AtomicInternet Archived News

Today I finally got my ELECTRON machine running Windows XP Media Center Edition properly. I found this list of accepted hardware which saved me TONS of time trying to find a tuner/video card combination that would work. XP MCE has very strict hardware requirements since it's designed to work on $2,000 machines. Not having $2,000 to spend I decided to bastardize my existing media machine into one. Unfortunately, the ATI All-In-Wonder series video/capture card I previously had in ELECTRON is not directly supported by XP MCE without a proprietary MPEG encoder by ATI, and even then it's slow (because it's software encoding). I had to E-bay that card to pay for some new, XP MCE approved hardware. The combination I went with is the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150 MCE and the NVIDIA GeForce FX5200. Total hardware cost was $60 for the tuner and $100 for the video card. My recent upgrade of NEUTRON left me with some donor memory and a new processor upgrade as well which I also threw into the mix. After configuring all the hardware and finding the right XP MCE drivers I was still unable to watch Television due to another obscure error. Some more research and I found out I had to purchase the NVIDIA DVD Codec to decode the MPEG stream my tuner was constantly encoding. After this final hurdle came the big payoff. As you can see it's now a very advanced media management device. Although the hardware/software and labor cost was much higher than I expected (still way less than $2,000) it was definately worth it.