Digital Home Thoughts: Building Your Own Media Center PC

Hard Drives: There were three important factors for me when choosing hard drives for my MCE computer. Size, size, and size. Although it would be great to have a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor drive in there, they top out at 73 GB and with only two hard drive bays in the SN95G5, I needed to focus purely on size. Thankfully, most modern hard drives are more than fast enough to dish up compressed video, even two streams at once, so I had some flexibility in my choices. I opted to buy a 300 GB Maxtor drive – it set me back $300 CAN, but I wanted to have gobs of storage. For the second bay, I had a fast 160 GB Maxtor drive that would make an ideal boot and backup/FTP drive. If you're building an MCE that will sit next to your TV, you may want to factor in the acoustics as well – though realistically, even the loudest drive would be hard to hear from ten feet away with other components active. If I were doing this project again today, I probably would have went for a Seagate drive – for the same amount of money I could have gotten a 300 GB drive with NCQ (native command queuing). NCQ may have helped in the instances when the system was performing several tasks at once.

2007 Update: I ended up putting in a single 500 GB hard drive to replace the above drives about a year after putting this machine into use. Doing this again today I might put in a 750 GB drive, or perhaps dual 500 GB drives in a RAID array for redundancy.

Video Card: This is one of the easiest decisions in the process: since I wasn't using the machine for gaming, almost any video card would do. The MCE interface uses DirectX, so if you want snappy and smooth performance, a card supporting a minimum of DirectX 8 is recommended. Because I was connecting a local monitor, I wanted a DVI port – but beyond that, anything would do. I had an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro card from a previous system, and while it was a tight fit in the SN95G5, from a performance standpoint it worked out fine. One thing to be absolutely sure about before buying a video card is the power supply requirements needed to run it. Since most small form factor computers use smaller power supplies, high-powered cards can easily overwhelm the whole computer. The SN95G5 has a meagre 250 watt power supply, meaning I was unable to use anything more powerful than an NVIDIA 6600 series card.

There's serious video problem that I've discovered after using this computer for a few months that made me re-think my choice of video card: Media Center 2005 requires a compatible MPEG2 decoder because Microsoft saw fit to not include one in the OS (which boggles the mind). At the time I was building this machine (early 2005), the only MCE 2005-compatible MPEG2 codec was the NVIDIA DVD decoder. The problem? I've never been able to play back DVDs on the MCE properly – there are constant visual artefacts and distortions. At first I suspected the optical drive was the problem, but after replacing it the artefacts were still there. I did some research and in the NVIDIA DVD decoder FAQ there's an entry stating there are compatibility problems between it and ATI Radeon-based video cards and that ATI was "looking into the problem". I upgraded to the latest ATI drivers, and the problem got much worse – before DVDs were mostly viewable, now the artefacts are so frequent and glaring it makes watching DVDs impossible. There has been no update to the NVIDIA DVD decoder in over nine months, which is extremely frustrating. I think this is a case of both NVIDIA and ATI not wanting to fix the problem with each other's software, and as a customer I'm caught in the middle – not a comfortable place to be. As such, my recommendation is now to use an NVIDIA-based video card if you're planning on using the NVIDIA MPEG2 decoder. I ended up replacing the ATI card with an NVIDIA 6600 card and, wouldn't you know it, the problem went away.

2007 Update: Today the machine is still running that nVidia 6600 card, with the fan un-plugged for silence. If the machine had a PCI Express slot, I'd put in an XFX 7600 GS, which is the most powerful passively-cooled card available today. Sure, DirectX 10 support would be nice, but it's not needed for a Media Center machine. The Media Center codec issue has been largely side-stepped because Vista Premium and Ultimate come with Microsoft's own MPEG2 decoder.

Optical Drive: Depending on what types of scenarios you see yourself in, the optical drive on an MCE can be anything from a lowly CD-R to a mighty dual layer (DL) DVD burner. Prices on optical drives have fallen drastically in the last year, to the point where it's commonplace to see 16X DL DVD burners for under $50 CAN. Because of this, I picked up a black LiteOn 16X DL multi-format DVD burner. Capable of burning either –R or +R media at 16x, and CD-R media at 52x, it's a very capable drive. If you end up using your MCE connected to a TV set and want to have it be as quiet as possible, you can use something like Nero DriveSpeed to slow the rotational speed of the drive and make it quieter.


Figure 6: The Hauppauge MCE500 dual TV tuner.

TV Tuner: The one piece of equipment that separates an MCE unit from a regular computer is the TV tuner. TV tuners are generally PCI cards with dedicated MPEG2 chips that offload the encoding/decoding from the CPU. With the current generation technology, HDTV isn't a viable option. There's no over-the-air HDTV in Canada, and there's no way for MCE 2005 to interact with my Motorola HDTV box from the cable company (I haven't tried that bizarre Firewire hack mind you), so I was stuck with analog. It wasn't much of a concern for me, largely because most of the TV shows I watched weren't yet in HDTV. Having the right brand and model of TV tuner is vital for having a properly functioning MCE 2005 computer. The list of compatible devices isn't very long – one of the reasons Microsoft hasn't released the OS at retail is that the only way Microsoft can offer a positive experience is by tightly controlling the hardware and software used. In this light, I picked a card that I knew would be compatible, the Hauppauge MCE500. Hauppauge cards have been used since the first MCE computers started shipping, and the MCE500 was the first dual-tuner model so I jumped at the chance to get it.

Overall, the card has performed magnificently. The MCE OS detected both tuners, and using them has been seamless – if you set it up to record two shows on at the same time, then try to change the channel manually, it will warn you that both tuners are in use and give you the option of which show to stop recording. Performance wise, the dedicated encoder/decoding on the card minimizes the impact of recording and viewing the massive MPEG2 files that are generated. A friend was playing Guild Wars on the computer, and when he finished and exited from the program we noticed that the machine was recording a TV show. He saw no sluggish performance from the machine, and indeed my tests have shown that when a TV show is recording the CPU time used is a mere 3-5%.

The only thing that hasn't worked for me with the MCE500 is the radio – it has an on-board radio, and MCE 2005 has an interface to control the radio, but I haven't been able to get it to work at all. It's not a big concern for me because I haven't needed to listen to the radio, but it's worth noting anyway.

2007 Update: There have been some interesting developments with external HD digital cable tuners, but it's a little too early to know exactly how all the pieces are going to fit together.