In the middle of the now oh so common waste of time of what’s called a windows reinstall, I decided to spend my time a bit more wisely than just waiting for the next “next button” to click. Therefore, I’m typing this post on the macbook pro I borrowed from OUNL’s new medialab, and, to not waste the geeky atmosphere I already created, I decided to tell you about the new media pc I recently assembled and is now the subject of a brand new Vista install.
Before Christmas, the range of multimedia content on my harddrive was already growing; I’m a big music fan, and want to have the my music collection always near me, so basically this meant ripping all my cds to mp3. Furthermore, with my new found hobby of photography, the number of photographs in my photo collection was also growing. Nothing that couldn’t be handled my old pc so far. But then came another hobby of mine….movies…having recently acquired an enormous amount of HD-ready or Full HD movies (some of you might have seen me carrying around with half a terabyte of new movie material in my arms) the need for a separate media machine became clearer and clearer. Not in the least, because my old machine was not able anymore to playback the movies. Therefore, with some advice of my fellow colleague Tally, I decided to assemble a new media pc.
First, and most important requirement for this media centre was that it did not look like a pc. One thing I would hate to have in my future living room is an ugly pc case. So we had to find something that did not attract attention. The Antec Fusion (Black) case was all I needed; while it had the possibility to harbour two harddrives, a micro ATX motherboard and a dvd drive, it did not look like a normal pc at all, its look resembles that of a hifi amplifier. See the picture below.
So, the next things we had to find after we found the case, was a suitable motherboard and a processor, fast enough to handle all the media. Because, I did not follow any of the technical developments in computer land for the last couple of years(unlike before), Tally was a great help in finding the right equipment. The motherboard was already found soon, an Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard with a HDMI output for a Flatpanel TV and an Intel chipset with Full HD capacity. I specificly chose an Intel Chipset, because a) I do not like AMD since my previous bad experiences with it, and b) Intel really supports the open source community, so drivers should be available soon for a wide range of OSs. The processor we chose was an Intel Core2Duo 2.20Ghz, which is more than able to do the job. Add to that 2 GB of RAM, 500Gb of harddrive, and a dvd-rw drive and the media centre is complete. See the picture below for an overview of the complete system.
So far, I’ve been running Vista on the PC, not a choice I fully support, but for now it does the Job. In the future, I hope to run my beloved Haiku on it, an open source operating system, based on the old BeOS, and much alike to Mac OS X. To control my media centre, and organise and play back all media, I used the windows media centre (with remote) up till now. But I must say, this media centre software is much too limited, and furthermore it engages the screensaver on the most unusual and unwanted moments; as a replacement I’m thinking of Mediaportal, an open source equivalent I tried before, with lots of nice addons (read last.fm plugin) but a major pain in the ass to configure…well we’ll see… Additionally, I’m also not too fond of the LCD display of the Antec Fusion, which is simply too bright, and thus circumvents all my wishes to keep the damn thing as unnoticed as possible; anyway as usual I might be doing something wrong.
Well…I certainly hope I did not bore the non-geeky folks under my audience (if any :P). For you, I promise, I will write up some interesting posts far away from the world of computing 
So keep tuned!