Windows Media Centre, a good idea, but …

We borrowed a house for our summer holiday.  The owner loves his gadgets (more than me?) and has two TV’s one in the bedroom and one in the Lounge.  His system comprises:

• Two PC’s running Widows Media Centre Edition.
• Two flat screen monitors.
• Four 500Gb network drives (that’s 2Tb!).
• Some fancy amplifiers.

I love the idea, great plan, have all your media networked, watchable from your main media viewing areas and downloadable to any Pc on your network.  A system that can pause live tv, record multiple channels and can be accessed and used by different rooms without any hassle.

I love the interface of Windows MCE.  It is easy to use, very intuitive, and you can run it from the remote easily.  However, it has some problems:

• The main PC reboots its self without notice during viewing.
• If it reboots while you are watching something on the other PC, you have to restart that one too.
• I think there are some configuration issues.  The tuner in one doesn’t work well, you can’t watch anything but recorded TV or BBC news in the living room.  There is only one tuner in the PC upstairs so you can’t record one channel and watch the other.

Based on my experience here, I have come to some conclusions:

• Windows is unstable, I wouldn’t go back.
• I wouldn’t risk my TV viewing on two PC’s with no alternative traditional system.
• I have a TV/Video combi in our bedroom.  It’s old, small and not very technologically advanced.  It makes a very loud noise when you rewind a tape.  You can only record four hours of TV in a shot, but you can record one channel and watch another.

I have found this LinuxMCE, this video suggests it will do everything well and it’s built on my favourite operating system!  I might have a play, but you’ll never get me to install a Windows option!

London Holiday

More here.