pc as media center (help wanted)

[daywane]

At our lake house (trailer)
my bed room is small. (2 bed rooms, Father-in-law has master room . I have the small room)
we have it set up very comfortable but no real room. 
full size bed, takes most all floor space. room just left over to walk between 2 closets and a set of built in drawers, ( drawers are in between closets)(all built into wall.)

MY HP 730meg PC was jerky with the DVDs (320meg memory) (could be a bad DVD drive, not sure yet) (motherboard will not take more ram than that. Have 4 of these machines and all are that way on memory  )
AVI files were on Hard drive and played Fine
tried WinDVD, Windows media player classic and newest Windows media player  version with XP service PAC 3

Wife just want to put in a DVD and player will just pop up and go to full screen . she understand having to hit play but gets annoyed with having to go down and hit full screen

I can go with a larger PC if needed ( I think I need a bigger system anyway because Atomic FE with angelfires SNES plugNplay slow on this system)

how would you build a media center.
needs to play
consoles.
 NES, Snes, Sega Gen, Tgx16, N64 would be a plus but not a must

MP3 player

DVD Player and AVI player
that will go to full screen on play
Oh... buy the way... I amusing a Crayola track ball if that has any thing to do with it.

[J_K_M_A_N]

At the risk of starting something, I would use a modded xbox. You can play DVD's and games on it. But that is just me.

J_K_M_A_N

[CCM]

I was looking into a modded xbox running XBMC and found out that there is a Linux port of XBMC.  If you want to use a PC instead of an xbox that could be the way to go.

http://xbmc.org/

[SNAAKE]

At the risk of starting something, I would use a modded xbox. You can play DVD's and games on it. But that is just me.

J_K_M_A_N

beat me to it. xbox is like the best and the cheapest "media center". its only like $60 at gamestop now(less on craigslist) and you can tsop flash it softmod it. get a logitec wireless controller and you are set. 


for the record, I have 4 xboxes at my house lol. 1 for my arcade cabinet and another for my media center and my brothers have their own for music or whatever..

[daywane]

I thought of a Xbox but I do not own one.
I have PC's a plenty.

How well do the Xbox's DVD drives hold out? Playstation 2 drives are junk

[stace]

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

http://www.theatertek.com/

 

[mcfreak]

What video card do you have in there?  You probably need hardware acceleration decoding turned on in the dvd software you are using.  I've had good luck with ATI cards and PowerDVD.

[daywane]

you know what.... I think you just nailed it for me.  Come to think of it
I do not have a video card in that PC. No agp slot. PCI only and I did not have a PCI Card.
That was on my to do list. In the rush to get to the lake I forgot that part.
Off to BUY/SELL/TRADE 

[delta88]

look at meedio. its a media center pc type app thats free. I think the ultimate app is the one ya want.

[massive88]

look at meedio. its a media center pc type app thats free.

Not anymore!

[daywane]

I have also found this out.
 seems Yahoo owns it now.
but just a few minutes ago I found meediOS is out
12 hr download at my house.
I will try it at father-in-laws house latter.
maybe 5 min. at his internet speed

[Havok]

Cool - I'm checking it out.

Hehe - the download took 3 seconds on my pc. I LOVE FIOS!

 

[shmokes]

Xbox Media Center really, really is phenomenal.  If you're not going to actually use an Xbox, throw Linux on the machines and use Xbox Media Center on the PC.  You'll love it.  Admittedly, though, I have haven't used any PC-based media center software, so I suppose there may be something out there that's just as good.  I kind of doubt it, though.