On a whim, I recently bought a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 - a PCI card that lets you view and capture TV.  Basically, it was on sale, and I thought it might be interesting to have a go at building a PVR.  Little did I know, at the time, that this purchase would lead me down the road to a (successful) Windows Media Center 2005 installation.

There are a number of commercial and free PVR software solutions out there.  Some are quite good, all have scheduled recording capabilities and make use of XMLTV to retrieve program listings.  Most ended up (for me) working quite well, and I obtained many hours of reasonably high quality recordings of movies and television programs.

What I didn't want to do, though, is either:

• Watch TV on my PC (I spend enough time there already)
• String video and audio cables from my PC over to the TV

What I wanted was a simple solution.

I thought - OK, I have an Xbox, it's hooked to the TV and stereo, why can't it stream the recorded programs?  The short answer: it can.  If you hack your Xbox, you can install any number of open source apps that will let you do exactly that.  But hacking your Xbox means either an unbelievably arcane set of software exploits or soldering in a mod chip.  Worse, there's a chance after doing the hack that you'll be unable to use Xbox Live afterwards.

Coincidentally, at the same time I was poking around for a usable solution, out comes Microsoft with the Media Center Extender for Xbox.  Perfect.  All you need is a Media Center PC, and the extender will let your Xbox stream video, audio, etc, etc out to your TV.

The key phrase here is "all you need is a Media Center PC".  Right then, lets go.

Building the Media Center PC

First off, you can't just walk into Best Buy and pick up a copy of Media Center 2005.   Microsoft doesn't sell this to consumers, just OEMs and "System Builders".  You can, however, purchase a copy from suppliers such as Directron, with these conditions:

 

This product is an OEM package designed for system builders. It must be purchased with an entire system or a major system component of any quantity. The remote control by itself is not considered as the essential hardware. Major hardware includes memory, hard drives, optical drives, motherboard, video card, processor, mice, keyboards, and power supplies. Failure to purchase this product with a major hardware component will invalidate the order during processing. (8) Examples of components that are not considered essential are external modems, networking devices, cameras, printers, and scanners

 

Not a big problem.  buy a $1.99 Logitech Mouse along with the $129 Media Center and you're good to go.

Also, importantly, if you want to control a set top box (like a satellite receiver), you'll want to get the Media Center Remote which includes the IR cable to do this.

The next problem, is supported hardware.  For the record, my system consists of (the important parts):

Processor: AMD Athlon XP1800+
Memory: 1GB RAM
Video: ATI Radeon 9600SE (with the latest Catalyst drivers)
TV Card: Hauppauge PVR250

This configuration works.  The processor is probably a little underpowered, but runs fine.  Be careful about the video card - the more recent, the better.  As an example, a previous NVIDIA MX2-400 didn't work at all for live TV.  It's fairly difficult to get reliable hardware recommendations.  Again, because Media Center is designed for OEMs and System Builders, there isn't a whole lot of (reliable) information out there).

You'll also likely need to buy a DVD Decoder that works with media center.  This is what allows Media Center to display live and recorded TV, play DVDs, etc.  You need a supported DVD Decoder.  I ended up having to buy the NVIDIA DVD Decoder for the princely sum of $19.95 US.

You can check to see if you have a supported DVD decoder after installation of Media Center using the Microsoft Windows XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility.  If the decoders you have aren't supported, you can purchase and install the NVIDIA one at this point.

OK, so the final checklist (over and above a "regular" PC):

• A reasonably fast processor
• A recent video card (you can pick up a Radeon 9600 SE card pretty cheaply if you need to)
• Lots of RAM (although 512MB is supposed to be OK)
• A supported TV card
• Media Center itself
• The Media Center Remote
• A supported DVD Decoder

Installation

Installation consists of two CDs - one is a regular seeming XP/SP2, followed by another that seems to contain the pieces that turn XP into Media Center.  Installation was completely smooth, and I was up and running in no time.

I should mention at this point, that at install, I didn't have a "recent video card" or a "supported DVD Decoder", and so I had to go through the pain of finding both, after the disappointment of not seeing live TV or videos :-(  Happily though, adding both of those items fixed things up perfectly.

One important bit of information about the TV Guide.  If your TV card has a tuner built in, and if it's able to do the tuning (i.e., you're feeding it an antenna signal), you'll have no problem using the guide as-is.  If however, like me, you have a satellite receiver which the card (obviously) can't tune, you'll need the infrared setup (the Media Center Remote) and it will need to be connected before Media Center setup will let you pull down guide listings for your satellite provider.

For all intents and purposes, XP Media Center looks and behaves like a regular XP installation - that is, the usual Start menu, etc.  To access Media Center functionality, you need to start the Media Center front end from the Start menu.  This is basically a portal from which you can access live TV, recordings, TV guides, and other (to me) less important items like "My Music" (I'd rather use iTunes, thanks) and "My Pictures".

The front end, though, is reasonably well thought out and fairly snappy in its performance.  No problem at all figuring out how things work.

Media Center Extender for Xbox

The most interesting part of this whole project to me, was the ability to pump recorded and live TV, via the LAN, to the Xbox for output through the television and stereo system.

The extender ($99 CDN) comes with two discs and a remote control (and, amazingly, the batteries).  One disc is the extension to XP Media Center itself, and you need to install this on your PC (and it requires activation).  The other disc goes in the Xbox.  This is just like popping in a game, but what you end up with (after it finishes making a LAN connection to the PC) is the same Media Center front end that you see on the PC, but on the Xbox instead.

You can access all of your recorded and live TV, recorded videos, music, etc, etc.  The extender lets you include arbitrary directories on your PC (and presumably network shares, although I haven't tried this yet).

The extender works amazingly well.  My only complaint is the startup time when it's inserted into the Xbox, which seems to be about 15 seconds or so.

Finally

Would I recommend this?  So far, yes.  It's a little bit of an odyssey to do yourself, but if you're inclined, there are a number of pre-built Media Center PCs out there.  If you already have an Xbox, definitely invest in the Media Center Extender.

More to come (I've created a new Topic area for Media Center) as I discover more interesting features and tweaks, and problems to overcome...