Comments on: Media Centre PC

By: mat

mat — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 14:49:21 +0000

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.

By: jaydublu

jaydublu — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 17:00:57 +0000

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.

By: mat

mat — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:27:13 +0000

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.