Ok so I got my hands on a ATi eHome Wonder based on the Theatre 200 chipset. Niceish card nothing too fancy. I also got my hands on a MSDN copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and I must admit for a Windows non believer MCE 2005 blew my mind away. It is definetly a good designed product that is hard to beat from the general joe/shmoe perspective. From the geek perspective the normal: can’t record in xvid, can’t do this, can’t do that deal is in order. Now the biggest problem with this thing is the fact that it is beyond picky about the hardware it chooses to run on. For instance the above mentioned tuner card was used as part of a MCE 2004 DVR box without any issues, with MCE 2005 the card is not supported because it uses Software Encoding (the encoding is done by the CPU and not the card) instead of Hardware Encoding (the encoding is done on the card itself thus not hoging down the CPU) also the machine I was using comes with a Radeon 7500 (I am not even going to go into how retarded and useless ATi’s website is when it comes to getting drivers for your card…) which is also not supported by MCE 2005 this time because it has only 32mb of RAM.
So what did I do after spending an entire day and almost half a night trying to get this thing working? I simply reformatted and installed KnoppMyth which installs and sets up MythTV for you automatically. What doesn’t come with MythTV? A convenient way to control your Set-top-Box (STB) without the use of IR Blasters and what not which is a must have if you do not want to have to use 50 remotes in order to be able to do only 2 different things…
I will continue playing with this thing tonight and see if I can make it work as good as MCE 2005 did (well minus the watching TV part).
{ 1 } Comments
really iam posting this on the ingula 8125.
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