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I have built a very serious home media PC based on Microsoft Medica Center Edition 2005 and I am pretty happy with it. The DVR functionality is not as good as that of my Tivo, but I am sure that with a little time, those things will get worked out. Most people using this setup have Tivos or are converting from Tivo, so there are a lot of voices saying the same things. The benefits are having much more flexibility and access to other media with MCE 2005. I have over 250 movies that I have compressed from DVD to Divx format. These take up anywhere from 700MB to 1GB each and look great on the screen. If I want to play a DVD I just pop one in like I would before. Maybe a DVD jukebox interface will be put together allowing MCE users to have access to hundreds of their DVDs rather than one or two at a time. But, that is for later.

One of the coolest features of Windows MCE 2005 is that you can use it to distribute all of your media to any location in your house via wired or wireless ethernet. Nothing is going to beat a wire and if you want the best quality, then you will need to run cables to all of your rooms. But, you can use these MCE Extender boxes to gain access to all of your media with the same MCE interface on screen. This also removes the requirement of you having to have a computer in your living room…as so many people refer to it. Noise levels are back to where they were. Even if you are only using MCE on one television right now, an Extender is a great option if you want to keep everything out of the living room (or whereve you are watching tv) or you want to use the computer for other things while watching television or movies. This is something that people were able to do with pre-release versions of Windows Media Center Edition 2005, but the standard release does not allow for more than one session to run at a time.

So, to sum it up, get yourself an extender box if you are running MCE 2005. You will be happy, your wife will be happy, and you can use your computer when she is watching something you don’t want to.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.