Media Center PC
I'm planning to move my current PC into the living room to use as a media center and then get a smaller one for my bedroom. I was wondering if anyone on this forum have set up their PC as a media center before and how well it's gone.
The idea for the living room PC is for it to have all my current DVDs, blu rays, HD-DVDs saved onto it and all my music. And connect up my Sky HD box. Then the outputs would be the 46 inch Panasonic TV and hopefully my surround sound.
I'm going to buy a few more hard drives to have room for everything, possibly 6TB. Do you think my 2.67 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2gigs of ram and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series GPU should be able to run all this fairly slickly? Can you recommend a good TV card with HD input?
Do you know of any good media center software? And software to use to burn all my DVDs, blu rays and HD-DVDs onto the PC? And possible software to record TV input?
Kind of a mix of hardware and software questions but if you can help with any that'd be great.
The idea for the living room PC is for it to have all my current DVDs, blu rays, HD-DVDs saved onto it and all my music. And connect up my Sky HD box. Then the outputs would be the 46 inch Panasonic TV and hopefully my surround sound.
I'm going to buy a few more hard drives to have room for everything, possibly 6TB. Do you think my 2.67 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2gigs of ram and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series GPU should be able to run all this fairly slickly? Can you recommend a good TV card with HD input?
Do you know of any good media center software? And software to use to burn all my DVDs, blu rays and HD-DVDs onto the PC? And possible software to record TV input?
Kind of a mix of hardware and software questions but if you can help with any that'd be great.
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Comments
I've done similar things in the past. Your system should be sufficient for an HTPC. If anything needed to be beefed up, I'd say moving to 4GB RAM, but only if you're having problems at 2GB.
As for media center software, I'd say just go get Windows 7. The media center software should be sufficient for everything. You will likely need some BD/HD-DVD software such as Nero or PowerDVD to get the codecs, but Windows Media Center should be able to use those once the software is installed. Another option would be the Boxee software (http://www.boxee.tv). The downside here is I don't believe it's able to play back your BD/HD-DVD files. Not 100% sure though.
I'm not 100% sure we can talk publicly about ripping software (DCMA and all).
Linux Mint
XBMC media center
Miro for all my podcasting needs
Since I already have my Xbox 360 in the living room, do you think it would be possible to stick the hard drives in these,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LUPO-Inch-SATA-Hard-Drive/dp/B0030Y58LY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1290288706&sr=8-2
Attach a bunch of them to a USB hub,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Speed-Power-Adapter-Cable/dp/B003DVC7N6/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1290289173&sr=1-2
and then connect that to the Xbox using the video/music library on the Xbox dashboard?
Would save me buying extra PC parts but do you see any issues with this? Would mean it can't independently collect video/music itself but I'm happy with that.