Media Center Update

A lot has changed since my last post on my media center. At that time, I had the media center up and running, and then it unexpectedly crashed on me. After much troubleshooting (the worst part about DIY projects) I realized it was most likely (note I never officially figured it out) that the video card I was using was PCI Express 2.0, and my mobo was an older one, that likely didn't support 2.0 on the Express slot.

Although that sucked, I was okay, because I wasn't quite ready to make the transition to HDMI in my living room. So, I yanked the vid card, put the media center in my office, and used my XBox 360 as a media extender to play my recorded shows from the office.

Did it work? Yeah. Was it the best solution? No way. I found the XBox to be somewhat slow and at times unresponsive. In addition, it required another remote (because I didn't want to take the time to program my Remote Commander for a temporary solution).

Anyway, I soon found a great deal at Buy.com for a 3-to-1 HDMI switch (only $12 with free shipping), and then picked up some HDMI cables, and I realized it was time to move the HTPC into the living room. But it was an unsightly thing in its' mid-tower case. Until my brother offered his "old" media case because he'd purchased a bigger and better one. The downside to this was it only accepts half-height cards, meaning my TV tuner wouldn't fit.

After thinking about this, I ended up being okay with getting rid of the card. I'm quickly becoming an HD snob anyway, and unless I wanted to upgrade my HTPC to Vista and run the TV Pack hack to get QAM on my tuner, I wasn't going to get OTA HD on my tuner anyway, and the new case looked great compared to the old one.

So I made the switch - and still couldn't use my HDMI card. Thankfully, I got an older Radeon X300 low-profile card with DVI out, which will work until I either upgrade my mobo or my video card.

Add to that using Handbrake to rip my DVD's, coupled with AnyDvd to strip the encoding, I've now got all my DVD's stored on my HTPC.

I also was looking for a good, easy to use visual piece to navigate the media when my brother recommended XBMC which is pretty, easy to use and develop on, and best of all, is free.

The last thing that I haven't done yet is to install VNC or Synergy to allow me to control the media center from my laptop. Once that's done, it will be fully functional. I'll post a pic of what the computer looks like sometime here soon.