Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds

There is a My Movies browser that can be installed into Vista's Media Center, but it looks like crap. Mike Andrawes (he was around from the early days of AT) recommended Video Browser for Vista MCE. There's a beta version of it available that you can find here.

The beta version enables a new browser mode that you can see below:

This is how you browse for movies

I simply created a file called Gigantor.vf and put the line "folder: G:\" in it and placed the file in my Vista-created My Videos folder. The G:\ drive in this case was a mapped network drive that pointed to the movies directory on my file server.

Under Pictures and Videos in Media Center, select video browser, hit the view button once to change to the new browser mode and when configured you'll get a screen that looks like what I showed above.

You can navigate through titles using a Media Center remote or keyboard, the UI is pretty slick although the beta version does have some bugs in it presently. I had to reboot the system to get the new browser mode to work properly and list view is the default which can't be changed, but this thing has potential. I'm betting that by the time I'm actually ready to deploy the HTPC that there will be some reasonably polished options for browsing content.

That's the quick and dirty setup, I had to install DirectVobSub for subtitle support. I also played around with ngRC which lets you control Media Center from any web enabled device, but it's not exactly the polished iPhone interface I'm looking for.

A crude method of iPhone Media Center control, but it's a step in the right direction...

Final Words

The HTPC is an ongoing project, while the Athlon X2 4850e is more than fast enough for watching 1080p content, actually interacting with the system and multitasking can be a little sluggish for my taste. Of course I generally only run into these problems when I'm actually setting it up so it's possible that it is bothering me more now than it will when the HTPC is just being used to watch movies.

At this point all I can conclude is that the AMD 780G seems to work very well and the Gigabyte board is quite polished, whereas the ASUS M3N78-EMH HDMI looks like it needs a little more work to be equally solid. If you've got an AMD CPU that you're looking to put in a HTPC, at this point I'd have to recommend the 780G chipset.

I've completely ignored Intel here, but I'll save that for a future installment. It turns out that the G35 chipset paired up with a Core 2 Duo E7200 could be an interesting combination, and whenever the G45 makes its debut there's a strong chance that it could become the platform to beat.