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Windows XP Media Center Edition Review
Harpreet writes "It took 2 months but someone finally published an informative review of the new
Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. AnandTech's
review has got everything you could want, including pictures galore. It looks
like the folks who make the Linux based Video
Disk Recorder have a new standard to live up to." Update: 01/08 21:06 GMT by T : Read on below for a different (Free software, CD-based) approach to computer-A/V integration.
Trunkboy writes "There are a lot of PVR projects out there (Freevo, TiVo, Dave&Dina, etc... but MoviX is a little different. MoviX is an entire distribution (linux of course) that is designed to play avi/mpg/mp3/etc files from a computer. Upgrading is easy, because it boots from a CD! Videos/music can be stored on a local hard drive, or on a network share. This project is incredible, but needs more developers. Stop in and give Roberto a hand -- MoviX shows some great potential!"
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Ever heard of the LiRC project? Myth fully supports all liRC remotes.
"Whenever AMD or Intel release a new CPU, everyone asks the question what we need faster processors for? The most common response for that is "to enable future applications" and a couple of years ago, there was enough processing power in a cheap enough form to finally give the VCR a brain - the idea of a set-top Personal Video Recorder (PVR) was born."
"Although MCE is by far the best first attempt at a PVR we've seen from any company, it isn't without its very noticeable flaws; the most serious of which happens to be this issue of performance. On a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, CPU utilization hovers around 30 - 40% while simply watching TV; note that this is with a hardware MPEG-2 encoder card and a very fast Pentium 4 CPU. We tried performing our own clean MCE install on the setup, updated all of the drivers and walked away with nothing better. There are clearly some issues with MCE as it shouldn't require such a high speed CPU to perform simple MPEG-2 decoding and writing to the disk. The CPU utilization drops to below 20% if MCE is closed and it's just recording in the background, which isn't too bad but still higher than you'd expect for a hardware MPEG-2 encoding engine that isn't relying on the host CPU.
The Tivo uses a 75Mhz PowerPC, which was available many years ago and is a joke of a processor right now. It's also what enables Tivo to not cost $1000. The fact that this windows media center slows down noticable with a 2.xx Ghz P4 is embarassing. Tivo rarely exhibits any slowdown, and it's not only using a alledgely more inferior PowerPC processor, but one from several years ago running at 3% of the speed of this thing.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
This is a limitation of most digital TV (cable or satellite). The STB can only decode one channel at a time, so you can only do something with one live channel.
You can get double LMB dishes, that provide two cables from the dish to the STB. None of the Bell STBs support two inputs, but you can buy another decoder for the second line for ~$99. Then you can record one show on the PVR and watch another on the other STB.
(STB=set-top box)
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
MythTV!
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.