Media Centre PC
We treated ourselves to a new telly, and I brought home a 32″ LG LCD.
“It’s got a PC input!” I thought, and a possible change in plan came into my head. The better half has been using an old laptop running Windows ME for some time to check email, play solitaire, and buy ’stuff’ on eBay - but it has been getting increasingly slow and temperamental and we were going to replace it. “Let’s build a media centre PC instead” I thought.
So I start window shopping - for me a very mixed experience; half pleasure, half pain. So many choices, so much to think about. I wanted to keep the budget under control, wanted a good looking functional bit of kit that Mel could use happily, it needed to be relatively fast to be future resitant, but it didn’t need to be too high spec as we wouldn’t be pushing it.
I found the Elonex Artisan LX barebones case on ebuyer which seemed like a good bit of kit and good value, so planning started on that. Next choice - processor. Now this is not the most current case, and the motherboard it comes with only supports specific processors (90nm skt 775 Pentium 4) and they’re a bit hard to get hold of now. I sound like I know what I’m talking about, and I may do now as I learned to tell my 65nm P4 from my 90nm, but at the start I couldn’t tell you much about even what a skt 775 motherboard was. So that was a problem - do I try and dig up an awkward processor and take the risk, or replace the motherboard with a newer, better supported one?
I’ll cut a long boring geeky story short - I stuck with the Elonex motherboard, found a 3GHz P4 on eBay, and we now have a swanky machine sat under our LCD TV running Windows XP, and all is great. Almost.
You see PC monitors are fine when they’re a foot or two from your face - I’ve not got the world’s best eyesight but I’m quite happy using a monitor at highest resolution. But a TV is quite a few feet away, and reading small text is a chore. So much so that we had to drop the resolution down from the max 1380×768 to a paltry 800×600 - and then you still have to strain. So no problems when watching video clips or playing spider solitaire, but reading email or web pages …
And I got a wireless keyboard with built in touchpad thingy - great, but it’s weird using that on your lap like a laptop, but the screen is a mile away and looking from one to the other ends up giving you a stiff neck.
The moral of this story - media centre PCs are different from normal ones in that you have to use them differently - lower screen resolution and different user interface. I’m glad I built it though - it’s a good bit of kit, but couldn’t replace a proper desktop or laptop.
XP? Bleh. XP Media Edition - double bleh. But then I would say that.
Check out MythTV. It’s designed for this kind of thing, and has a tonne of useful modules for doing browsing and email in a readable way and so on without dropping resolution. I think there’s even a bootable-cd MythBuntu (or something) out there nowadays. Also LinuxMCE is supposed to be very good too.
Hang on - did you have a TV card in there? Then you can do PVR stuff, which is (for me) the only reason to do a media centre box. Mainly ‘cos we can’t get HD off Freeview, so the only thing that actually delivers HD to our HD screen is the XBox360 (DAMN it’s pretty though). You need a lot of grunt for proper HD though - even my GeForce 6600/2.2Ghz Athlon 64-X2 can’t play full-hd video at 1920×1080 smoothly. That’s likely a 64bit codec issue though, to be fair.
And the laptop - put xubuntu on it. Windows ME is the worst windows ever, you know that as well as I do - of course it’s slow and unstable. She’ll be able to use xubuntu for browsing web/email/solitaire perfectly easily (firefox works the same on all platforms), and it’ll be fast, stable and malware-proof. I use a P3-500/128Mb tosh laptop (blagged off Soup years ago) with xubuntu and it’s not noticably slower than my desktop machine for most things, except on pages with excessive amounts of Flash. It’ll even play SD video without complaining, which ain’t half bad for something of that age.
Comment by mat — September 23, 2007 @ 3:27 pm
Mat - good to hear from you.
I thought of XP Media Edition, but I didn’t really want the Media bits of it and thought I’d play safe. I know XP and knew it would do.
I have played with MythTV, and if I wanted the full PVR thing I probably would have done that, but again I played safe with a setup I knew stood the best chance of low grief. We’ve got Sky+, and for all the problems about being trapped, not being able to get recordings off digitally and all that - it’s still far better than any PVR I’ve seen, and the only way to get recordings off Sky that isn’t a bodge (flame bait!)
Yes I’ve got a Happauge PVR250 card left over from my MythTV playing - it’s used to have the TV on in the background while surfing etc., but not for anything else.
Now the laptop is freed up I will play with Linux distros - but when I was trying to get it sorted in the past I had prtoblems with drivers etc. - no doubt more recent livecds will play ball with the hardware better than they did a couple of years back.
Comment by jaydublu — September 23, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
New Xubuntu is out in a few weeks, that should be the most compatibliest of them so far. Or you could try Slax. Slax liveCD is incredible as far as drivers etc goes, but I don’t use it for day-to-day stuff ‘cos I don’t have the strength to learn a new flavour of linux right now.
Hope all’s well down’t mill.
Comment by mat — September 24, 2007 @ 3:49 pm