You'll get 16:9 eyes, you know

Recently I decided to build a 'media PC' for myself. This means a PC that you plug into your TV, and use as a PVR, a DVD player, and to watch video files or listen to music. Or do anything else you can set it up to do.

You can use a few different bits of software to run a media PC, but I chose Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE), mainly because MS provide free TV listings, and MCE supports dual tuners, too.

So, if you want to know how to put a media PC together, and what to look out for, then I have written up what I did for your viewing pleasure.

I even took some photos.

So, to start with, I'm assuming you're going to use XP MCE as the software, but a lot of this article is relevant even if you don't.

Windows XP Media Center Edition

Here are the Headlines

The rest of this page goes into details, but here's a headline list of things you should think about/be aware of when building a media PC:

The PC needs to keep cool

Modern PC components (especially powerful CPUs and graphics cards) can run hot. This means one thing: they must be cooled, which means fan noise (unless you're insane).

So a media PC with the latest and greatest CPU and graphics card will be louder than a more sedate PC. Loud fan noise can be very annoying.

Graphics card

ATI or nVidia? There are a few factors to think about here, but a less obvious one you ought to know about is that currently nVidia do a better job of offloading MPEG decoding work to their graphics hardware (which means the CPU has less work to do, so stays cooler, and so you (usually) get less fan noise - see cooling section above). See also next section on TV output though.

If you're going to use a monitor rather than a TV, you might be able to get away with your motherboard's onboard video hardware. For instance, my motherboard had Intel integrated graphics, and it seemed to run Media Center just fine (but only had VGA output so I couldn't use it for everyday use).

TV Output

You need a graphics card (or motherboard) with TV output - either S-Video or Component is recommended. You may be disappointed if you try to use composite video (single phono/RCA connector) to drive your TV.

Also, many newer ATi cards support connection of the VGA output to a TV that takes RGB input, as they provide the correct sync output to do this - it requires a special cable (VGA to SCART, or whatever), but it does work. On the other hand, nVidia cards don't currently support this, so if you want RGB from an nVidia card, you'll need a TV with either component input or DVI input, which are less common.

S/PDIF Output

If you have an AV amp, or any sort of speaker/entertainment system that accepts digital input, then try to get a motherboard/sound card that can output the sound via an S/PDIF connector. It just makes everything so easy. You connect one cable from the PC to the Amp, configure MCE to use S/PDIF, and that's it. Dolby Digital 5.1 sound is automatically sent to the amp from DVDs, Stereo PCM is sent from TV/music etc. No messing about with 4 or 5 jack plugs which probably give naff sound anyway. All sound is pure digital all the way to your amp. Just make sure you get the connector that matches your amp, because S/PDIF can be either electrical or optical.

DVD drive

It's hard to go wrong with a DVD drive in these days of dual layer DVD+/-R/W burners for £30, but the main thing to watch for is noise. It's no good building a nice little quiet media PC if whenever you sit down to watch a DVD your drive sounds like a 747 taking off. Various websites will tell you about quiet DVD drives.

You need to buy an MPEG2 software decoder

You can't watch DVDs or recorded TV without an MPEG2 decoder, and XP MCE does not come with one. Luckily, various companies sell them at a reasonable price. Personally I use the nVidia decoder as it is by all accounts very reliable (I've certainly never had a single problem), and it also takes full advantage of the PureVideo MPEG decoding hardware on my nVidia graphics card.

Size matters

You're probably trying to build a fairly small PC - so make sure it will all actually fit in the box!

Will the CPU fit in the case without blocking off anything else or being blocked itself? Will the fan/heatsink fit in the case? How much cabling will you have? Is there room for the cables to fit, and the drives, and still have sufficient airflow in the case to allow the PC to avoid overheating? Give this at least some thought before you run off buying all the biggest/coolest/hottest components you can find.

So, er, anyway...how did I get on?

The First Mistake

So, I thought I'd try out MCE, as MS have started selling the OS as an OEM package. What this means is that you can buy the MCE OS for about £80 from a computer retailer, as long as you buy one or more other 'bits' of a PC at the same time, e.g. a new hard drive, etc.

Before this, you could only buy a PC with MCE installed from an official MCE reseller such as HP. They would build the PC and set up MCE, and sell you it as a complete package.

These PCs sold reasonably well, but part of the success of the PC is due to the open nature of the platform, which is why I guess Microsoft decided to start selling the OS as an OEM version.

I had an old PC, which I thought I'd try out MCE on - it was an 800MHz Pentium III with a GeForce 2 MX graphics card. I figured this would be enough to get it running, as any TV recording I would do would be via DVB-T cards, which just dump the pre-encoded MPEG stream to disk, so the CPU requirements would be fairly minimal. The PC was also more than capable of playing DVDs, too.

So I bought XP MCE and the MCE remote control for £100, and tried to install it on my old PC.

Well, that didn't work

It installed ok, but when running the Media Center (which is a separate full-screen application that runs on top of XP), I was told that my graphics hardware or drivers were not compatible. From looking around on the internet, it seemed that MCE requires more than 32Mb of video RAM to run, and will just abort if your system isn't up to it. My GeForce card had 32Mb of RAM, so I was out of luck.

From searching on the internet, I found a way to circumvent the check for >32Mb, so it would accept a video card that had 32Mb. It was a bit of a hack, but it got the Media Center app to run. However, when I tried to watch videos or a DVD it would just crash with a black screen.

Even if the hardware didn't work, you'd think they'd manage to make MCE not just crash the whole OS/GUI, but that's probably outside the remit of this article.

So I searched a bit more, and found out about 'approved' graphics cards for MCE. This is when I learned the most important thing there is to learn about MCE.

How to survive XP MCE

Rule #1 - just use approved or compatible hardware.

That was the closest I've ever come to using the tag. Seriously.

If you don't have the right graphics card, go and get one.

The amount of grief you'll have using untested hardware configurations is probably really not worth it. Especially as one of the main features that you want in a PVR is reliability. You don't want your graphics drivers to periodically cause random BSODs when the PC is, for instance, recording the Season Finale of 'Lost'.

Microsoft keep a list of graphics cards/chipsets that meet the requirements of XP MCE - however, they keep it reasonably well hidden - have a look at it here. (Once again, I couldn't find that page by navigating Microsoft's site; I had to use Google to find it - good job, Microsoft!)

Realistically, your choices for graphics cards are ATi and nVidia. The Microsoft list is slightly out of date, so you can check the approved cards on for both ATi and nVidia on their websites.

If you want to use MCE as a PVR (and you very probably do), then this rule goes double for TV decoder/tuner cards. For the love of God, check that the TV card you buy is supported by MCE, and is generally reliable. This hardware/software is going to be running 24/7, so you don't want flaky drivers or codecs.

For reliability, just check out other people's experiences on relevant web forums. In particular, if you're going for dual tuner support (so you can record two programmes at once, or record one programme while watching another), then check that the dual configuration for your hardware is supported by MCE (again, forums are best for this).

Sadly for me, if I wanted to use an approved graphics card, they were all AGPx4 or PCI-Express, and my motherboard only supported AGPx2. So I would need a new motherboard. Which means a new CPU. And new RAM. So I decided I'd just build a new PC.

Living with a Media PC

So, you probably want to put this PC in your living room, so you probably want it to be unobtrusive. This means it needs to be small and quiet.

Smaller than a rat

In terms of being small, you can get 'microATX' motherboards (also known as mATX) - these are a maximum of 24cm by 24cm in size, so you can fit them in quite a small case. More microATX cases are coming on to the market these days - basically, you can go for a cube-ish shaped one, or a flat one, shaped rather like a VCR or hi-fi component.

Finding a small PC case is a voyage of discovery all of its own, so I won't bore you with the details except that I eventually decided to get an Antec Aria case:

There's a helpful review of this case at silentpcreview.com.

You might also want to look at the Antec Overture case.

Cases like these let you choose which motherboard to put in the case - you can also get 'barebones' PCs that include the motherboard (and sometimes other components). Because the configuration is known, this allows manufacturers to make the cases tailored to the motherboards (which are themselves often custom built). The most well-known exponent of this style of small PC is Shuttle. Most of their PCs are smaller than the Antec Aria case, for example:

...and some have nice things like front panel displays built in:

However, be prepared to pay for them. Personally, I was able to justify spending about £500 on a media PC. Getting a Shuttle SFF PC and spending £800 or more on it seemed to be pushing it.

Another advantage of systems like this is that they know where the cables will go, so they can do customised cable management. For example, the IDE/power cables on Shuttle PCs are sometimes only a couple of inches long:

Then again, SFF PCs such as this are often more limited in terms of being upgraded, so some upgrades are difficult (and usually replacing the motherboard is out of the question). As ever, it comes down to a compromise in the end.

Cooling is the new hotness

As I mentioned earlier, you should pay attention to keeping the PC components cool. There are two main reasons for this:

1. If the combination of the case and components cannot be kept cool, your components will overheat and fail. This can be expensive - or just irritating if it causes unreliability but not outright failure.
2. Keeping things cool usually means fans, which usually means noise, which is usually annoying when you're trying to watch TV.

As a general rule, the bigger the fan, the quieter it is. This is a slightly counter-intuitive result, but it just comes down to the fact that a bigger fan doesn't have to turn as fast as a smaller fan to move the same amount of air.

The fans you usually have to worry about (in terms of noise) are CPU fans, and the fans on graphics cards. The CPU fans are often small (50mm) compared to larger case fans (up to 120mm), and often change speed depending on the load on the CPU (and hence how much heat it is generating). So when they're turning at higher speeds, as they are small, they can make a lot of noise.

That CPU - who does he compute he is?

As it happens, the CPU fan in my Media PC (an LGA775 Celeron) is really pretty quiet - whereas the CPU fan in my desktop (an S478 Pentium 4) is annoyingly loud.

If your CPU fan is loud, there are all sorts of 'aftermarket cooling solutions' as they are known. What this means is that you can buy replacement heatsinks and fans to fit to most x86 CPUs, which are in some way or another more efficient than the standard heatsinks the CPU manufacturers provide/sell.

There are usually two reasons for getting one of these cooling systems:

1. Your CPU is overheating with the normal fan (e.g. your case cooling system is poor, or the case is too small, or you have too many components generating too much heat, or you are overclocking the CPU, etc.) so you want to cool the CPU more efficiently.
2. Your CPU temperature is ok, but you want more efficient cooling, so you can reduce (or in some cases eliminate) fan noise altogether.

For instance, you can buy pretty heatsinks like this:

An optional extra with this is to mount a large fan (120mm ideally) above it, so it will dissipate the heat, but using a fan that rotates slower and hence generates less noise (because it's bigger - see above). This Zalman heatsink comes with a handy bracket for mounting such a fan.

Or you can get 3rd party heatsinks with integrated fans like this:

In all cases, be sure to check the cooling system dimensions, and any space required around it that must be free of components on the motherboard. For example, that heatsink/fan above might look nice and pretty, but bear in mind that the fan in that picture is 120mm in diameter!

Also, some of these heatsinks are so heavy (especially the 100% Copper ones, rather than the Copper/Aluminium mix ones) that you can't actually move your PC with them attached, as it will damage the CPU or socket/motherboard. All of this is worth bearing in mind.

Me, I'd say keep it as vanilla as possible. In my media PC, I have the standard heatsink/fan combo that Intel provide with the LGA775 Celeron, and it is quiet and works fine. (On the other hand, I am considering a Zalman heatsink for my desktop PC, as the CPU fan can get so noisy).

Graphics Card Fans

The main problem with fans on graphics cards is that the designers all seem to have gone to the same engineering school - the one where the lecturers left out the part that said don't put slats around the fan otherwise you'll turn it into an air-raid siren.

Graphics card manufacturers are getting wise to the fact that people don't really like noisy graphics cards, so you'll see lots of strange and interesting designs, involving heatsinks on both sides of the PCBs, or in some cases bizarre heatpipe arrangements. If you don't need the latest top of the range graphics card though (which you don't, unless you're playing Half-Life 2 on your Media PC, or similar), then you can go for a reasonably powerful modern card (i.e. actually 'low end') and just get one with a heatsink. I got one of the cheapest nVidia PCI Express cards around, based on the GeForce 6200 chipset:

As you can see, I went down the fanless heatsink graphic card route. I can recommend it. The card does dual output, and has VGA and DVI connectors on board, with S-Video, Composite and Component output connections(!) via a short breakout lead. It's also very quiet :-).

NB This card only has 32Mb of VRAM, and uses your system RAM to bump it up to 128Mb as necessary, using the magic of PCI Express and the associated fast memory bus - an arrangement which nVidia call Turbo Cache (ATi have a similar scheme on their low-end cards called HyperMemory). This probably means that if you're building a Media PC with one of these cards, you should probably install more than 512Mb of system RAM. I have 1Gb of system RAM in my Media PC, and it seems to work fine.

Motherboards

Choosing a motherboard for me was both complex and easy. Complex, because there are so many motherboards out there, but easy because I wanted:

• Micro ATX
• FireWire
• S/PDIF audio output

Those 3 requirements narrowed my choice down to 4 motherboards - 2 of which were Intel. In the end I went for an Intel 'media' board, the D945GTPLR. This can take both Celeron and Pentium 4 CPUs (in an LGA775 socket), has a 7.1 audio chipset with optical S/PDIF out, onboard video (which seems more than capable of running XP MCE), 10/100 LAN, 3 Firewire ports, and more USB2 ports than you know what to do with (eight, I believe).

No Gigabit LAN onboard, but you can't have everything, it would seem.

The S/PDIF is very nice though - just connect the S/PDIF to your amp/decoder, and that's it. Assuming your amp/decoder is smart and can auto-detect 5.1/DTS/PCM Stereo etc. Also, make sure you get the right kind of digital output for your amp - mine can take either kind, but you might find your amp accepts optical (TOS) connectors only, like this:

This is a fibre-optic cable, so of course be careful with your minimum bend radius, as ever.

Alternatively, you might have a co-ax (electrical) cable for digital audio, like this:

As I said, I was lucky enough to have a choice (my amp has 3 optical inputs and 1 electrical), but some amps only do one or the other, so check first, unless you want to end up buying a Co-ax to TOS converter box for $40 or whatever.

Miscellaneous Hardware Stuff

Hard Drives - SATA or ATA/IDE?

You're probably not going to see a huge amount of benefit from using SATA drives in your Media PC instead of ATA drives, except for a couple of advantages that I totally missed until it was too late:

1. SATA data cables are much thinner and easier to route in your case.
2. If your motherboard only has one IDE controller (mine does), your hard drive will not have to share the IDE controller with the DVD (optical) drive (which can slow the hard drive down, depending on your hardware configuration/capabilities).

Just thought I'd point it out.

Hardware has Version Numbers too

Be careful when buying components - I managed to look at a whole stack of motherboards, and saw that they all used DDR RAM, so I ordered a couple of sticks of DDR RAM, as I knew I'd need it. Then I ordered my nice Intel motherboard. Of course, the motherboard took DDR2 RAM - there's a version 2! Luckily it's the same physical size as DDR RAM - but the connector is different. Watch out for that. Fortunately I knew someone who wanted to buy some DDR RAM, so in the end my mistake only cost me a tenner.

Perhaps more importantly, you should know that not only is there an 'ATX12' PSU standard now (an ATX supply with a 12v rail for the ever hungrier CPUs on the market today), but there is an 'ATX12v2' standard too! This standard includes a second 12v power rail for PCI Express cards (i.e. for monster high-end graphics cards that need to draw 75W - some even have an extra power connector that plugs straight onto the card!).

When my Intel motherboard arrived and I plugged in the PSU connector, I was confused, as it didn't look like the keyed connector would fit. It did fit straight on...but then I realised it was two pins too short - this was when I first became aware of the fact that there was a 'Version 2' of the ATX12 PSU standard. Grrr! In fact, my motherboard supports Version 2.1!

At this point, I was super annoyed, because the PSU was a custom fit for the Antec Aria case, and if I couldn't use the PSU, I couldn't use the case. Damn and blast them all!

Anyway, much googling revealed that I might not need a v2 PSU after all - the main difference seemed to be the extra 12v rail for power hungry PCI-Express devices - it was at this point that I was grateful I had chosen a low end graphics card. It seemed to make sense that if you didn't have the requirement of the 2nd 12v line to drive your PCI-Express graphics card, then you might be able to get away with it - especially as the ATX12 connector was keyed, but still fit onto the ATX12v2 connector on my motherboard - if they were incompatible, surely they would have changed the keying so you couldn't even plug it in? Well...probably...hmm.

So I fired off two emails - one to Intel to get the lowdown on their motherboard/CPU's PSU requirements, and another to Leadtek to ask them what the power consumption of the graphics card was.

The response I expected was exactly the opposite of what I got. Some muppet at Leadtek replied saying they recommend a 450W PSU - thus neatly avoiding the question I actually asked, of course.

But with Intel, after a day or two of silence, I assumed they were ignoring me. However, then I got an extremely helpful reply, summarising what the situation was, and saying, yes I could just use the ATX12 PSU if my PCI-Express card did not draw too much power, and I wouldn't blow up my PC if I turned it on - that was the news I wanted to hear!

So I will say: pay close attention to what you buy - especially any innocuous looking version numbers you might find in the specs. As it turned out, I got off lightly, but it could have been an expensive mistake.

I will also just say here: Intel's email support is great. They actually answer you in the end, and they seem to have people who know what they're talking about, or who are able to talk to engineers that do. I emailed them back with some feedback about the drivers on the CD that came with the motherboard, and they thanked me for the info and said they would try to put it in a revised product note on their website, and asked if there was anything else they could help me with. Top marks to Intel email support.

(By contrast, Intel phone support were useless and couldn't wait to get me off the phone at the earliest excuse - but try their email support - it's really good.)

Putting It All Together

Not much to say here, except I was super lucky that everything actually fit into the Antec Aria case.

While I was still waiting for the motherboard to arrive (which took ages, as it was newly released), I first became concerned about the size of the Intel heatsink/fan, and whether it would actually fit under the PSU in the case. Various worried googling revealed that it would probably fit...just. Maybe.

I was not wrong:

Top tip for Aria case: just remove the PSU before you start - trust me, it will make it so much less hard to get the motherboard in. Notice that I didn't say easy. You can take the PSU right off - just remember the connector details for the 3-pin mains socket on the back - if you disconnect these pins (fairly easy - they're just standard blade/socket connectors) then you can just take the PSU right out. It is up to you to make sure you connect the PSU up again correctly! If you fry yourself, it's your own damn fault - don't blame me.

It looks a bit dodgy with the CPU fan being that close to the PSU, but the vast majority of the CPU fan is unobstructed by the PSU, and so far I have had no problems with CPU temperature:

It might look like there's lots of room in there, but once I put the drive bay in, it gets a bit cramped, and routing some of the cables (USB and Firewire to front panel, as well as the USB card reader) got a bit fraught until I worked out a neat way of arranging the cables:

By the way, that black curved thing nearest the camera is the extra cyclone blower that comes with the Aria case. It sits in an expansion slot and sucks air in and blows it out the back of the PC. Even though my PC didn't seem that hot, I installed it anyway, as I would be having two PCI cards (TV tuners) and one PCI-Express card all sat right next to each other. Fortunately the TV tuner cards don't need much power, so they're not a major source of heat. Even the graphics card is only fairly warm to the touch, rather than too hot to keep your fingers on. Chalk up another point for not buying the most powerful graphics card available.

It's a bit of a tight fit getting the drive bay in, but I found round IDE cables helped enormously here - and I found I really needed a long one (75cm) due to the way the drive bay swings in/out, and the arrangement of master/slave connectors on an Ultra-ATA cable. It's a slight hassle, but I much prefer it to having a short cable I have to disconnect every time I want to open up the PC. With the long round cable, for instance, I can easily do this:

You may notice that I used a simple Y-connector for the molex power supply connectors for the hard drive and DVD drive - this gave me the extra length required to be able to lift the drive bay out without having to unplug the molex power connectors. If you've ever had to unplug one of those bastards, you'll know why this feature was top of my list. If I ever meet the guy who invented those connectors, one of us will die.

So anyway, with all that, it's a tight fit when the drive bay is installed. I was a bit worried about airflow problems due to the cabling, but it seems to be fine, and the Intel motherboard has two temperature probes which both say the temperature inside the case is fine.

So, it's all jammed together now, so I plug it in, hold my breath, turn it on, and bung in the XP MCE install CD...and look! Windows is installing on my TV!

So, once I'd installed MCE and played with it a bit, I decided to go for dual TV Tuners, just to go mad, so I ordered a second Black Gold DVB PCI card.

NB If you want dual tuners, you need to get the same hardware for both tuners, otherwise MCE will have problems. I believe it's possible to use two different DVB-T tuners if they both receive exactly the same services/channels, but I wouldn't risk it myself. Keep your life simple - you know it makes sense.

So, I had one TV tuner, and I had one spare PCI slot burning a hole in my pocket:

Inserting the second tuner card was pretty simple - I was a bit concerned that the back of the tuner card would be jammed right up against the graphics card heatsink, but due to the fact that the PCI card sits centrally in the socket (duh) it turned out to be fine:

Just to make life exciting, of course, the audio header connector for the motherboard is under one of the PCI slots, and the PAL tuner housing of one of the tuner cards snagged the cables. However, in a repeat showing in the 'I'm so lucky it all fits in' category, I found that if I carefully bent the wires coming out of the header, the tuner card would fit over the header and everything still worked great:

So after all that, it's done, and it must be time for a nice cup of tea. Or at least some form of pleasing beverage.

Miscellaneous Software Stuff

MPEG2 - Hello John, got a new codec?

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a newly installed MCE Media PC must be in want of an MPEG2 codec."

Although XP MCE is designed to play DVDs, and recorded TV shows, both of which are in MPEG2 format, it doesn't actually come with an MPEG2 codec. Read that again in case you missed it. I'll wait.

The idea is that the (in our case mythical) OEM will choose an MPEG2 codec for you and install it on the PC when they set it up. There are a number of MPEG2 codecs you can buy - WinDVD, PowerDVD and nVidia offer MCE approved MPEG2 codecs, amongst others.

There's that word again - approved. Make sure before you buy a codec that it is designed to work with XP MCE. You can download a program from Microsoft's website to check what MPEG2 decoders you have installed, which are MCE compatible, and which is the 'preferred' codec that MCE will use. If you have problems with MPEG2 playback (DVDs or recorded TV shows), then this is the first port of call. I won't even bother to link to the download page, as MS will have moved it by tomorrow - just google for Microsoft and DecCheck and MPEG, and you should find it.

It basically tells you about your system config, regarding MPEG2 codecs - for instance, here's what my desktop PC reports:

The 'MCE Compatible' and 'Preferred Decoder' are the important columns.

E4 - Huge Disabled Channels In Your Dinky Little Registry

If you live in the UK, and are using Freeview DVB-T, then you might find that E4 mysteriously doesn't show up in your channel list, even though you know you can receive it. This is because E4 used to be non-free, so MCE blacklists it from showing up in the channels/services - because MCE currently has no way of using CAM slots/cards, etc., to receive and decode non-free (encrypted) channels. (Yes, that means no Top-Up TV for you with MCE, I'm afraid.)

However, this is out of date because as you probably know, E4 is now free for all to watch on Freeview in the UK. To enable E4 requires a bit of jiggery-pokery, and is explained here on the Microsoft website. Enjoy.

So...how well does XP MCE work then?

Well, that's a subject for another (hopefully much shorter) article. In summary: it works mostly ok, but with a couple of really annoying bugs :-(

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