I read Adam Turner’s blog last week with interest: Is the Media Centre PC dead?

Adam filed another article on the popular Hydrapinion blog, too: Media Centre PC – R.I.P.?

My initial reaction was, “NOOooooo, Adam, why would you say such I thing?!” I’ve had a Media Centre PC in the living room for some years, running various versions of Microsoft’s Media Center operating system; with varying degrees of success too, I might add.

What we’re talking about here is not just a Media Centre: it’s actually a PC Media Centre running in your living room, plugged in to the television, the surround sound and your computer network. Like any PC it’s got a monitor (which, invariably, is your big-arse LCD or plasma television), as well as a mouse and a keyboard.

But what does the Media Centre PC actually do? In Adam’s ideal lounge room, he breaks down the technology components into five key functions:

1. High-Def PVR;
2. DVD/Blu-ray player;
3. Streaming media player;
4. Online video player; and
5. Gaming console.

Adam says you can mix and match gadgets, and I agree whole-heartedly, and I think that a Media Centre PC is the best device to achieve most (if not all) of these components.

For Points 1, 3 & 4 – my Windows 7 Media Centre has a tuner card (albeit Standard Definition – time to upgrade, Dr Ron?) and records free-to-air TV with ease. Ad-skipping is a breeze, and the programming and scheduling is made super-easy with an intuitive interface and electronic program guide.

Also, if you’re looking for a good streaming media player, I reckon the PC has got this nailed. Despite the occasional horrors of missing codecs, or proprietary players or buffering bandwidth, media streaming is made simple on a PC.

There are two problems that leap to mind with media streaming devices like Western Digital’s WDTV Live. Because there is no physical keyboard, you have to enter search queries, web addresses and server names with an on-screen “virtual” keyboard using the arrows on your remote control. I think I’d rather sit in a dentist’s chair for an hour than have to enter another URL on the WDTV Live with the supplied remote control. Don’t get me wrong, I own a WDTV Live and I think it’s an awesome device for what it is – but there are some things it just can’t do well.  This is one of them.

Second, a lot of “TV connected devices” are region-blocked on providers like Google’s YouTube. Devices other than PCs and home computers can’t play a lot of content. To add insult to injury, the User Interface in these devices often recommends popular clips, only to deliver a perfunctory error, like: ”THIS CONTENT NOT AVAILABLE ON TV-CONNECTED DEVICES” or similar. Of course, the Media Centre PC sidesteps this problem nicely.

For a DVD/BluRay player and gaming console, nothing beats the Sony PlayStation 3 for high-quality DVD and BluRay playback. The digital outputs deliver top-notch audio and video to your 21st Century lounge room. The PS3 is also a sensational games console, despite the recent PlayStation Network difficulties and Sony’s apparent slap-dash attitude towards security. Hmmmmmm.

I found this comment of Adam’s interesting: “To be honest, these days [the PC media centre] is more of a media server than a player.”

In actual fact, we use it the other way around. Apart from recorded programs from free-to-air, we don’t keep any content on our PC Media Centre. Its primary use is playback, accessing on-line content like YouTube, and Windows shares on the family media server (which is a Linux-powered PC in Shack East – read, ManLand).

It also makes sense to me to have a simple PC as a “lounge room component”. Sometimes you just want to do stuff on your big-screen TV: like web browsing, or looking at friends’ holiday pics on their SD card, or even sniping the latest must-have on eBay or GraysOnline.

The only downsides I can think of are the mechanical noise of a PC (which is manageable, and certainly not as bad today as it was 10 years ago); potentially the space it takes up; and the unwieldy mouse and keyboard which need a home somewhere. Even without cables, the wireless versions take up a bit of space.

I agree with Adam that you’re unlikely to find one gadget to do it all. But wouldn’t you agree, the PC Media Centre comes close?

adam turner · digital lounge room · media centre · media streamer · Microsoft · WD TV Live · Western Digital · windows 7

Still searching for an all-inclusive family media centre? Maybe it’s time to look at the latest offering from Microsoft.

I’ve never had a PVR in the lounge room. Everyone has their own personal preference, and for me, it makes sense to have a PC as a fundamental lounge room component, alongside the television, the DVD player, the BluRay disc player and the surround sound system. In addition to recording programmes off-air, you can use a networked PC-based media centre to view movies and listen to music on networked file shares, surf the web, and watch YouTube and Twitterfall on your big-arse television.

And sometimes, it’s just good to have “PC functionality” on a big screen in your lounge room.

An old-fashioned version of Microsft’s Windows XP operating system was the Windows XP Media Center (sic) Edition. The last version was released about 5 or 6 years ago, and was intended for the lounge room PC to consolidate your audio and video libraries, TV recordings and provide a friendly user interface with large fonts and nice colours which could be operated with a remote control, or wireless keyboard and mouse.

Unfortunately, the reality was quite different. Windows XP-MCE was the buggiest, flakiest, most God-forsaken application, and just completely failed to do anything useful whatsoever. It wouldn’t recognize many standard tuner cards (despite them being recognized and operating faultlessly in the same PC outside of XP-MCE), and it wouldn’t play many movie formats (again, despite them being playable by Windows Media Player in the same PC).

After wrangling with XP-MCE for several weeks, I gave it up as a bad joke. I used my PC media centre with the AVerTV software that was supplied with the tuner card (which worked fine ’standalone’, for recording free-to-air), and I simply used Windows Explorer to connect to network shares and play movies with Windows Media Player or VLC.

This worked well for many years.

Recently, Microsoft released Windows 7, and bundled the latest version of its media centre software with the Home Edition. Ho hum, I thought, the product probably hasn’t changed much, I’ll have a quick look but I can’t imagine using it as an all-in-one media centre.

Oohhh, but how wrong I was!

Microsoft, to its credit, has done an enormous amount of work on Win 7 MCE, compared with its XP ancestor. The user interface has been completely overhauled, and is fast, smooth and intuitive. The installation wizard recognised my tuner and set it up straight away. It seeks-out and finds audio and video media on the network, and adds files to its catalogue. It creates a new “Recorded TV” library where it stores all off-air recordings, and builds its own sensible filenames, thumbnails, and even saves a programme synopsis which it sources from the off-air TV  guide.

Hot-searching makes it very fast and simple to find pre-recorded programmes, indexed movies and other media.

The Main Menu is divided into a number of sub-menus:

• TV
• Movies
• Music
• Pictures + Videos
• Extras

TV

Recorded TV displays thumbnails of pre-recorded programmes off-air which are saved in a new “Recorded TV” library. You can see a brief synopsis of each, as well as recorded date/time, duration and other information. It’s simple, and it’s quick to launch recorded programmes.

One of the *best* features  is the recorded TV playback interface. When you move the mouse during playback, Win 7 MCE superimposes a slider control / timeline across the bottom of the display.  When you click-and-drag to jump forward or backward, Win 7 MCE displays a small thumbnail above the timeline, with a frame-grab of the programme at that point.  This makes ad-skipping an absolute breeze and sets Win 7 MCE ahead of many PVRs and internet TV services with this feature.

The Guide displays a conventional table that shows which programmes are currently being put to air by the “FreeView” stations, and which are scheduled in the near future. Simply right-click on these entries to see additional programme details, or to start recording, schedule recording, mark the series for recording (works very well), and a raft of other functions.

Live TV lets you watch television live. You can pause live TV, rewind live TV, view subtitles… all the usual features you’d expect from a modern PVR. What’s more, you can leave Live TV running while you click “back” or “menu”, and Win 7 MCE superimposes  the menu on top of the picture with an impressive “blend” effect.

Movies

The Movie Library functions search for and catalogue media on your network, as well as scheduled programmes in the FreeView Electronic Program Guide, which meet your search criteria.

For example, by selecting Movie Guide / Genres / Science Fiction – Fantasy, I can see in the next few days that “All Dogs Go To Heaven 2″ is on 7TWO, “Species” is on 7 HD Digital, and so on and so forth.  Of course as you’d expect you can right-click any of these results to record or see a brief synopsis.

Music

Win 7 MCE is great for organising your music.  Already got everything ripped to a network drive or external disk?  Simply add tracks to your Music Library by selecting Tasks / Settings / Media Libraries and selecting tracks or folders.

Search by albums, artists, genres, songs, and create your own playlists.  The album artwork is used nicely so you know what’s playing, what’s coming up and what’s available.  Microsoft even has native “visualization” effects, in case you like your TV / monitor to look like an animated tie-dye T-shirt.

The new Media Center also supports digital radio, if you have a digital radio tuner installed in the machine.

Pictures & Videos

As with music, Win 7 MCE makes it easy to manage pictures and video files on your network.  You can search for local media, as well as network file shares  and external devices.

It’s easy to add individual files to “Favorites”, and create playlists and slideshows.

By the way, all these functions operate independently. You can start listening to a music playlist for example, then click “Back” to the Main Menu, select Pictures and start a slideshow of your favourite happy-snaps.  You can show-case photos from your recent trip to Bali while you’re rocking out to Nirvana.  Or something.

Extras

There’s heaps under the hood: built-in support for BigPond Movies, media extender support for the Xbox 360, CD and DVD burning, syncing of content between Media Center and portable devices, and much, much more.

My Setup

None of this is running on the world’s fastest machine. I’m running Windows 7 Home 0n an Intel Core 2 Duo 3 GHz machine, with 2 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard disk. This machine has a Windows Experience Index of 5.5.

I use the digital video output of my media centre’s video card, which connects directly to an HDMI port on the television. I have a lovely new Sony Bravia LCD television, and the picture simply sparkles.

Audio runs from the soundcard output of the media centre into an auxiliary input of a surround-sound audio amplifier.  The next project is to get digital audio out of the PC and into the same amplifier.

I did have a wireless card in my earlier Windows XP Media Center.  It did the job okay, but video buffering and network speeds were always a problem.  Eventually I got sick of the stop/start wireless networking and cabled a 100 Mbps port to the rear of the machine.  I’d strongly recommend cabling a network connection to your media centre instead of relying on wireless.  Trust me, you’ll notice a massive improvement in network access speeds and reliability.

The Verdict?

Windows 7 MCE is streets ahead of its predecessor, Windows XP Media Center Edition. Microsoft has done a lot of work to keep the product competitive against big names like TiVo, the Foxtel iQ, the Boxee and others.

Playing devil’s advocate for a moment, I can think of three four things where Win 7 MCE falls short of a digital PVR:

1. the proprietary Microsoft recorded TV file format, which can’t be used by other applications without first being converted to something standard;

2. the system startup time, i.e. if you see something on live TV and want to start recording straight away, when your media centre PC is turned off;

3. the mechanical noise of a physical PC in your lounge room; and

4. unwieldy wireless keyboards and mouses lying around the lounge room.

For me, these are not show-stoppers.  Windows 7 MCE is a real contender in the digital lounge room.  If you’ve got a spare PC lying around, and a VGA port or spare HDMI input on the television that needs to be put to good use, you could do a lot worse than loading Windows 7 Media Center and connecting it to your digital living room.

Unlike its predecessor, you won’t be disappointed.

digital living room · digital lounge room · Media Center · media centre · Microsoft · PVR · Windows · windows 7

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to cable a network socket to the lounge room, and a network socket to the bedroom.

This would enable me, in theory, to stream audio and video from my network to the television and sound system in my living room; and to stream audio and video from my network to the television in the master bedroom.

Why not just use wireless?

I’ve been using WiFi to the lounge room Media Centre for some time (well, years) now. It works adequately. But wireless technology is designed for portable devices, and in the case where I’ve got a Media Centre PC which never moves, the better option from a technical standpoint is to connect to the network using a wired network port. A fixed network connection is faster than wireless, more reliable, and my Media Centre won’t be competing with other wireless devices for bandwidth, using the same hotspot ‘legitimately’ (e.g. net books, smart phones etc.).

Conspiracy theorists that obsess about security will also agree that a wired network connection is a better option than wireless. I, however, do not obsess about such things. Honestly.

Yesterday I got out the fashionable white overalls, retrieved my toolbox from a bygone era and proceeded to cable new network points to the lounge room and the master bedroom. This involved much swearing, grunting, bashing-of-head-against-low-floorboards and grazed elbows, but I got there eventually.

In Australia, make sure any infrastructure cabling, at work or at home, is undertaken by a licensed cabler.  Like me.

Lounge Room – wired for internets!

I plugged the Media Centre into its new network port, and was pleased to see a noticeable improvement in network speed. I’ll keep using the PC as a Media Centre in the lounge room. It makes a lot of sense to me to have a networked PC connected to your television and sound system.

The Bedroom Solution

- or -

“How to browse internets and network file shares in your bedroom without a computer”

A PC in the bedroom, however, is a bit excessive (IMHO). So what’s the best way to access content on the network and stream it to the television?

I had my eye on a fashionable media streamer from Western Digital which Andrew spoke about on Tech Talk Radio in November. After seeing a demonstration, viewing a Blu-Ray rip over Andrew’s network in his lounge room, I was sold. The quality was great.

There are three versions of these little boxes, and I bought the most expensive one, the WD TV Live, which supports networking. This set me back $198 from JB Hi Fi.

The WD TV Live is a small unassuming box which provides an interface between your television and your computer network, with a nifty little remote control (yes, batteries are included!). All the WD TV Live needs is power and a nearby network connection, which I now have, thanks to yesterday’s wrangling.

The WD TV Live outputs to composite or component video (cables supplied) or HDMI (cable not supplied), in full HD 1080P video. When it powers-up, the WD TV Live finds shares on your computer network and lets you watch video and listen to music. It also has 2 x USB ports so you can connect external drives, memory sticks and the like.

To get it going, all I needed to do was connect HDMI to my television, connect the blue network cable and plug-in the power. The WD TV Live did everything else, and the default settings are very usable. It found my network’s DHCP server, assigned itself an IP address, found my network shares and just started working.

Format Support

According to the documentation, supported video formats include AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG 1, 2 & 4, WMV9 & VC-1), MPG/MPEG, VOB, MKV (H.264, X.264, AVC, MPEG 1, 2 & 4, WMV9 & VC-1), TS / TP / M2T (MPEG 1, 2 & 4, AVC & VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4 & H.264), M2TS & WMV9.

Supported image formats include JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP & PNG.

Supported audio formats include MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby Digital & DTS.

The WD TV Live also supports common playlist and subtitle formats, and it’s got the DLNA stamp of approval.

Andrew says he’s had huge success with MKV video formats, in terms of quality.

User Interface

Nice.  Fast and smooth.

There’s also a nice interface which streams content directly from Google’s video-sharing website YouTube, popular photo-sharing site Flickr and Live 365 internet radio. You can login to YouTube if you have an existing account.

My only gripe is the on-screen keyboard, which is clunky and frustrating. You’re driving it with the up/down/left/right arrows on the remote control, so I’m not really sure how Western Digital could improve on this. You only need to use the on-screen keyboard if you’re entering custom network settings, or user names and passwords for network shares and such things. Fortunately the WD TV Live remembers these settings, so you rarely need to use the on-screen keyboard.

Problems with HomeGroup Networking

Tech Talk’s Graeme Callaghan also purchased one of these little boxes some weeks ago. He told me that the only difficulties he has experienced have been with Windows 7 “HomeGroup” networking, which apparently does strange things, e.g. causing network shares to disappear, reappear then disappear again. Graeme said that after he disabled HomeGroup networking, in favour of traditional Windows workgroups, everything worked consistently and well. I’m sharing content off a Windows 7 Professional machine in traditional ‘workgroups’ mode and everything with the WD TV Live has been smooth-sailing.

The Verdict

Good.

Easy to set up; reliable; intuitive user interface; excellent playback quality. High WAF*. This is a media streamer which fills a fundamental hole in the digital lounge room.

Or, in this case, Dr Ron’s Digital Bedroom.

* Wife Acceptability Factor

Digital Living Network Alliance · digital lounge room · DLNA · HomeGroup · media streamer · Tech Talk Radio · video streamer · video streaming · WD TV Live · Western Digital