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NativeTongue
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| Joined: | Tuesday June 8th, 2004 |
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Posted: Friday March 11th, 2005 11:03 |
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| anyone got any experience of this. how much did it cost you, how hard did you find it.
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stone monkey
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Posted: Friday March 11th, 2005 11:19 |
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| Yes I have built a few, it can be pretty simple even for a beginner, as to how much it costs, well that all depends on the spec your looking to have.
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NativeTongue
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Posted: Friday March 11th, 2005 11:42 |
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ok i should have made this clear i want to build a media centre not a PC.
so something that will replace a Tivo, dvd player, and hifi.
will look smart, and be able to go under the TV , look smart, so probably a horizontal rather than vertical (tower) box.
im thinking of about 120 GB, dvd rw , tv tuner card, broadband connection.
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Nick
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| Joined: | Monday January 12th, 2004 |
| Location: | Surrey, United Kingdom |
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Posted: Friday March 11th, 2005 12:30 |
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I have built something similar. I have a dedicated pc with a Digital TV card in it, so I get all the freeview channels. This pc runs 24/7 so that I can access it from across the internet and schedule programs to be recorded where ever I am. I use the nebula-electronics digitv card. But recently a very good open source program called webscheduler has come out that looks a lot better. Unfortuatly it is not compatible with my card yet. Either option will still give you great functionality.
Depending on wether you will have a keyboard and mouse you might or might not want to get media center software. The idea behind this is that you can control every aspect of the media center by remote and all the menus etc are in big text. These softwares also normally give you live TV pausing/time shifting and various other features.
For storage, you can never have enough with video. Raw mpeg2 will cost you about 1gig per 30 minutes. Although you should be able to compress it down to about 300mb with divx/xvid.
The processor you want no less than 1ghz. If you are planning on doing a lot of compressing of video you want a serious hefty processor. But if you are planning on having it on 24/7 take into account the power consumption + electric bills. 512mb memory is a minimum as well.
You want to get a nice TV out card and also a nice multi channel surround sound card.
A DVD writer is very handy to archive material and will also double as a DVD player. Don't skmip on the speakers, they will add a lot to the overall quality of the system.
Let me know if you have any questions.
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stone monkey
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Posted: Friday March 11th, 2005 13:59 |
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NativeTongue wrote: ok i should have made this clear i want to build a media centre not a PC.
so something that will replace a Tivo, dvd player, and hifi.
will look smart, and be able to go under the TV , look smart, so probably a horizontal rather than vertical (tower) box.
im thinking of about 120 GB, dvd rw , tv tuner card, broadband connection.
A media centre is a PC and yes I have built a few... the best thing to do is by A bare bones PC, SFF (Small form factor) Some come with TV cards etc and don't need to boot play cd's etc. Other than the fact you may want to use Windows Media Centre as your OS, its no diffrent from building any other PC.
... The only thing with small stylish cases, is the problem with keeping them cool, hence they can be more noisy than you would like!
Last edited on Friday March 11th, 2005 14:06 by stone monkey
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NativeTongue
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| Joined: | Tuesday June 8th, 2004 |
| Location: | London, United Kingdom |
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Posted: Friday March 11th, 2005 14:32 |
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| thanks stone monkey and nick great advice. cheers.
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