Media Centres...

Anyone set up one or have any thoughts on them? Have quite a lot of music, videos, pics etc stored on my comp and have recently been dabbling with running it on my tv (watching the latest episodes of IT Crowd online is made all the more fun by watching on a big TV on a couch, instead of breaking my back sat at the comp :smile: ). Im quite keen on setting up a dedicated system for it all, with a remote control (the idea of selecting music to play via a remote at a party seems class :biggrin: ), proper media centre software etc etc. but am struggling to find a decent comp for it. I wouldnt mind buying 1 of the new Intel Mac Minis because they look ace and I can dabble with OSX at the same time, but I would have to buy a seperate connector for the TV and a freeview (UK) TV Tuner, do they even exist for Macs? As for PC systems they all seem to be either ones with highly limited features or big massive things that have zillions of audio sockets in the back for suber-duper-hyper-surround-whoneedscinemas-speakers. Anyways, enuff rambling, whats ya thoughts/experiences?

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Hello there.

When I finally get ym own place, I'll just have all my video come off one big screen and all my sound come out of the surround system. Everything will be hooked up together. Instead of having two differnt computers and two differnt screens i think it'd be cool to use one screen and one computer

keep it all together. Keep it real.

Good to see you back, Spikers!

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I tried sniffing coke, but the ice cubes kept getting stuck in my nose.
http://www.dimebowl.com

I've recently priced this and you can build one for as low as $600 USD, but this is also taking into consideration a 400 GB HDD and at least 2GB of ram. The tv card was one of the ATI ones, don't remember which, but it was pretty decent. The problems are this: if you want it small, that usually means you need half-height cards :\ If you want HDTV, you'll have to pay a bit more for a TV card that supports it.

Um, as for audio, those "super incredible audio" connections are fairly easy. They just have weird hookups, which I can easily explain. The downside is, you need a receiver that has 6 or 8 channel input hook up. (Otherwise it just doesn't sound nice ... at all) the other problem comes in the software. There are many programs to use for things like TV and the entire media center, but a lot of them, well, blow. Intervideo software just crashes and freezes all the time, Cyberlink can't seem to select the right speaker settings, Dscaler, while being good and all, takes some effort to get things set up ... It really depends on how much work you want to put into it.

If you go with a mini-mac deal, you'll have to find some software that will run the media entire system. I don't know of any.

Now, if you don't care ... there are ways to program a remote using GLIAM (or whatever that program was) to use keyboard commands (like alt-tab, for example) You can easily program buttons to open whatever program in the windows scope, then within the program, have completely new definitions.

Anyway, that's it. It isn't exactly a straight cut thing. If you do it yourself it'll take quite a bit of work. But I gotta say, if you get the audio and video running fine, watching movies is going to be awesome. (I have a 6 channel set up right now, the audio is so smooth and clean and... distinct)

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

Im not really entirely sure why I feel compelled to go for a Mac Mini as I can see a lot of complications and hidden extras, in particular networking it to my existing PC network and being able to transfer files onto it (for instance I would copy music off my CD's on PC and save them to the Mac). Do any of you know any links to (UK) sites that do media centres/htpcs etc?

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Hello there.