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You might recall during the beta period I wrote a review about Windows Vista Media Center, and the drastic changes, mostly in the UI that I noticed.  Although the changes were somewhat drastic and took a little bit getting used to, I absoluted loved them, and the love continues to grow with time.  I wanted to hold off on writing this review until I had invested a lot of time in testing and pushing my media center experience to the maximum before I wrote this review.  Well, that time has come, and I’m afraid I have nothing but great things to say.  Media center is ready for the big time, and I highly recommend it become the central entertainment hub of your home.  With extenders in any of your major entertainment areas, you now have access to everything.  All your music, all your TV, pictures, even video library is now available everywhere from a centralized location.  Multiple sattelite DVR’s is always a huge hassle (let’s see, which one did I record that show on again?), it’s low def, no music library, etc.  Besides, with free over the air HD, it’s a no brainer to spend $50, and a little time on your roof.  What a lot of people don’t realise is, that most of the HD you can get on sattelite and cable, you can get for free, over the air, and recorded directly into media center.  (about 95% of the TV my family watches comes from the major networks, which provide free over-the-air HD.  (Mostly Fox.)  24, Prison Break, American Idol, Bones, etc.)  Also, for a lot less money than you think, you can toss in home automation and control it through your media center experience.  Everything from turning off any lights in the house, to open the garage door, viewing security cameras, just about anything you could ever want!  All from the comfort of your couch and a remote with the 14? experience.

Key Changes between Vista MC & XP MCE Rollup2;

• • Completely re-designed UI
  • Native HD support
  • Can handle multiple ATSC (HD) tuners without the need for analogue tuners
  • Built in MPEG 2 decoder.  (You no longer need a 3rd party one.)
  • Old Extenders will no longer work with Vista MC.  Currently the Xbox 360 is the only extender that will work with Vista MC that I am aware of.

Now, let’s look at my configuration I’ve been using to full test, and now enjoy media center.

MCE PC Specs (Custom whitebox in a Thermaltake Mozart Case);

• • AMD 64 3200 (Vista x86 edition, not x64 running due to lack of Vista x64 driver support from manufacturers.  Get on the ball guys!)
  • 2G Dual Channel 533mhz RAM (Originally I only have 1G of RAM, and that hindered performance rather badly.  I highly recommend 2G.)
  • System Drive - 300G 8MB Buffer, 7200 RPM Sata Hard Drive
  • TV Recording Drive – 2x 400G 16MB Buffer, 7200 RPM Sata Hard Drive, in a hardware striped RAID array for a total of 744G.  (About 88 hours of HD, 233 SD)
  • NVidia 6800 GT PCI-E w/128MB RAM Video Card – Connected to projector via DVI @ 720P (running latest nvidia vista beta driver, 100.65)
  • Turtle Beach Dolby Digital Live Montego Bay Sound Card (Running generic Vista sound drivers chosen by OS default.  Manufacturer has not yet released Vista drivers.  I will address this in my review.  No sound issues so far, outputting via optical cable to Harman Kardan DPR 2005 receiver.)
  • Hauppage 500 Series Dual Tuner (not current doing anything.  I had bought them for dual tuner for my sattelite recievers.  Haven’t quite switched off my sattelite DVR per my wife’s request.)
  • Digital Tuners;
  • HD Signal via terrestrial antenna (free over the air) mounted on my roof, with a single signal booster in house.  (I’ve tried to add more amplifiers but they kill the signal.  Best Buy, the ‘HD Guys’ have been anything but that, and have been no help at all on boosting my signal further.  I am a fair distance from the transmitters with hills and mountains in the way, but I am now able to get 4 bars (still in the yellow) on all major stations including WB now.)
  • 2x Avermedia 180 PCI ATSC Cards.  (Awesome cards, and CHEAP on ebay!  I paid $70.00 per card!  This particular model and brand was recommended to me by those on the Media Center team.)
  • Pulled - ATI TV Wonder 650 ATSC Card.  (Horrible card that finally just stopped working, would show signal on the meter, but say no signal when attempting to view tv.  Expensive, $130 from Best Buy, DO NOT buy this card.)

3x - Xbox 360’s as Extenders;

• • In theatre connected to the projector @ 720P via component video cables.
  • In living room connected to a 42? plasma tv & 720P via component video cables.
  • In bedroom, connected to a 27? LCD SD tv via component video cables.

Windows Vista Media Center, HDTV, & Home Automation Tips

I’ve spent months tweaking my Vista MC PC and my free over-the-air HD signal to finally acheive the results I wanted.  Here I thought I would share some tips from my experience.

• • Have at least 2G of RAM in your Vista MC PC, especially if you are going to be doing dual HD tuners.  RAM can get chewed up like candy, and when it does it will start paging your hard drive, which will have a huge impact in your system performance over-all, even impact the response time of extenders.   RAM is cheap, and will give you your biggest performance boost for your money.
  • Have a dedicated drive for your TV recording, especially if you only have 1G of RAM.  If you are recording HDTV, that requires a more considerable amount of throughput to your hard drive than analogue recording, and if you are doing dual tuner HD, obviously double that.  If your system drive is paging due to low available RAM, you might encounter a choppy recording.  Besides, if you are doing HD recording, your system drive is going to get very full, very fast, which again will impact system performance.  I store all my music and videos for my video library under the public ‘music’ and ‘video’ folders, which is on the system drive, leaving my second drive entirely dedicated to recording.  Also, if possible, striping 2 large drives will not only give you much more HD recording time, but will increase the available throughput as well.
  • Purchased only well known, recommended tuner cards.  Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way after purchasing the ‘ATI TV Wonder 650? card.  I’m sorry to say, but this is one of the most un-reliable cards I’ve ever dealt with in my life, not to mention one of the more expensive cards in this category.  I got it because I got it in my head one Saturday to try over the air HD, and it was the only ATSC tuner card I could find that said it was ‘Vista Ready.’  Which, was a complete joke.  Not only did I get very choppy recordings from this TV tuner card, but recently it started to say it had signal, but when I tried to view it, I was told it had no signal.  Total garbage.  So, where do you find a list of ‘recommended’ Tuner cards?  Unfortunately I couldn’t find one either, (and this may be due to Microsoft trying to stay neutral with their hardware vendors) but I was able to unofficially get a couple of recommendations.
    • Analog - Hauppauge 500 Series Dual Tuner - I was told this card is near flawless, and I have to admit that I have never had a single problem with this card.  It was worked like champ, and I also personally highly recommend it.
    • ATSC - Avermedia 180 ATSC Card - This is the card I was told works the best in Vista MC, and that has definietly proven to be the case.  I initially purchased it to be my second tuner after  the ‘ATI’ fiasco, and found it to work so well that I bought a second and pulled the ATI.  I am doing dual HDTV recordings flawlessly, and couldn’t be happier.  Also, I purchased them both off of Ebay for a mere $70.00!  Highly recommended.
  • HDTV Signal - First, get your bearings for where the HD transmitters are.  I didn’t initially and it cost me a lot of time one the 6 mile radio asking “Can you see anything now?”  Yeah, in the winter on a ladder, that sucks, especially for my poor friend who was on the roof.  Also, don’t go crazy on spending money on your antenna.  I just got the external HDTV antenna from Wal-Mart for a mere $50.00 that came with an in-home signal booster.  That’s all I needed.  (Of course, I didn’t know that because I didn’t have my antenna aimed correctly, so I purchased multiple digital signal amplifiers to add on to that, and my experience has been that none of them work.  The only signal amplifer that works is the one that came with the antenna.)
    • This website has you enter in your street address, and it will then give you a compass heading to point your antenna at your HD transmitters in your area.  Unfortunately my subdivision is so new it couldn’t give me an exact reading, but I did get the general direction and go from there. - http://www.checkhd.com/aw/welcome.aspx
  • Try not to use the MC PC to watch content - Crazy right?  Well, HDTV playback requires a lot of resources, and if you have others using extenders it might slow down the responsiveness they experience.  Besides, over-all, I’ve had a far better experience with playback on my Xbox 360’s than I’ve had on the PC itself.  This is more than likely due to the sound card, etc, but as far as universal compatibility Xbox 360 is the way to go.  Also, a little known feature about the Xbox 360 is that it upsamples any signal to what it is set at.  For example, HDTV recordings are broadcast for the most part in 1080i.  My Xbox 360’s are configured for 720p.  So when I watch HDTV through my 360, it upsamples the 1080i signal to 720p, and it honestly looks even better.  Also, extenders have very little system resource impact, and this will  allow your Vista MC PC to handle other tasks, such as transcoding….. (Just google transcode 360, that’s all I’ve gotta say.)  Now, granted, 360’s are expensive, but soon Vista class extenders are going to be in everything from TV’s to DVD players, so keep an eye out for the new extenders this year.
    • Now, if you follow this advice, you can benefit from my experience.  See, I wanted a ‘cool’ looking MC PC that looked just like the rest of my AV equipment in my theatre, including putting a VFD on it.  (A display, like a DVD player has on it that shows what TV show I am currently watching, etc.)  Now, while very cool, it was expensive, and is very limiting on how many additional hard drives I can add, etc.  If you are going to use extenders everywhere, build your MC PC in a nice large case with good air flow and plenty of room for expansion and put it in a cable closet or office somwhere.  Just make sure you have a Gigabit NIC in it, and have your 360’s connect via a gigabit switch, and you’ll have plenty of pipe for them.  (360’s only have 10/100 cards in them, so each 360 can max out it’s pipe and you’ll still have available throughput from your MC PC.)
  • Home Automation - Make sure to get some signal filters on your PC.  I’ve noticed that PC’s provide a lot of interference over the A/C lines, and so if you want a clear home automation signal this is a must.
    • I highly recommend the Insteon line of products, made by http://www.smarthome.com
    • To be more specific, here is a great Insteon starter kit - http://www.smarthome.com/2493.html
    • mControl has released an alpha build of their software designed for Windows Vista Media Center.  It also works great over extenders, I am currently running this in my home.

As always, I welcome any feedback anyone might have.  What has your experience with Vista Media Center been like?  Also, please feel free to ask me any questions you wish, especially if you are having problems getting something to work.  Trust me, with as much time as I’ve spent on this, chances are I ran into that problem too.

Source: the Stone Blog

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