Get a low-end graphics card that has TV-Out. A DVD-ROM if you want it to play dvds. A decent sound card that can output to whatever type of speaker setup you have. And (if you want it to record TV) the coup de grace: a Hauppauge PVR-250. The pvr-250 is a hardware MPEG2 encoder. You can record incredible quality video at only a 1-10% utilization on your processor.

bendsley

Media Center is an addition to XP Professional. It has it's limits, such as the IR reciever it can handle is one proprietary unit.

dogma13554u

thanks all. Decided to go with regular XP. I hadn't heard anything reallly good about MEdia center, and it is WAY overpriced.

docbungle

Media Center Edition is nothing more than a fancy front to the programs you more than likely already have. There is nothing overly neat about it. It has some of the features that the AIW video cards have. That's about it.

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