Community Newsletter: Q&A: 2/16/07 Need advice on how to integrate PC into your home theater

2/16/07 Need advice on how to integrate PC into your home theater

by Lee Koo (ADMIN)  - 2/15/07 5:06 PM

Question:

I am looking to find out as much as possible on the subject of home multimedia. I want to set up my own media system to play videos, view photos, and listen to music from my computer to a TV and a projector, either through wireless and/or the new wired network using your home electrical wiring. Please let me know what my options are and how I can go about achieving this. Thank you!

Submitted by: Mike R.

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Answer:

Mike, The best option is almost certainly either Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) or one of the two versions of Vista that have the same features (this would be Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate).

These versions of Windows were designed for exactly what you want to do ... not only video (TV) but also music and photographs ... and for the most part they do it extremely well, better than any other product I am aware of (although still not perfectly).

What we are talking about here is a PC that can be dedicated to media. You have two choices: you can buy a Media Center PC from Dell, Gateway, HP, or Sony; or you can build a system yourself and buy the software as an OEM copy XP MCE or an OEM or retail copy of Vista Premium or Ultimate. (Vista Home and Business do not have these features).

If you build, be very careful of the components that you use, as the requirements for this to work properly are very narrow, and for the most part you want to stick to items that are on Microsoft’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for XP Media Center Edition (MCE). Components that will work with Windows XP will not automatically work with MCE, the requirements for MCE are far more narrow, especially for the video card, tuner card(s) and remote control, so it really is important to stick to products on the HCL or you may find that your system doesn’t work.

XP MCE is a modified version of XP Professional, and all of the XP Pro features are present except for domain networking, which most home users don’t need (if you do need it, there are some ways around it’s absence, but they are a lot of work and involve making some compromises that cost you a few of the less frequently used MCE features). MCE has both the full, standard Windows XP desktop user interface and the Media Center interface, and you can switch between them with a couple of mouse clicks, as well as select either to be the startup default. All normal Windows XP programs will work just fine. Really, it’s XP Professional unless you start the Media Center interface (which appears as an icon in the Start Menu), and you need have no real fear that you have lost anything by using MCE, with the exception of domain networking. [Some users who get systems with MCE preinstalled and Media Center as the default startup interface panic and remove MCE entirely, not realizing both that the standard XP Pro desktop is still present and that it can be made the startup default. There is no reason to remove MCE for XP Pro unless you need domain networking, and even then a domain workaround for MCE may be a better option than changing the OS.]

Of course, you now have the option to use Vista Premium or Ultimate as well, but since I have not yet used Vista for this purpose, I can’t give you much guidance in that regard except to say that Vista Premium and Ultimate have MCE’s media center features as well.

A media center PC is basically the same as a normal PC with the addition of one to 4 TV tuner cards and a remote control. All components must be MCE compatible (very narrow hardware choices here), but the real issues boil down to the choice of video card, TV tuner(s) and remote control, where selection of MCE compatible hardware is absolutely critical. Also, note that in many cases you need special different drivers to use these components under XP MCE than under XP Home or Pro (and, also, of course you would need Vista drivers if you were using Vista). Expect to spend about $100 more for a Media Center PC with a single tuner than you would spend for an equivalent non-Media Center system (more, of course, if you want a fancy, high-end case). Another consideration with a media center system is that you want really, really large hard drives, as video files are just huge and eat disk space, not to mention that many MCE users will have thousands of MP3 and JPEG files on their system, and these also can be several megabytes each (but video files can be tens of megabytes and even over 100 megabytes each in some cases).

When you choose the video card, keep in mind the type of displays that you will be using. You need to consider carefully the output types (analog VGA and digital DVI and/or HDMI), and it’s clear that in the future, there will be a need for HDCP in the video card, which is currently a very rare feature of PC video cards, so much so that it may be best to plan on getting a card without it now and doing a future upgrade. You do not need an extremely high end video card, unless you have other requirements (gaming); there are plenty of $50-to-$100 range video cards that work fine, starting at about the ATI Radeon 9600 and NVidia FX5200 levels, but, again, be SURE that the card that you select is MCE compatible and that it has the necessary MCE XP and/or Vista drivers.

When you choose the tuner card, again, stick to the MCE HCL, and be sure that the card has hardware MPEG encoding on the card (there are a few cards that [claim to] support MCE with software MPEG encoding ... if you are smart, you will scratch these off your shopping list immediately). You must have at least one NTSC tuner card, you can have two NTSC cards, and optionally you can have one or two ATSC (HDTV) tuner cards. Direct cable tuning without a set-top-box is problematic because I’m not aware of any approved tuner cards that have both ATSC and QAM (or, even better, NTSC / ATSC / QAM in a single tuner). Satellite receiver interfacing is also more challenging, both set-top-box and satellite interfacing are normally done by having the MCE system control the set-top-box (be it cable or satellite) through an infra-red “emitter dongle”. It works, but it’s awkward and takes a bit of effort to setup. There are also some dual tuner cards available, such as the Hauppauge DVR-MCE-500 (two independent tuners on the same PCI card), which lets you record two different channels at once or watch one channel while recording another), and there are some external USB 2 tuners as well. But, again, be sure that what you plan to get is MCE compatible ... as an example, Hauppauge makes some external USB 2 tuners that are not MCE compatible, and other models that are MCE compatible. While I don’t mean to be pushing a particular brand, the Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 MCE is a popular tuner because it’s both cheap and works very, very well. But note that there is both a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 and a different WinTV PVR 150 MCE, which are different products. Only the MCE versions are fully supported under MCE (the non-MCE versions are intended for XP desktop use only). Although I use Hauppauge as an example here, you will run into subtle situations like this when selecting both the tuner and the remote control, so, again, if you are building a system, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to be absolutely sure that you are getting MCE compatible and supported components. [This is one reason why XP Media Center was originally not available as software only, and why even today it’s only available as an OEM product and not a retail product. It is very, very easy to build a system intended as a media center only to find out that one or more of your components are not, in fact, media center compatible. And I believe that these cautions apply to a Vista based Media Center system as well: The hardware requirements for Media Center are very tight, and the choice of products that work (well or at all) is very narrow).

One of the major shortcomings of MCE which I’d hoped would be fixed in Vista (but it wasn’t) is that there can be only a single channel guide for all of the tuners installed. Therefore, all tuners have to tune the same set of channels, you can’t have, for example, one tuner tuning “off the air” and a second tuner tuning your cable system. Maybe this will be resolved in the next version of Vista; it’s been high on the “wish list” for some time.

[One workaround for this may be to use the non-Media Center tuner applications that come with many tuner cards directly from the Windows desktop (outside of Media Center), but you won’t have Media Center compatible files if you go that route.]

The remote control should be the genuine Microsoft remote control. Most non-Microsoft remote controls won’t work with MCE (with a few exceptions), and experimenting can get expensive. The real MS remote control is relatively inexpensive (should be $30 to $45 depending on where you get it .... try E-Bay, but be sure you get the IR set-top-box control “dongles”), so it’s the way to go. But there have been several versions of the MS remote, so be sure that you understand which model you are getting up front.

A working MCE system is truly a wonderful addition to a high-end media system. If you need help in setting it up, look to the Usenet group Microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter, and also to a web site located at http://www.thegreenbutton.com (on the Microsoft remote control, the button that starts Media Center from the Windows Desktop is green). These sites are dedicated to media center systems, issues, questions and downloads. If your local newsgroup server doesn’t have Microsoft.public.windows.mediacenter, you can subscribe directly to the free msnews.microsoft.com newsgroup server maintained by Microsoft, which hosts all of Microsoft’s “semi-official” newsgroups.

Media Center has a feature called “media center extenders” for sending content over a network connection (wired or wireless) to additional rooms, but this is such a complex subject that it would require another entire column probably longer than this one. Both Linksys and D-Link make media center extenders, and a few other firms (including Logitech) make products as well for sending audio and/or video wired or wirelessly to other destinations but, again, to combine that discussion with this one would be prohibitively lengthy. If you take a look at the newsgroup site and the Greenbutton site that I referenced above, you will lots of additional resources to help you in rounding out other aspects of your system.

I hope that this helps, and best of luck in setting up your media center.

Submitted by: Barry W. of North Canton, Ohio