archGFX

current tune belle & sebastian - asleep on a sunbeam

Im now listening to music from my hard drive, through my stereo, with minimal quality loss. something i've wanted since napster was cool. My wife, the bestest wifest evar, bought me windows media center 2005, OEM and the xbox extender.

the xbox extender

As a means of getting my music over to the stereo, without running 20'+ of optical/digital coax cable, it works excellent, and it's far cheaper than airport express, and it means i don't need to run itunes, which swallows more resources than any other media player (aside from winamp 3). plus it comes with a remote, that lets me use my xbox to play dvd's. that means that my xbox can now replace nearly my entire component stack (except the receiver), although i've yet to see if the xbox has a DTS decoder. That said, the xbox extender isn't without it's faults. it only plays videos is mpeg, mpeg 2, and wmv 9 formats. that means using windows media encoder to transcode all of my invader zim (divx) to windows stupid ass format. downloaded games like Otto don't play on the xbox. and it manages to look stupider than the pc version, because none of the animations work on the xbox. On the whole, however, it's an excellent solution for playing my 6,000 mp3's from my stereo, via remote (something your bottom of the line airport express lacks), and once i've gotten used to only downloading wmv formats, i'll be less disgruntled with it's lack of codecs.

media center 2005

contrary to what some might say windows media center 2005 IS based on XP Pro, not home.it is lacking the join domain function, but anybody who's used both operating systems know there's hella more difference than that. After switching back from SUSE linux 9.1, i find this version of windows... odd. with suse, the only thing that didn't work "out-of-the-box" was my video card, due to ATI's fglrx driver not supporting kernel 2.6.x at the time of suse 9.1's release. the current driver has been intergrated into suse 9.2, i hear. which means i'll probably start dual booting at some point. The biggest difference in going back to windows, is not being able to effectively run as a non-administrator. at least, not without substantially reducing the permissions on EVERY FILE ON MY HARD DRIVE. Scratch, that, the biggest change in switching back to windows is THE NEED TO REBOOT. everything i install, every driver, every program, every update, requires a reboot. suse prompted me to reboot when i updated my kernel. that's it. Where normally you would say that windows has a driver for everything, linux only has drivers for old hardware, i would say that's crap. but then, i was also willing to compile drivers from source for my webcam.. but that was the only device that needed compiling to function. everything else was installed trhough YOU (except the firegl). Windows does have drivers available, but most of them require a reboot, and all of them are seperate downloads. The Media Center itself is finicky after a fashion. it won't support ANY card that doesn't have hardware mpeg2 encoding. that's annoying because my Leadtek WinFast tv2000 deluxe is an FM turner as well, which shouldn't require mpeg 2 encoding. but since the "Whole card" is unsupported, i can't use the FM tuner portion. i also can't even view the Program Guide without having a supported tv card, or without a few registry hacks (near as i can tell). i won't worry about it for the moment, because we get such lousy reception in the apartment anyway. but once we get cable, it seems i'll need a new tuner card. Which i would want for PVR functions anyway, it just would be nice if i could at least watch live tv/listen to the radio through the card, and have recording disabled. so for now, essentially it's no different than having XP pro. once we move to a 1 bedroom apartment/get cable & tuner card, it seems like it will do me a little better.