Today I had a guest spot on the Digital Life Style Media Center podcast which is hosted by Ian Dixon and gave out a little plug for my blog here so I’d though I’d update it a little and put some relevant Media Center and Home Theater information on here.
I want to start post on here more often so I am coming up with a series of blog posts about my personal interactions with Media Center (Vista and 7MC), Windows Home Server, and General Home Theater. Today’s post will be about how my family (mostly myself) uses Media Center and how it affects our every day life.
My wife and I basically revolve our entertainment around Media Center. I have 4 displays in my home, three of which run off of Media Center extenders (2 Linksys DMA-2100’s, and an xbox 360 Arcade), the final display, my home theater, has the main PC running Vista Ultimate which is my Media Center PC, and the central location for all thing media related.
My Media Center PC (HTPC for short), has 10 tuner cards in it, a little excessive for most people, however when you want to watch live tv, and record at the same time, additional tuners are always welcome in my house hold. I have a total of 6 ATSC (digital over the air) tuners, and 4 NTSC (analog cable) tuners. The majority of my DVR comes from the ATSC tuners via local broadcast tv, however my wife and I still record the occasional show that isn’t available in HD locally. I also use the NTSC tuners to record Disney and Nick cartoons for my daughter. You always have to have something for the little one to watch, even though her attention span doesn’t usually last long enough for her to finish the show, its always good to have something on hand.
I have two HDTV’s one in my bedroom, and one in my living room/dining room, this is where I have two Linksys DMA-2100’s, one per tv. In my office I have an older CRT tv which I have the 360 arcade connected to. I have all three extenders setup to connect to my HTPC with the tuner cards which is located in the basement and directly connected to my Home Theater. With this setup I am able to stream live TV, or recorded tv to basically any tv in my home. My wife can be in the bedroom watching TLC live, and I can be in the dining room or my office working and streaming a recorded show both at the same time.
Another great thing about Media Center and my setup is I have all of my family photos, videos, and music stored on my WHS box which is also located in my basement, that I use to share to my htpc, and each extender. My wife can pull up her music, which she does on a regular basis and play it in our family room while making dinner or cleaning up around the house. Its also fun to pull up older photo’s of my daughter and see her own reaction to what she looked like when she was a baby.
In all Media Center is the “Central” hub of all things media related in my house hold and we use it on a regular basis. I even started to test out the Beta 1 release of Windows 7 and Media Center (aka 7MC). I have my old HTPC hardware, in which I just added a new HDD and got small cube case and a network based tuner box, and I now have a test HTPC running Windows 7. Over the next several days, weeks, months my goal is to do a post every day or two with updates on windows 7 and media center as well as throw in a few Home Theater and WHS content as well. If you have anything that you want me to talk about or have questions about that I could use at a post about anything I just rambled on about you can hit me up on Twitter or register and post up a comment on the post here.
With that, I will leave it until next time,
- Josh