Media Extender

Willow

Does anyone have any experience with one of these? what is the quality of the picture and sound.

I am finding buying blank dvds becoming expensive (esp. the 8gs dvd)
My PC is in a spare room and the HT on the main floor. I wouldn't mind running movies and such from my HD to my HT.

Thanks

bobman1235

I just built a second computer and networked it in and put it next to my HT. Added bonus of surfing the web from teh couch

Willow

can you record HDTV ? in 5.1 and 720P 1080i ?

bobman1235

No....

I thought you were just talking about something to broadcast stuff from your PC to your HT. Is a "Media Extender" a specific product? If so, could you provide a link?

Willow

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?sku_id=0665000FS10053744&logon=&langid=EN

TheReaper

The LinkSys and HP Media Extenders, are extenders for Windows XP Media Center Edition. They give you remote access to the media and services on a pc running xpMCE (abreviation for above). So I hope your pc in the other room is an xpMCE box.

Your best bet to find out information would be to check out some xpMCE forums, which also usually have a section for Media Extenders.

http://www.thegreenbutton.com/community/
http://www.xpmce.com/forum/
The AVSFORUM (I forget the url) also has a section.

Like bobman1235 I just hook my pc directly up to my HDTV (no monitor) and Onkyo receiver (spdif optical). I am running xpMCE, the Media Extenders support most but not all of the Media Center Functions. So I can offer a little information.

Record HDTV, haha (it's either laugh or cry, as I only get cable). Heres the catch, MCE only supports Over The Air HDTV channels (with an OTA HDTV tuner card + regular tuner card). Cable HDTV support supposedly will come with Windows Vista (end of 2006?). I don't know whether extenders support HDTV (from master xpMCE pc) or not, they do support viewing regular (analog) tv from a tuner card in the master xpMCE pc.

As a little expansion, I have HD cable, so I have my cable box connected both to my tv via Component, and to my pc via SVideo. My MCE remote has an IR blaster to change the channels on my hd cable box, and I have my hd cable box set to do an anamorphic squish on 16:9 content (hd channels) that goes out the SVideo. So I do get the HD channels in xpMCE on my pc, and can record them (and make widescreen DVDs). The quality of the HD channels is very good, but not quite as good as DVD (better than normal channels). So if I did have an extender, I could watch the HD channels and recordings of them, but they wouldn't be HD, they are actually SD (down conversions). Confused yet?

ps. there is also an MCE Media Extender for the xbox360.

michael_w

For $400 you could almost build yourself a cheap computer simply for streaming audio and video from your computer using a program like Orb. (link) Don't need a fancy computer if it's just for streaming either....

Another option would be to buy cheap 4.7 gig dvd's like these from futureshop (or some other cheap ones). You can fit a full movie on a single layer dvd using a program called dvd shrink, if you don't already use it. You get to choose where the compression takes place to bring it down to fit on the single layer dvd. I usually take out any extra audio tracks or languages and compress all the extras as much as possible, which usually leaves the actual movie quite nicely intact.

Willow

Thanks for all the info.

I think I'll just stick with a spindle of 50 DVD for 17.50$ and find DVD shrink.

michael_w

http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/CD-DVD-Rip-Other-Tools/DVD-Shrink.shtml

Lemme know if you need any help using it.