Someone Else

Building a Media Centre

As anyone who takes even a cursory glance at this site will know, I've been critical of Windows Vista for a very long time (way before it became fashionable to bash it! Who says I'm not a trendsetter?). With Service Pack One being released I thought it was time for another decent trial.

Building "Brandine"

So rooting around in my box of spare computer bits, I realised I had enough spare parts to build a new computer, with the exception of a case and motherboard. All the computers I've built have been named after characters from The Simpsons, and most of the old parts were removed from a computer I'd named "Cletus". Obviously this new computer would have to be called Brandine!

On reflection, I also decided I wanted to build a modern media centre, which made me decide to also purchase a video card that could handle HDTV and wouldn't sound like a jet taking off to the mix too. So I now have a new computer built on the hardware below:

ASUS T3P5G965 "BareBone" system (Minitower case inc. i965 BTX Motherboard and 250w Power supply). [Asus website]
Corsair DDR2 memory 4GB (2x2GB) [c'mon you've all seen memory before]
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 [toms hardware article]
Samsung 20x DVD-r/rw DVD+r/rw DVD-RAM SATA DVD writer [view]
Samsung 500GB SATA II hard drive [view]
Sapphire 512MB HD3650 PCI-E video card (DVI-I HDTV HDCP supported) [view]

As you can see from the Asus T3 specifications, it's quite a well built platform even though the 965 chipset isn't that new anymore. The Asus T3 motherboard is based on a BTX layout and supports up to 8GB of memory. It also supports 3 SATA and 1 PATA drive, which for a small media centre is probably more than enough. In addition to all that, the T3 also includes onboard graphics based on Intel's X3000 graphics, which didn't meet my needs (hence the new video card above) but would be fine for general office use.

Still, you've all come here to watch me chew Microsoft out over Vista again and not to watch me babble about hardware, so lets get on with the software shall we?

Enter Vista

Brandine is running Vista Ultimate Edition x64 with Service Pack One installed, with Office 2007 SP1 also installed. Also installed are the latest versions of iTunes, QuickTime and the very useful Bonjour from Apple. If you have a home network and you're not using Bonjour to help devices find one-another I can only suggest you give it a try.

Nero 8 suite is installed, with the rather useless Nero search indexer service disabled.

Windows Live was also added, all components installed without any of the drama I suffered on the XP machine, and lastly I also installed Paint Shop Pro to help me grab screenshots and Crysis to help me relax... er to test DirectX 10.

I chose the x64 edition of Vista for a couple of reasons:

1) Because I can. I have the licences and x64 is the wave of the future.
2) The hardware supports 8Gb of memory and I might want to see what that performs like one day
3) I already knew what 32-bit vista behaved like.

Installation proceeded very quickly, with no problems just as you'd expect. I created an admin account and a couple of 'normal user' accounts and configured Vista to automatically log in to the account I had set aside for shared media centre use without any issues.

Vista works well on this platform, but even with SP1 installed it still feels more sluggish in response to the user than you'd really expect, but nothing too objectionable. Microsoft Update still downloaded several updates even with SP1 installed and the update process still feels far too slow when compared to Windows XP or Apple OSX 10.5. Still, it gets there in the end.

The WEI report shows a good level of performance from the system too, which isn't too surprising. None of the components I'm using here are the fastest in their class, but all of them were / are well designed and well balanced components that are well up to the job being asked of them. The slowest component here is actually the CPU, the Core 2 Duo E6400 itself, with a WEI of 'only' 5.

This just goes to reinforce the idea that you'd be crazy to buy a new CPU that wasn't a dual core these days, or even quad core if you know why you actually want one (heck, can you even still get single core CPUs outside of budget ranges?).

So how was it?

Vista makes a pretty decent media centre PC when all is said and done. The media centre experience is smooth and pleasant on a large TV screen, and despite one or two quirks the interface is usable enough. I don't think I'm telling you anything there that you haven't already read in any other review of Vista's media centre. A couple of bad points for me might be configuring the PC to auto-logon and run media centre, which isn't difficult so much as clumsy, because you have to make changes in a couple of unrelated areas to get everything set up right.

Another area where x64 Vista Media Centre doesn't do so well is in codec support. There are two things that surprised me here:

1) Codec Support for x64 media centre is relatively poor because of the requirements for 64-bit codecs for media centre playback. It's not as bad as it was, I've read some real horror stories about how bad this was when Vista was still new, but it's still not all it should be. When you consider that video encoding and decoding is one of the things that can definitely benefit from 64-bit multi-core processors, this really surprised me.

2) Being able to play a movie in the 'normal' Windows Media Player is no indication of whether or not you'll be able to play it in Media Centre. This is an unbelievable pain in the hoop because it makes testing a drudge.

I found a good few websites that had a lot of help for us pioneers though. Thanks to The Green Button, Freik's weblog and doom 9 for helping me figure out what's going on and find a fix for most of my codec issues between them.

This is something I think Microsoft need to work on. I realise there are sound technical reasons why this problem happens, and heck if I didn't fix them myself, so what's the big deal? At the end of the day, if I'm sitting in front of my TV trying to watch a film or show I've saved to the hard disk, I want to relax, not to fiddle with the inner workings of the computer driving it. I earn a living doing exactly that, and while I'm fortunate enough to really enjoy my job, the plain and simple truth is that when I'm not at work I just want to get things done without fiddling around.

Another area that surprised and worried me was file performance. Despite doing a clean install of Vista SP1 onto reasonably specified components, all of which are certified Vista Compatible by their manufacturer, it seems the much reported file copying problems remain.

Using a portable disk to move saved films between my computers, I'm still dismayed to report that it took about two to three times as long for Vista to read the data from the portable drive and copy it onto its local disk than it took for the XP machine to write the data onto the portable disk from local storage.

Benchmarking. And Crysis.

Crysis worked well too. It wasn't as fast on this computer as it is on my 'normal' Windows desktop, but then I never expected it to be. It was perfectly playable though, and the graphics looked much the same, possibly very slightly better lighting effects and such-like, but nothing substantial. It's worth mentioning at this point the hardware remained cool and quiet throughout all of this play-testing, remaining inaudible throughout my video playback and my game session.

I grabbed benchmarks using the PCPitstop tools. I'm not saying these numbers are authoritative but they do give some indication of performance. The XP machine is running a faster Quad Core processor so this should be taken as a 'flavour' of the two machines rather than a direct comparison.

As you can see, the two computers show a clear difference in performance, as expected, though both machines perform very well indeed compared to the average tested by PCPitstop. The only area where the Vista machine 'wins' compared to the XP machine is on hard disk performance.

The Internet performance differences surprised me. The connection was idle in the tests apart from the machine being tested.

The Vista machine is connected to my gateway with an 802.11n connection and my XP machine is hardwired through gigabit Ethernet. So far so good, but the connection to the Internet is a 20Mb connection, which should be well within the capacity of both connections.

At the end of the day, the Vista machine's Internet connection is still fast enough to download most things at a fair clip, and that will do me. I tested streaming music from the iTunes library on my XP machine over the wireless connection to the Vista machine and I'm pleased to say it worked just fine.

And yes I do have a lot of music, thanks for asking.

Conclusions

So what did I think of Vista Media Centre? Well I'm keeping it for now, This probably doesn't sound like much of a compliment if you've just Googled your way onto this article and haven't visited my site before (welcome by the way) but as I mentioned at the top of the post, I've not been a fan of Vista for quite some time so simply persuading me not to nuke it and install something else is a major accomplishment.

I'm still not sure I like Vista's desktop eye-candy and generous use of white space for a day to day desktop, but on a media centre designed to be viewed on a TV set at a distance the uncluttered layout, large icons and generous space between groups of items starts to make a lot more sense.

The x64 question is another matter. I'm a geek so I've got no problem with keeping this computer as a 64 bit machine, but at the moment I think if I was building a media centre for 'normal' people I'd use the 32 bit version of Vista rather than the 64 bit version. The point for most people isn't "can you make it work in the end?" but rather "why should I have to struggle to make it work at all?" and for now the 32-bit version of Vista media centre still holds a slight edge here.

Finally, a word about the hardware. I picked a BTX-based system because I knew that it would run cool and quiet. I picked the HD3650 video card because I knew it would provide a good balance between performance and noise. This has to be one of the biggest driving factors behind hardware choice for a media centre. Could I build a faster computer to make Vista run like greased lightning and produce benchmarks where that waxes a XP machine? Of course I could. But would I want that computer in my front room wailing like a banshee while I'm trying to watch a DVD? No.