Sony Vaio XL-201
Windows 7 Home Premium (from hereon 7MC)
3 GB RAM
64 GB SSD - OS
750 GB HD: Recorded TV & Films
500 GB HD: Pictures & Music
750 GB USB external disk for robocopy backup
3 x DVB-T Tuners:
1 x Twinhan USB Tuner
1 x AverMedia PCI
1 x DVB-S2
Hauppage HVR 4000
In addition to the above, the following other customisations have been done:
Remote Desktop enabled, so I can RDP to iTunes while 7MC is still running things.
We use iTunes, because I've got an iPod and MP3 tech is a 20 year old codec and it shows (sounds?). We use a combination of AAC encoded at 320 kbps and Apple Lossloss for music storage. Hard drive space is cheap and if you're going to rip, do it well. The cover is than dl'd from Amazon and called folder.jpg, albumartsmall.jpg & artwork.jpg for the covers.
Modified The Guide to display 10 lines of channels, instead of 7
Installed Remote Potato to allow remote scheduling
Installed Media Browser for Film trailers
Installed Auto Rip & Compress
Installed TunerFree MCE for all Internet TV
Installed MacroTube for YouTube
Installed Music Browser (prefer to browse via folder list sometimes)
Sky Player
MSN Videos
Optical out for music
The Freeview feed is split using a non cheapo splitter i.e not a 99p supermarket special. We use always use a decent metal splitter (£10) from Maplin and gold plated decent RF coax cables, as we found that cheapo RF cables didn't carry the split signals too well.
As with decent hi-fi separates, you shouldn't just use the standard thin 13-strand or whatever phono cables that are supplied; these are just to make the units functional - they don't necessarily get the best from the tech.
There's a satellite dish that has a quad LNB; we use two of those cables, one to the Media Centre, the other to the Freesat enabled TV (no point losing out on another tuner).
I'll be expanding on some of these points in future posts, as otherwise we'll just end up with one big rambling post and we don't want that.
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