My Media Center Setup

Some folks on my team were talking about Media Center and I had to chime in. I love my digital media and my Media Center PC. I will be upgrading to Vista Ultimate as soon as all the drivers are out for my equipment.

The goal of my media center setup was to consolidate devices and media. I have effectively killed the DVD player, VHS, CD’s, and most of my DVD’s. I want everything to be on demand (without WebSphere) with a remote control. I have pretty much achieved this.

My requirements are to have ubiquitous content that can be accessed from a heterogeneous computer environment. To achieve this, the content must all be industry standard with limited or no dependences on a specific vendor. Absolutely NO DRM shall be on my network. 90% of all my content is DRM free. Remote access is a must as well. I use ORB to achieve this over the web.

There are reasons why I don’t use extenders throughout the house. For example, I repurposed an older PC and put MCE on it. I use a NAS device to centralize all my content. Additionally I use MCEBackup to push frequently used content to local drives for two reasons.

· Performance - elevating network congestion that can occur over WiFi. Additionally frequently viewed content is at the optimal performance over internal SATA.

· Backup – Provides necessary redundancy of content. Provisioning of content is all managed on off hours.

I use my Xbox 360 as an extender but it is primarily a gaming console. In the bedroom I repurposed an older PC and put MCE on it. I have several hundred of gigabytes of TV and Movies that just would not be able to be played on an extender. So I use the MCE box that has some content local content and utilizes the central store of record, NAS.

Here are some of the downfalls of extenders:

· Codecs – Severally limits playback of content. Can’t play popular formats such as DIVX, mp4, VOB, XVID, Quicktime, etc

· Extensibility – Limited or no plug-ins available

· Performance – All content MUST pass through the central media center. This can cause performance issues, especially if cable is streamed across it as well.

Managing Movies

I use the application MyMovies to manage all my movies. It downloads all the movie art, actors, ratings, descriptions, etc. It will also play pretty much anything you have a codec for. So I rip all my DVD’s with DVDShrink to shrink my movies from 8gb to 4.5gb and remove foreign languages and unwanted extras. These are all ripped to the raw .vob files so that they can be played by ANY program.