Media Centre Spec advice please

[TheAnimus]

MS uPnP support is patchy, partly because the protocol is lacking in definition of some important things (transcoding).

Now myself i much prefer MCE 2005, its stable, but has one failing, it really dosen't seam to like the size of my music collection it takes about 10 seconds to load up. Not much time i suppose but it anoys the crap out of me.

Media portal is again, just not really good. If i'd made it, i'd be more forgiving of its failings, but it really just dosen't hit the spot. This is personal opion, try em all

As for spec, i'd recomend 2 gig of ram.

[directhex]

of the windows pvr solutions, i've tried sagetv, beyondtv, mediaportal, and gb-pvr. and maybe some more which were instantly forgettable. none of them really hit the spot for me.

ms media center is probably the best software if you want a windows system - and especially if you want a windows system which is also useful for non-media tasks.

myth is probably the best software for a final solution, but it can be an arse to set up (and you need to be prepared to run at least one linux-only machine as the recording back-end)

[Menslain]

OK I need help. I've been doing alot of reading up to ensure the componenets for the media centre PC I build are all going to work together. And my brains gettin fried.

With the HDMI 1.3 standard having been agreed and HDMI cards hitting the shelves I'm jumping onto the wagon. Current favourite to buy being - ASUS EN7600GT. The reason for choosing HDMI enable card was to integrate sound and video in one cable to try to eliminate any lip sync issues (found numerous references online to this being major problem with HTPC). The wall I'm hitting now is the sound card. The Asus uses Optical SPDIF but my prefered sound card (creative XFI) has no Optical SPDIF connector.

Has anyone got any recommendations as to which sound card to go for. I'd rather not push the sound out to external amp because of sync issues.

I'm using a Silverstone LC17 case so don't want a card which has a 5.25 expansion box with the additional output ports.

[Skillian]

Have you considered how you're going to get Sky on your Media Centre PC with all the timeshift recording etc.?

At the moment it's not as easy as you might think - in fact, it's very difficult.

There's a decent thread on it here.

[mr-nick]

Good point, the AV Forums thread is a great read for anyone considering native Sky in MCE, although you can use an analogue TV card input and the IR Blaster to control a Sky box.

If only Vista had delivered DVB-S support

Have you considered how you're going to get Sky on your Media Centre PC with all the timeshift recording etc.?

At the moment it's not as easy as you might think - in fact, it's very difficult.

There's a decent thread on it here.