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I was hoping you’d chime in on this Dave, thanks! I actually installed Windows XP Media Center 2004. During installation it said it was XP Professional. From my own readings I think somewhere along the way they switched from using a modified version of Pro to using Home.
That’s too bad about the HD processing capability, but I was somewhat afraid of that. As long as the scaling is decent we should be good. I’ll worry about true HD later.
I have a lot to say on this subject, as I have spent much time buggering about in this area, but no time to sit and write it all out at the moment so here is a couple of points in brief:
-First point, the next couple are partially peformance related. The tech specs of the PC in question can be veiwed here:
http://support.dell.com/support/
edocs/systems/dim4300/specs.htm#1101572
[sorry I had to but a break in it, it wouldn’t fit on the standard template]
-Don’t use Windows Media Centre. Use XP Pro.
Media Centre XP is modified from XP Home, which lacks several components that (at least I think) you at least want, if not need on a Media Centre. The main thing is Terminal Server (Remote Desktop). I know there are alternatives but if it’s Windows to Windows control it uses the least resources by far at both ends.
Media Centre can also be less stable on machines designed for standard XP (BSOD’s a lot), and contains nothing extra apart from the Media Centre application and associated services. As far as I can work out, this is basically WMP with live TV support. WMP comes with XP, and while I admit it would be nice to have everything in one application; a) the software with any given TV card is usually much better and b) there are plenty of third-party (many of them open source) applications of there that do exactly that in a much better way.
Check out GB-PVR. Originally designed for use in the UK, but has now been developed to include support for NTSC.
-You will have problems obtaining true HD media playback through an AGP/PCI graphics card.
The bus speeds are simply too slow. HD media playback involves up to 14 times the data of SD if your dealing with raw streams. Media streams are a complicated business - GDG you may know some bits and pieces from your web design work - but the long of the short of it is that it’s just more data than the interface can handle.
Annoyingly, looking at the spec of the machine in question, I don’t think there’s much you can do about this without rebuilding from the motherboard up. The current FSB is not good enough to get the data from the source (HDD, TV signal, stream source) to the last stage processors (GFX card, Sound card) fast enough.
All is not lost, however, as most new GFX cards are capable of quality scaling - so you get the best quality possible according to the current system conditions. This is particularly true of AGP, because of the problems mentioned above.
PCI 33MHz is a complete non-starter for HD, sound or video.
Apologies for the excessive acronyms, reduces the amount of typing and makes it (a little) less long-winded. Feel free to pick my brains on anything, I’ll do my best to provide answers, but if I’m honest most of what I know is just what I have learned from buggering about reading on the internet…
DaveRandom | 06.30.2008 | 11:54 AM