Links

Here's two completely unrelated but nevertheless interesting links:

Missing remote has a helpful guide on building a Media Center PC for a little over 1000 dollars. All important aspects are covered, check it out if you're building a yourself a new set.

The other link is to All out Assault, a forum site where Audiogon users display their monstrous audio setups. The absurdness is funny to the point where you almost feel pity for the audiophiles, basically feeding their addiction by throwing tons of money (literally) into their hunt for the ultimate listening experience.

Internet

Using information from internet is what distinguishes a Media Center PC from a harddisk recorder, a Tivo, etcetera.

MediaPortal is constantly finding information from the internet about the media it shows or plays. It gathers tv guide information for watching tv, artist information, related music and cd covers while listening to music, actors with your movies, episode guides with the tv series. And then there's the stuff that you can only get from the internet: Webradio, rss news feeds, movie trailers.

Now, this also means that using a Media Center isn't half the fun when you loose connection to the internet. Dutch readers: By all means - avoid Tele2 as an internet provider. It took the Swedish maffia 10 weeks to move my phone and internet connection.

In my new house I also made some improvements in connectivity. Instead of wireless, my desktop pc and Media Center PC are now hard wired to my ADSL router. That means I got rid of USB WiFi devices not starting up properly. And that I have 100Mbit connectivity between my PC's, or more if I upgrade the router. So I'm set up for some serious nerdmanship...

Keyboard

I bought myself a nice keyboard. Generally speaking, you don't really need a keyboard and mouse for operating the mediacenter, but sometimes... There's a couple of things I like about this keyboard. For one, it has built-in mouse functionality. So you can operate it from the couch on your lap, without having to locate a mouse and a suitable surface first. The 10 meter range is a must for this as well, I found my desktop keyboard and mouse did not cover the less than four meters between couch and mediacenter. There's no numeric keypad, keeping the keyboard small and easy to store in the living room. Finally, the price is acceptable: 60 US dollars. The unit is MCE certified and has 16 multimedia hotkeys along the top. Let's see how that works with MediaPortal!