The Blog of G

It’s a question people ask, often with an air of disbelief, like why would you want to have a pc in your living room?

There are a lot of plus sides to it, not least of which is a 32″ widescreen monitor to surf the web with. But that’s only a small plus, first off what does a HTPC do for you?

Well a home theatre personal computer is exactly that it’s a computer for your home theatre, or in my case, living room. How does this add to your home theatre? for a start it’s 1 box for your DVD player, all your music, digital photo’s, TV recording’s and Home Movies. That’s what Windows Media Centre 2005 will do out of the box. Is it difficult to setup? not really, you can do it all from the remote once the operating system is installed.

For me there are 3 killer features…

1. My Photos – allows basic photo editing and slideshowing your photo albums
2. My Music – The Music collection
3. My TV – schedule and watch TV recording’s

The last of these gets the most use in our house, although having a photo slide show as wallpaper means both myself and Elly get to see those precious moments plenty.

I love the Music portion of Media centre, it was a bit time consuming to get all the info and album art sorted out but once thats done, it makes it so easy to find your favourite artists’ or albums. I’ll post another time about my personal experiences tagging over 20 Gb or about 10,000 individual audio files, it’s actually not as time consuming as you might think.

Where Media centre comes into it’s own is working hand in hand with our set top box for TV. it means outside of Grand Prix, neither myself or Ellybabes watch TV “live” anymore. Instead we record all our favourite TV shows and we can watch whatever takes our fancy at that particular time. So much better than spending 20 minutes flicking through channels till you find something worth watching.

This is really easy to do, just search by keyword till you find the program you like and select “record series” you can even tell it to record all showings on all channels or just new episodes, but once you take those 2 minutes to decide that, media centre just does it. The NTL set top box is far less reliable, needing to be rebooted at least once a week.

What if 2 shows are on at the same time? first media centre tries to find an alternative showing of either show, if it can’t then, it decides what to record based on the recording priorities the user sets. So for instance, we’re huge “Bones” and “Boston legal” fans, to make sure we don’t miss an episode these are top of our priority list.

Whereas “The Simpsons” which is on so many channels and almost daily, it’s near the bottom of the priority list as there always being re-shown.

What all this means is that when we sit down to relax and watch some telly what we want to watch is always on.

So is that it? well not entirely, there is a lot more to it than that and in a future post, I’ll touch on the why I chose Microsoft Media Centre and the benefits that it will bring when we move into our new home.

Wow, I spotted this on Gizmodo yesterday. An unconfirmed rumour of a new Logitech peripheral ideal for the HTPC user with a Media Centre PC. I just hope that it’s not Vista only. That would rule me out for the foreseeable future. I’ve heard to many storeys about DRM gone mad on the new Microsoft OS so I’m not planning on upgrading until I get a chance to check them out further.

Anyway, this little keyboard is a great idea, we’ve gotten used to having a wireless keyboard and mouse in the living room as well as the remote, but it would be nice to be able to put them away outta sight and still have all the functionality.

There was another problem with the HTPC…

What to do with the boxes?

On of the things that happened while this blog was sleeping was that our old HTPC gave up the ghost. Now to be fair this was not a young machine and it wasn’t built to be a HTPC originally but it got “re-tasked” when it was about 3 years old. The day that it passed on it was over 6 years old! Not bad considering it ran 24/7 for 3 years or so.

Anyway, having lived with a HTPC for a few years it was immediately critical that we (myself and Ellybabes) got it replaced and after considering a shuttle option and having difficulties with Shuttle resellers not offering the model we wanted and the only one that did flat out refusing to support the config we wanted, we made the decision to build our own.

So after a bit of shopping around I ordered all the components from a few different online stores…

1. Elara, Provided the Motherboard. When others Let me down, Kin sorted me out in a matter of days. Thanks
2. Quiet PC supplied the case, CPU heatsink & fan, Graphics card, Power supply and some excellent advice.
3. Dabs provided the Ram, hard disks and the DVD Writer

I decided to reuse the Hauppage PVR-350 tuner card from the old Media Centre to save a little on cost and prayed that it wouldn’t be one of those “christ I wish I hadda” moments

After about a week and a half all the parts arrived within 2-3 days of each other. The hard disks were the last to arrive and there’s only so much you can do with the rest of the components, so I took a few photo’s.

Some of the boxes arriving.

The fantastic Zalman Packaging.

And the visually Stunning MSI Silent Graphics Card

So after the unboxing I snapped the case before starting to assemble.

which was severely hampered by my stupidity

So what did I do that was stupid? Well, your just going to have to come back tomorrow to find out what I did wrong and how I solved the problem, completed the assembly and installed the operating system.