Creating a home media centre using an old laptop

stirlo_2

Hi everyone, this is a great board!

first off, Im not that technically mided at all, so please bear with me if Im getting this stuff wrong!

I have an old (but powerful) laptop at home which I have just replaced. Normally I would do the money saving thing and flog it on ebay, but cosmetically its not great so I thought, hey why not use the laptop as a home media centre and thus save myself the £200 needed to buy a 'real' one like a slingbox

Has anyone else done this before? Im making this up as I go along, but so far

what I am trying to do is :

-reboot my laptop with just windows xp and nothing else, so that it runs fast and smooth
- connect the laptop wirelessly to my high speed broadband
-install the free to download media manager mediaportal
-attach an old 160gb usb hard drive to hold music and films
-connect a usb infrared receiver to my laptop, with this

http://www.amazon.co.uk/One-all-URC7556-Remote-Control/dp/B000CEU4GE/ref=pd_rhf_p_t_2

which will also control the flatscreen tv
which is connected to my amp and music system

and therefore I would be able to have everything in one spot and watch tv over the internet!!

Can any techie type people out there tell me if Im about to make a big mistake or if I have overlooked anything?

fwor

For audio only it should be fine - my old 233Mhz Dell PII would stream audio over the network to multiple remote machines without any problem at all.

Are you sure you need the USB IR device? Most laptops have IR onboard, though they may be hard to spot.

However, if you're thinking of turning it into a freeview/freesat PVR, you might need to think a bit about whether it has enough grunt. IIRC, each MPEG channel requires around 800MHz-1.2GHz of clock speed, so if you're going to watch one channel and record another you'd probably need (in very crude terms) a processor clock speed of around 2.4GHz for reliable viewing.

stirlo_2

I've just checked the specs and theres no IR on board so i would have to get a receiver!

I hadn't previously considered the watching tv and recording at the same time thing - although to be honest I dont actually watch very much 'normal' telly at all - I was more thinking of downloading films or whole series of programmes to watch, with the added benefit of letting this media centre laptop spend the night and daytimes when Im at work downloading those massive files rather than my new laptop that I need for standard work uses

Conor_3

What spec is your laptop?

I'd put Windows XP Media Centre on it and get a USB Twin tuner Freeview adapter such as the Hauppauge Nova-TD USB. It comes with an inbuilt IR receiver and remote control.

fwor

Conor wrote: »

I'd put Windows XP Media Centre on it and get a USB Twin tuner Freeview adapter such as the Hauppauge Nova-TD USB. It comes with an inbuilt IR receiver and remote control.

I'm a fan of Hauppauge hardware, but you have to be a bit careful with some of their products.

IIRC, the TD model went through a phase where they changed the chipset for one that nobody wrote drivers for, so if you don't use their (not very good) software you can really struggle to make it work with something like Mediaportal, GBPVR or MythTV. Sadly it's not listed as compatible with Mediaportal, so you might have to live with a lesser single-tuner model.

mdbarber

uuumm, have a fair bit of experience with media centres and mp, first things that get me here are
a. the resolution most lcds run at is 1366x768(16:9) upwards.
this probably is not achievable by the laptop and pic quality will suffer
b. the laptop may look a bit silly sat there? cos most turn off or go on standby from the lid switch and some can't have this disabled.
also from experience whilst you may not have thought of the tv angle the hauppage remote has excellent OOB support in MP, an aio remote may not!!
consider selling the lappy and getting basic s/h machine to convert into htpc

stirlo_2

first of all, thanks for the answers guys!

spec of laptop:

AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ 1.8 GHz 512 MB 40 GB ATI Radeon IGP 320M 64 MB





well regarding the dvb-t hauppage thing - there is no digital TV signal in my area - I take it this still applies as far as laptops are concerned? I was just thinking of mostly streaming bbc iplayer and 4OD, with maybe some progammes from some of these new international tv channels

regarding the whole 'laptop looking unsightly' - yes I fully agree, hadn't yet worked out what to do about that (was considering a larger cupboard for my amps and simply putting half open laptop inside, with IR receiver sticking out the side somewhere...TBH this aspect may put me off the whole idea

..and mdbarber - what is 'htpc'?

fwor

Home Theatre? I'm just guessing.

I reckon mdbarber is right - flog it and get something small like an Asus Pundit. Then you have scope to add a decent graphics card, which should give good resolution on your flatscreen TV - provided it supports a decent resolution itself. Plus a Hauppuage Nova-T 500 twin tuner card when Freeview goes live in your area.

Conor_3

fwor wrote: »

IIRC, the TD model went through a phase where they changed the chipset for one that nobody wrote drivers for, so if you don't use their (not very good) software you can really struggle to make it work with something like Mediaportal, GBPVR or MythTV. Sadly it's not listed as compatible with Mediaportal, so you might have to live with a lesser single-tuner model.

Windows Media Centre is way better than all of those which is why I specifically mentioned it. Yes they're free but pretty much everyone universally agrees that Microsoft actually got WMC pretty much spot on.

mdbarber

Conor wrote: »

Windows Media Centre is way better than all of those which is why I specifically mentioned it. Yes they're free but pretty much everyone universally agrees that Microsoft actually got WMC pretty much spot on.

had appalling results putting ms-mce under pressure testing(both xp and vista versions), it really is not all it's cracked up with regards of HW compatibility especially using it as a 24/7 pvr with multiple freeview tuners.
MP is much better but has some idiosyncrasies, GBPVR is most stable with cherry picked hardware but not so user friendly as the others.
in summary
ease of use with no tv, go mce
features and customisation + good HW compatibility, MP
stability, gbpvr
Yup htpc = home theater pc
consider the hauppage cards with hardware mpeg encoder can be wired to a sky box for nice pvr functionality.

http://www.members.lycos.co.uk/maddogbarber//DSCF0077.JPG