A side project

[SideShowCecil]

About a year ago I hooked up an old PC to our living room entertainment system for storing and playing MP3s. It took some fiddling with the display settings so text was legible on the TV; otherwise the system works great. I added a second hard drive exclusively for storing the music library and spent about two weeks ripping our CD collection to MP3. Once I added a network connection the music library was available to all the PCs in the house.

A few weeks ago I figured I’d try adding video functionality to the PC. I installed a TV tuner card and a DVD ROM drive. The PC does as good a job or better than my Sony DVD player for playing movies; and it’s not picky about playing DVDRs like the Sony. It works extremely well as a digital video recorder too; though I’ll need yet another hard drive since the video files are so huge. I found a 200 gig drive for under $100, it should hold about a 100 hours of recorded video.

My next step is to add a decent remote control and a scheduled TV program recording function. (like TiVo) That stuff is all available in Windows XP Media Centre Edition. Right now Microsoft isn’t retailing the OS due to its ‘specific hardware requirements’. They only whole-sale it to Microsoft certified retailers to be pre-installed on retail PCs. I’m really not interested in spend $2000 on a new media centre PC. My total investment on my system so far is less than $300.

[Don-Dad]

I use the hauppage media mvp with my whole house audio system. You can pick it up for less than $90 and it plays mp3's and video files. So instead of having the pc you would have just a small box, about the size of 3 remotes. It runs off your network connecting to the host pc for the files.

If you buy a ATI video card, the radeon or better, it comes with TIVO like functionality. It will get the tv listings a week at a time and you can use it to record, also can connect cable to it and use the video in and out features for connecting to digi cams.

[Indy]

I just got an E-machine that came loaded with Windows Media Center. Picked the machine up at Best Buy for less than $600.

[Jackson's Dad]

Cool project.

Right now I have all my music served off my work computer, since I listen to it mainly at work. To get access in other parts of the house, I use our wireless network. I use iTunes, so they make it pretty easy to share your library across many machines. The family room has an older laptop with some nice Bose speakers hooked up -- pretty nice reception!

One of these days, I'll probably spin the whole music collection off onto its own machine.