Digital Home Thoughts: Details Emerge on Shuttle's MCE-01 Set-Top PC

"The Shuttle MCE-01 has an extremely nice form factor as well as quiet but significant power. The unit is powered by the Intel 915M chipset which are usually manufactured for notebooks. The key here is quiet. The unit runs a ATI x300 graphics card, includes a 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound card, a wireless LAN card and even an FM tuner (no word on how these FM broadcasts would interface with MCE, I doubt they will but it would be hot if they did). The design also features a dual internal/external drive combo scenario. The idea here is portability and it is a good one. Personally I think an external USB 2 Maxtor or a laptop on the LAN works just as well for me but I could see where it might be nice to have an all in one unit with easy external portability."



If you're looking to build a Media Center Edition PC and have it integrate with your home theatre system, brother, this is what you should be looking at. And to answer Thomas' question, MCE 2005 has the ability to control radio hardware - there's a whole interface for it. Unfortunately for me, even though my WinTV-PVR-500MCE has built-in radio, I can't get it to work - I can start up the radio, but I get no audio. I might need to crack open my Shuttle XPC and see if I was supposed to connect it internally to a sound header on the motherboard...but hey, check out that new Shuttle! :D