Your OS of choice for BTV?

[suprfli]

i'll have my mobo tomorrow and after that i'll have all of the pieces for my htpc. i was planning on installing winXP but then i started thinking that installing winXP media center might be better since i could use the tv guide and some of th other features that it includes. i was wondering what others think and if installing media center might be a better way to go rather than winXP pro.

[HideOut]

ya got Media Center 2004? use it, if ya dont need the features, turn them off. Ya still basically have WinXP Pro under it. Id use XP Pro cause of its term services client and server side functions, some IIS ability and dual CPU capabilities (not needed for you mobo but still.) You dont wanna use a server class OS cause of the lack of native D3D and OpenGL (can be added though). XP pro or media center 2004. If ya got the older media center there is an upgrade available. Search bittorrent for it.

HIdeOut

[ScAtMaN]

Media center is not available (officially) to buy as a seperate product. - you have to buy it as part of a media center PC.

I think you will find the guide will only work within the media software and cant be used to control BTV recordings.

[imf4]

Media Center would pretty much be useless unless you are going to use it or already have it.

Just go with XP home or pro.

I do use some of the features in XP pro so I am sort of biased to it, but I see no reason why you couldn't use XP home. It is a little cheaper.

[Bryce]

I got BTV running on a XPmce(msdn download) install, and it works just fine.

Be warned, XPmce has some tight hardware requirements in order to run the media center portion of XPmce

1. Video card must be 64m
2. Must have mpeg2 encoder TV capture card, and has a short list of supported cards, pvr250 is on that list.
3. Also, to enable "video in" ports on mce, you need to have a Media Center OEM remote installed, these can be purchased from newegg, comes with a nice IR/blaster too.

Overall the mce interface is really nice, i cant wait to see what beyond media is like. I am using btv because my video card only has 32megs of ram so mce will not run properly, keeps thinking i am in remote desktop mode . Also mce uses a funky file format.

Bryce