Digitalquill

I have for a long time been running a media centre in various guises, starting with Ubuntu and MythTV on an old laptop which worked nicely for our requirements until we purchased a new Panasonic Viera TV which took a SVGA input.

This opened up many more possibilities for the media centre to be more than a simple recording station, so I wanted to link the media centre to the TV and Surround sound system, and although the laptop and TV were quite capiable of doing this, I faced the well known ATI/Ubuntu graphics driver problems which at best meant blue lines at the top and bottom of the screen and at worst a totally blue screen on the TV while the laptop was quite happy.

Along with this problem the laptop was showing its lack of power when recording the CPU fan would be at fill speed and thus created quite a bit of noise.

I took the decision to invest in a media centre box and found a nice Elonex Spectra on ebay. It is only a Pentium 4, but it has a stylish case with many controls on the front meaning it does not look out of place in the hifi rack. More importantly it was designed for silent running.

As soon as I got the machine I put in another gigabyte of Ram that I had lying around brining it up to 1.5gb and proceeded to install Ubuntu and MythTV which I had running and nicely configured, and with an Intel graphics card it worked well with the TV, however I found that I could nt quite get it quite right, screen resolutions would reset, it would forget my scheduled recordings and it did not like my MP3 archive as it ran to over 500gb of music and it never seemed to cope.

I started looking into the new version of Windows Media Centre on Microsoft Vista Ultimate and it seems that since I ad last looked at it and discounted it, it had become a contender. I took an evening and got it installed on my original media centre laptop and had a play and was impressed with what I saw. So I bit the bullet and installed it on the media centre.

The benefits this brought were immediate, although trivial; I could now get the front LCD panel working on the media centre and more importantly the surround sound system on the computer working with my hifi system. Along with this we could get office installed and use the system as a computer in the living room.
Te over riding benefit was that I could install the software from our HD Digital Video Camera and record direct onto the hard drive and then downscale to DVD (Eventually I intend to install a Bluray recorder).
Since then I have not looked back, it links to my NAS drive and runs my music and pictures, works as an internet PC, allows us to use the BBC iplayer and of course records TV. I have three TV tuners installed so my only problem now is disk space and as the system is running a Sata hard drive which means that I can easily upgrade to a 1tb disk for around £60

The main feature that I miss from the Ubuntu/MythTV model is the ease of the internet controls, although I have installed a plug-in to control the Windows Media Centre via the net, this was never worked correctly. The one with MythTV was perfect in this regard so much so that I was able to control this via my mobile phone.

On balance I do not think that there is much between the two, however the age old problem of open source software holds up both Ubuntu and MythTV in that they are just somehow not quite there, they are not as slick and are a bit rough round the edges. I have to say that they are getting close and given a few more iterations of development I am sure that I will be able to consider them again in the future.