media centre pc's media centre pc's. for a while now ive wantedone of those media bozes where its basically a tower that you just plug into your tele. and example would be a Sony Vaio XL100 http://www.play.com/play247.asp?page=title&r=ELEC&title=903471&p=539&g=697&pa=genbrw i want to use somet like this with a hd tele, anyone recommend any similar bozes to use. must have mint processor and gfx card and bog storage. id rather have a box like this instead of just making a tower up myself ta,
Check this, nearly a full £300 cheaper and more powerful: http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/shop/detail.asp?ProductID=1865&CategoryID=142&SubCategoryID=183
Is there any differnce between a high spec pc and one of these 'media centres' ? That aint much better than mine that conway psted tbh
A media centre PC tends to have lots of storage, a tv tuner (sometimes two), and XP MCE on it. All it does more than a normal PC is record the telly and store it for you, but that isn't that hard to do yourself. My final year project at uni was a media centre using linux and a platform called myth, and that ran on my current PC (which isn't much more powerful than the one I've listed). They may be something in the future but at the moment they're nothing short of a gimmick, and if you know what you're doing you can build one up yourself for a fraction of the cost. Juski has built himself a media server with 3 tuners in running on an athlon 2400, last time I spoke to him it also had about a terabyte in hard disk space. It uses myth and it's capable of recording multiple shows at once and storing them to disk, in addition you can push them out over the network to myth "front ends" that are capable of connecting to the media server over a network. myth is well worth a look if all you're doing is using the PC as a media centre
its all about myth forget these toy xp media pc's - build yourself the real thing for a fraction of the cost as conway says !
