Dustin Software Online (post-beta)

Wow, I’m so sorry it’s taken so long to actually do anything on my site! This week’s news flash is a very cool project I decided to pursue this morning-so here’s the scoop. We’ve had this problem concerning a bunch of TV shows we taped in the states in MPEG1 format just laying around on a computer, with no easy or convenient way to watch them. So this morning when I looked at this old 850MHz computer I had laying around, I thought to myself, “This would make one heck of a media center.” So, having absolutely nothing to do with my day, I set off to work.

When I blew off the dust on the case and opened it up, I found all the extra PCI expansion cards that I had stuck in arbitrarily a long time ago. I ripped the unnecessary cards out and with 120 Gigs of space, a DVD drive, a 64 MB graphics card (with TV out), WiFi, and a whopping 512 MB of RAM, I was ready to go. I formatted drive and installed Windows XP, a process of which took around an hour to finish. Fun. Then came the tricky part-what software would I use to make it work?

The answer was simple-I lovely ­piece of software called MediaPortal did the trick. Open-source was the feature that caught my eye, plus it used all DirectShow filters to play everything, making it essentially a nice front-end for Windows Media Player. After installing it and tweaking the features a LOT (the forums were helpful in dealing with bugs), the box was ready for testing. I installed a handy remote-control program (RealVNC) to fix any problems I might encounter from a laptop, as opposed to having a keyboard sitting on top of my box. A wireless networking card took care of connectivity issues, but the real issue was how to control it easily. A USB remote control that came with another media center we have (that we weren’t really using as a media center) did perfectly.

So now, instead of collecting dust in my bedroom, I have a very nice and well-performing media center for our TV that can handle just about any format there is (DivX, MPEG4, DVD, and much more…). One thing that should be noted is that I used “ffdshow Tryouts” to handle most of the codec issues, a very handy software package that uses one codec to handle just about every media format out there. All in all, instead of dumping hundreds of dollars on a mediocre solution, I created an even nicer box out of spare parts all in about 24 hours. Neato!