• The form factor is great. It’s very small and utterly silent.
• Linksys include a set of each cables (aside from HDMI) which is nice.
• The included remote feels much cheaper than those included with V1 extenders.
• Setup was super-easy and the non-extender setup pages are well implemented.
• Startup times are abysmal. It takes around 60 seconds over Ethernet and longer via Wireless-N. Powering down also takes a surprisingly long time.
• Video quality is excellent for both SDTV/HDTV, as well as XviD.
• The menu and selection transitions are painful to watch. Turning them off gives a much better experience.
• On an HDTV, areas such as the menu backgrounds and fonts are of a noticeably lower quality than within Media Center itself, or when using the Xbox 360 as an extender. These differences are largely unnoticeable on SDTV.
• There is no 4th Zoom option for watching a 4/3 video on a widescreen TV.
• All of the Media Center backgrounds, menus, and text appear embedded in the firmware. Due to this I feel it’s unlikely V2 extenders will be supported on the next major release of Media Center (and since the hardware already appears underpowered, this may not be a bad thing).

Overall I would say I’m neither impressed nor disappointed with the new extenders.  The experience is generally very good (once you turn off the transition animations) but at $250+ they feel overpriced and the startup time is disappointing.

If you’re looking for an extender for the living room, particularly for an HDTV,  then I’d suggest considering an XBox 360 (particularly the quieter model, or if you have a cabinet to muffle the fan sound). For a second extender in the bedroom then the Linksys V2 extenders are a good choice.

Footnote: I believe that the forthcoming extenders from companies such as D-Link are all based upon the same internal hardware, so the experiences are unlikely to differ much.

(One of the nice things about Windows Home Server is that you can do things like this, safe in the knowledge your old install is only a few clicks away .

Unfortunately my experiences so far have been largely negative.

The first problem was more of an inconvenience. When upgrading from MCE2005 some Media Center settings are preserved but others, such as the TV setup, are not. This is a little frustrating as it couldn’t have been that hard to implement, and it takes a good 40 minutes edit the channel list to reflect which of your providers ~700 channels you both subscribe to and want to watch. The method of making this selection has not improved since MCE2005 either and is still slow and cumbersome.

In terms of hardware I only came across one problem; the Microsoft IR receiver/blaster that controls our cable boxes would only emit a signal from one bud. After a couple of reboots I ended up uninstalling it via device manager and restarting, whereupon it was recognized as a new device and began working correctly.

The other problems I’m seeing are all performance based.

Under Vista, the Media Center UI frequently becomes laggy and often hangs/pauses for a few seconds. For example if I press Guide on the remote while watching TV there’s a delay of ~5 seconds before it appears. Other areas of the UI can become equally unresponsive at times, which leads to multiple button presses and general frustration.

Another problem is that VMCE’s handling of video thumbnails seems to be very poorly implemented. Our videos are stored on our Windows Home Server, with shortcuts placed in the "Videos" folder on the Media Center, and browsing these folders from within MCE results in the UI hanging for considerable amounts of time.

For example when I opened the folder containing Heroes Season 1, the UI hung for around five minutes while thumbnails were generated for all of the files. This problem never occurred in MCE, nor does it while using Explorer in Vista, so it’s definitely something within the Media Center UI. As far as I can tell the UI spawns a copy of Media Player in the background to generate the thumbnails, but does so in a very unfriendly way. The episodes themselves stream fine (although there’s still no way to fast-forward xvid files) so it’s not a bandwidth issue.

Speaking of thumbnails, I have very mixed feelings over the "Wall of thumbnails" that Vista Media Center uses for the UI in the Music/Video sections. While it looks fantastic it sacrifices usability to do so. The only way to see the title of a video/album is to select it, so although the UI fits more items on each "page" than MCE2005 it can take longer to find the file you’re after. There’s an alternative "List" view which shows the content as a list of names, but you then loose the thumbnail image and looks boring (strangely the ‘list’ option in Recorded TV includes a mini thumbnail, but not so in Music/Videos).

On the flip-side the new UI looks fantastic and is generally better organized than MCE2005, which now looks very dated.

I’d really like to like VMCE but at the moment the experience is far below my MCE2005 install. I’m going to push on with it for a while longer and see what I can do to improve the performance issues, but so far I’m rather underwhelmed

I figured all I’d need to do is find the URL for their Wii/PS3 friendly flashplayer and set it up in Media Center. Since all three are designed to be used with a TV my theory was the player should work equally well on any of them.

20 minutes later, after much spoofing of both PS3 and Wii browser agents, I’d drawn a blank. No matter what I tried I always ended up with the regular, and somewhat un-TV friendly, web player that PC users get.

So I fired up my Wii, downloaded the latest Internet Channel and visited the Virgin website. Whereupon I realized the problem.

There is no Wii/PS3 specific player. Virgin’s regular player just happens to support the Wii and PS3. Bah!

So, how hard could it be to knock up a quick add-in for Media Center that supports Virgin Radio?

About eight hours hard.

Starting with a regular HTML page I created the four channel buttons and wrote the JavaScript/CSS needed for navigation via remote control. Then I added the code to play the audio streams via Media Center and to generally make the page exist nicely in the Media Center shell.

Yay, I had my working proof of concept! Since it was going so well I decided to get ambitious and embed the AJAX stream Virgin use to display images and song info in their regular web player. This was a bit tricky but thanks to Virgin’s excellent player most of the hard work was already done, my part was reduced mostly to trial and error.

After that it was just a case of messing around till I had a look I was happy with, and that seemed compact enough to fit on TV’s of different sizes.

I’ve been using my new player for about a day now and already I’m smitten. I have a lot of fond memories of listening to Virgin from when I lived in the UK and it’s great to be able to listen to the station from 5000 miles away on a TV.

Oh James just came on. Fucking A!

You can download the setup program here. It also includes options to setup XM Radio/Live-365 in Media Center, something I did a while ago to make that process a little easier.

I’d be really interested in knowing if this works using the XBox 360 as an extender. As it works on my Linksys extender I’d imagine it does…

The list of radio stations will grow over time as I add more of the stations I listen to. The current list of supported stations are:

• Virgin Radio UK
• XM Online
• Live 365

XM Radio and Live 365 are supported courtesy of the MCL file these companies provide for Media Center. The installer simply creates the appropriate link in the “Radio” section to avoid the need to traverse through Online Spotlight or manually edit files.

Virgin Radio support is via a custom HTML page designed for access using a TV and remote control. Audio is played natively through Media Center, the artist photos and information are pulled via AJAX from the feed used to power the “Listen Now” page on the Virgin Radio website.

Known issues:

• On first listening you may be prompted by Media Player to confirm streaming from the Virgin Radio site. If Media Center is running full-screen they may be hidden
• The Virgin Radio interface has been designed for access via a Remote control – literally. There is no support for navigating the interface via mouse, though the arrow keys on the keyboard may be used.

Coming soon:

• More stations

Fortunately it was the disk containing the OS and not the larger disk that holds all of our media. And while it did take 6-7 hours to reinstall and set everything up again, it would have been far more painful had it been my main PC or my girlfriend’s laptop. With those machines there’s also a pretty good chance we’d have lost something more important than just our TV recording schedule.

Before now my backup strategy was to keep mirrored copies of important files on seperate computers via FolderShare. This prevented us from losing our documents, photos or music, but it didn’t guard against disk failure or an accidental overwrite. I thought it best to take the Media Center failure as a warning shot from fate and move to a better backup strategy.

Enter Windows Home Server.

I received an invite to the Windows Home Server beta a few weeks ago so now seemed like the perfect time to try it out. My aim was to build a WHS machine that would run nightly backups of our three machines, and act as a centralized storage location for all of our media and some large datasets that I use for work.

Over the next week or so I’m going to write about actually setting up and configuring the machine, using it to backup our PCs (including my girlfriends Mac), and integrating the shared media with our Media Center PC.

However this first post is about choosing the best hardware configuration for Windows Home Server, something I spent considerable time researching.

The budget I set my girlfriend set was $600 all-in, which allowing for tax and shipping left $525 for actual components. This is more than I expect many prebuilt machines will retail for when Windows Home Server is released, but I was aiming for a spec quite a bit higher than the entry-level requirements.

There were a few factors to consider when building our Windows Home Server. Firstly our media library is around 200GB, 50GB of which are photos and music we’d hate to lose. The combined disk sizes of the machines we’ll be backing up is another 200GB. Our server is going to be on 24/7 so energy consumption is something to consider, and while it’s going to live in a cupboard in the office/guest-bedroom it still needs to be relatively quiet.

With all this in mind here are the parts I chose, followed by the thought process behind each.

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ “Brisbane” ($89.00)
• GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2 Motherboard ($69.99)
• 1GB A-DATA DDR2 800 RAM ($68.99)
• LITE-ON IDE DVD-ROM Drive ($17.99)
• Rosewill R6421-P ATX Mid-Tower Case ($15.99)
• SeaSonic 330W Power Supply ($69.99)
• 2 x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives ($199.98)

 Total: $521.93 before tax and storage.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ “Brisbane”

For a server power and heat are important considerations, and in my opinion AMD chips have a better price/performance/heat ratio than their Intel equivalents. After some research I decided upon an Athlon 64 X2 3600+ from the ”Brisbane” family. This is a dual-core 65nm chip with a max power rating of 65 Watts.

I did consider a chip from the ”Lima” family, which are single-core versions with a higher clock speed and lower power consumption, but the difference was less than $10 and in a server I’d prefer two slower cores than a single fast one.

GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2

For WHS I wanted a motherboard with integrated graphics and Gigabit LAN. It also needed to be Socket AM2 for my Athlon, and support DDR800 dual channel memory.

For once I wasn’t concerned about the number of PCI/PCI-E slots, but I did want support for at least four SATA drives. I’d be starting with two HDDs so I wanted a degree of upgradability without the need for an additional controller card.

Putting these requirements into newegg’s Power Search, the result was the GIGABYTE GA-M61PM-S2. It was the cheapest, had a lot of good comments, and I’ve never had a bad experience with a Gigabyte board so I popped it in the cart and moved on.

1GB A-DATA DDR2 800 RAM

The minimum requirement for WHS is 512MB RAM, but 1GB is a better amount if you’re going to be streaming data or using indexing. I also wanted two sticks for Dual Channel performance and the difference between 2×256 and 2×512 was only $30.

LITE-ON IDE DVD-ROM Drive

The easiest choice of all since the only reason I need a DVD-ROM is to install Windows Home Server DVD and drivers. I picked the cheapest I could find, making sure it was IDE so as to not use one of my four SATA slots.

Rosewill R6421-P ATX Mid-Tower Case

It’s ironic that I spent the most time choosing the case since it’s going to be sitting in a cupboard. I’d have loved a shuttle-sized server, but with the amount of storage I expect to use I decided upon a Mid-Tower with room for at least four internal 3.5″ drives. I ignored cases that came with a Power Supply. They can look like a great deal but the PSU’s are invariably low quality and noisy.

The Rosewill was one of the cheaper cases I saw. It looked good and had some very positive buyer feedback so I took a $15 dollar gamble which definitely paid off.

SeaSonic 330W Power Supply

At $70 the SeaSonic isn’t cheap for a 330W PSU, it is however utterly silent.

I bought the same unit when building my Media Center and was very happy with it. The first time I switched it on I actually started to check whether it was plugged in – it’s that quiet.

2 x Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drives

I decided early on that I would settle on specs for the server then spend the rest of my budget on the two biggest HDDs I could afford.

Because I wanted to use WHS’s data replication feature I needed two disks roughly equivalent in size. Two 500GB drives would have put me over budget so I went for the next size down, 400GB.

With one drive being used for data replication, 400GB may seem a little tight to store 200GB of media files and backup 200GB of data from other PCs. However, WHS employs “Single Instance Storage” for backups where identical clusters on a drive are only stored once. Not only does this massively reduce the amount of space needed to backup a machine, but additional backups require radically less space.

Potential Savings

If my budget had been lower there’s a few changes I’d have made. First to go would have been the SeaSonic power supply, for $25 you can get a great, though not silent, 350/400W PSU.

Moving to 512MB of RAM would have saved about $30, and a mid-spec Semperon a further $40. Buying a motherboard from a less well known manufacturer, or with less SATA connectors, could have saved another $30.

Moving to two 320GB or 250GB drives would have saved around $40 and $60 respectively. I could also have bought a single HDD and used any external drives I might have lying around.

Finally there’s the DVD-ROM. Since the only need for this is to install Windows Home Server I could have used the drive from my main machine temporarily to save another $18.

 Summary

It’s clear that for as little as $400 you can build a perfectly capable Windows Home Server with dual drives – and of course this can be reduced further if you have unused hardware to begin with.

Everyone’s needs are different though. While these specs are great for me your needs may be slightly different. What would you change, and why?

But what about the alternative? Are there reasons to stay with MCE 2005?

I would say absolutely yes. Vista MCE is certainly new and improved, but depending on your situation there are some very good reasons to hold off upgrading for a few months, if not longer.

Here’s why:

1. Cost. Aside from any required hardware upgrades, Vista will cost between $100-$400 depending on the version you choose. This isn’t going to change, but if you’re considering a new machine it could be worth waiting a bit longer, especially with CableCard supporting machines on the horizon.
2. Extenders. It can cost less than $100 to put a wireless MCE2005 extender in a room, but the only Media Center Extender (MCX) that works with Vista is the XBox 360. Cost of a 360 + decent cables + remote + wireless adapter? Around $450-$500. Do you really want to spend $500 to watch recorded TV in the bed?
3. No Remote Desktop. All versions of Vista come with a Remote Desktop Client, but only Vista Ultimate has a server (which surely should be the other way!). Unless you buy Vista Ultimate, which is overkill for a dedicated MCE box, you won’t be able to use Remote Desktop to administer a headless machine.
4. Functionality. Sure, in many ways the interface is nicer but there’s little Vista MCE does that is not already available on MCE2005. CableCard support require you to buy a whole new PC, and although Vista MCE is a better platform for developers there are few, if any, must-have applications at the moment.
5. Stability. Aside from some recently fixed overheating problems, my MCE2005 box has been running unattended for months (with a scheduled reboot and defrag). Upgrading to Vista and having to install new drivers is almost certain to cause a period of instability, and there are already hotfixes appearing for MCE issues in Vista. 

I’ve been using Vista on my desktop PC for a while now and I’m HUGELY impressed, as far as I’m concerned Microsoft have really hit a homerun. However, until there’s some real benefit to upgrading, and I can put extenders in rooms for less than $500, my Media Center will be running MCE2005.

Windows Home Server surprised me. It has promise, but like Chris Lanier, I would have really liked to see a “Windows Home Media Server that could act as a dedicated Media Center PC, with support for TV and streaming content to Media Center extenders. With the need for machines that support CableCard (and presumably, if it ever appears, DirecTV) to be pre-built and certified, this would have made a lot of sense.

Such a machine could also have gone a long way to unifying Microsoft’s digital home strategy.

Instead, it’s all becoming a little confusing.

• IPTV is coming to the XBox 360, which will offer DVR-like functionality for viewers. There was however no mention of IPTV support for Media Center.
• Windows Home Server can stream content to devices that support Windows Media Connect, but no mention was made of support for Media Center PCs or Extenders.
• Aside from two third-party devices, there appears to have been little mention of Media Center Extenders for Vista. Devices that support Media Connect are prolific however.
• Despite being touted as a success on the XBox 360, and further content partners being announced, there is still no Microsoft-provided way for PC and Media Center owners to download TV shows or movies.

I understand why Microsoft are pushing Windows Media Connect. As it’s basically streaming over HTTP it’s relatively easy for hardware companies to support in a variety of home devices – a winning situation for everyone.

But what’s the future for Media Center?

If a company like Tivo were to release a DVR with support for Windows Media Connect, would I still consider Media Center? The DVR box would do everything I need, would likely support CableCard, and would probably be cheaper to boot.

Will Media Center one day become just a pretty frontend for PCs to view content delivered by Windows Media Connect?

As I said, confusing  

Aside from the occasional Windows Update there hasn’t been any additional software, or hardware, installed in months. The machine reboots itself every night, and all non-essential startup tasks have been removed.

The problems are:

• Time slots in the guide will occasionally be shown as blank. Restarting the MCE interface fixes this.
• Very occasionally a scheduled recording will only be 1 minute in duration
• Randomly, MCE will ignore all input from the remote (volume, channel change, pause) for a few seconds, then process all the commands at once.

As I mentioned, aside from media functions the machine does very little else. I did notice the drive where recorded programs are kept has become quite fragmented, but this is a separate drive (due to that problem) and shouldn’t impact the OS.

If these problems occur on a dedicated PC, I can’t imagine many people are running Media Center on PCs they use for other tasks.