Ingredients

In order to build a Windows Media Center system, we needed all the right ingredients to make this work. Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition is extremely picky when it comes to certain hardware requirements. Most of the complexity centers on the TV Tuner / Video Capture Card. You can't just pick up any old TV Tuner card - the card needs to be on the approved list of the hardware compatibility list. If you need some help in deciding what hardware to purchase, then check out this list here (in an Excel spreadsheet).

http://oem.microsoft.com/downloads/MCEReadinessCenter/MCE_Approved_Components_for_MOSB.xls

For our system, we decided to opt for the Hauppauge TV Tuner. We thought about using the ATI All-In-Wonder 9600XT but we needed to spend an extra 20 dollars for a CD that provided the necessary software from ATI to make this work. Perhaps we'll try this solution one day but for now, we went for a separate capture card. This does mean that at least two slots on your PC will be occupied – the AGP card for graphics rendering and a PCI slot for the video capture card/TV Tuner. This is particularly important if you are planning to use a small form factor system since they tend to be limited in expansion slots. Well guess what? That's exactly what we plan on doing.

The rest of the hardware requirements are fairly straightforward. You can read more about the hardware issues for the Windows Media Center Edition here:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/mediacenter/default.mspx

As for the hardware used in our new box, it consists of the following:

• Shuttle XPC SN85G4 v2 Small Form Factor Barebones System
• AMD Athlon64 3200+ processor
• 1GB of PC3200 RAM
• 250GB Maxtor 7200RPM Hard Drive
• Pioneer DVR-105 DVD Burner
• ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
• Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-250 TV Tuner Card
• NEC-Mitsubishi 19” LCD Monitor
• Viewsonic Speakers

As you can tell – this system is a mixture of old and new components. Component reuse was the key word as we tried to minimize the overall system cost. The Athlon64 processor would provide more than enough horsepower for our MCE system.

Here are some pictures of the WinTV TV Tuner card.

And finally, let us not forget about the most important ingredient to the setup – the Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition OS. We were able to purchase the OS from Direction and it came packaged with the MCE remote control. You can purchase the remote control separately if you don't need one at the moment. Here is the link to Directron if you are interested in the OS:

http://www.directron.com/xpmedia.html

(Note - we have no affiliation with Directron.com)

Here's a picture of the package:

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