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Setting up a Media Centre PC using Windows 7

We have been using a PC to play music, movies, TV shows and games on the lounge room TV for years. We started with Windows 98, flirted with Linux (briefly), moved on to Windows XP, Windows XP Media Centre Edition, Windows Vista and finally on to Windows 7. The hardware started as the PC that was left over after upgrading and finally became a PC built from the ground up to be the Media Centre.

Nowadays you need powerful computer hardware for your media centre PC. The ability to play High Definition content and to record multiple high definition digital TV channels means that the PC that drops of the end of the line is not going to cut it any more. Our Media centre has a dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM, a good video card, four digital TV tuners, Blu-Ray drive and lots of disk space for recording TV. To be able to play blu-ray you need a good video card and lots of processing power. To avoid problems at least 4GB of memory is a minimum as you don't want your Media Centre swapping program memory to disk and back into memory as that can affect performance and cause video to be played choppily and music to skip.

Each upgrade was caused by the previous Media Centre being unable to properly play something. As we went from a 51cm (20 inch) CRT TV to a 80cm (30 inch) CRT and then to a 101cm (40 inch) LCD (1080P) the media we wanted to play gradually changed and required better hardware to play it. In a way it is similar to the upgrade cycle caused by the evolving computer games market. Blu-Ray was the last straw and I built a PC from scratch that would be able to cope with the demands.

Up until a few days ago the Media Centre was running Windows Vista Home Premium and had started to display some problems, caused by the incessant need to fiddle and upgrade all the software, plug-ins for media centre, drivers and so on. I decided that it was time to move to Windows 7, installing from scratch and taking a full backup as soon as a fully functioning system was achieved.

The first step was to compile a list and make sure I knew where all the software I was going to install was. This list consisted of the following
Windows 7 install media (and appropriate license)
Windows 7 codecs. The best codec pack in my opinion is by Shark007.
Media browser plugins – we use Media Browser and Media Control.
Latest video drivers – downloaded from nVidia. All other drivers would be those installed by Windows 7 or from Windows Update after the install.
Latest steam client and a backup of the steam directory.
Latest impulse client and all the impulse games and applications archived ready to be restored.
Arcsoft Total Media Theatre 3.
All product keys! You need these somewhere you can find them easily!

The actual install of Windows 7 was problem free. After the install I let Windows Update do its thing and then installed the video drivers and code pack followed by installing Total Media Theatre. You should always reboot when prompted as not doing so can lead to problems. In my case I installed the latest patches to total media theatre without rebooting as as a result Total Media Theatre told me there was an update available but couldn't find it and finally decided it was already installed. It is possible to mess things up that way.

At this point I installed Media Browser and Media Control and then ran Windows Media Centre for the first time and ran through its initial set up process. This recognised my two dual tuner TV cards, speaker configuration and it also let me choose the resolution I wanted it to run at (it had chosen 1080i so I quickly changed it to 1080p!). I finished configuring Media browser, played around a bit, set up the audio to use the digital SP/DIF output and then did a complete image backup (you need Windows 7 Ultimate or something like Clonezilla or Drive Image to do a image backup as the Home versions of Windows 7 – Vista is the same – do not include the full backup software).

It will need a few weeks bedding down – making sure steam and impulse games work properly as well as making sure all the media we want is also playing properly and then another backup will be taken. This time I am going to make sure the backups are up to date so I can easily fix it when (not if) I break something!

Webography

Media Browser - http://www.mediabrowser.tv
Media Control - http://damienbt.free.fr
Total Media Theatre -
http://www.arcsoft.com/estore/software_title.asp?ProductCode=TMT3P
You need the Platinum version for full blu-ray support.
nVidia drivers - http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
steam - http://store.steampowered.com/about
impulse - http://www.impulsedriven.com
Codec pack - http://shark007.net

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