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I just ordered a new workhorse PC with Windows Media Center loaded. I am a first time owner of Media Center. The question I have is: Can I keep the PC in my office, using it as my work/gaming PC and setup a remote usage so I can use it in my home theater as well. In other words, I would like to be able to use my PC from my theater couch on my DLP television with the PC itself, 40 feet away in another room.

Ideally, the PC would store music, videos, photos, games and could all be accessed from my couch without the PC actually being in the theater.

-Dave

That would involve some long cables (and possibly a video amplifier) and a remote control extender.

I was hoping for a wireless solution that would be cheaper than a second PC. I know wirelss keyboard and mouse exists. I guess the problem becomes the broadband video signal transmission. There is coax, and cat5, and obviously wireless, between the two locations. Anyone know of any "black box" that will allow KVM(HD)and 5.1 Audio over any of the three mediums?

I guess it is pretty far fetched although I see a market opportunity here....

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I was hoping for a wireless solution that would be cheaper than a second PC. I know wirelss keyboard and mouse exists. I guess the problem becomes the broadband video signal transmission. There is coax, and cat5, and obviously wireless, between the two locations. Anyone know of any "black box" that will allow KVM(HD)and 5.1 Audio over any of the three mediums?

I guess it is pretty far fetched although I see a market opportunity here....

I beleive this terminal will get you 80% of the way there. The only thing it lacks is the 5.1 output. For that, you will probably have to run cables all the way back. Or find a second solution to work along side this one.

I understand you can use and XBox 360 as an extender. Or so I've been told.

Yes, I was about to say that you can use an Xbox 360 as a Media Centre PC extender in any room and any tv in your house. It will play any media files that are on your Windows Media Centre PC while connected to the network.

All you need is a cat5 cable or a wireless adapter for the X360 and a wireless router.

Oh yeah, and a $400-500 box...

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Oh yeah, and a $400-500 box...

In the states you can get the Core version for probably under $350 right now (if there are specials up here in Canada for $397!). It also has alot of good quality 2nd gen games on it now!

Wait until the new year for a price drop and a better, smaller, processing chip.

I had just posted this thread about 360's being used as extenders if you want to check it out.

The cheap (core) Xbox 360 works fine as an extender. Microcenter had an in store special selling it for 200$ after rebate. It's normally 300$ everywhere in the US.

Do any of you use media center to store DVD'S for playback on projector or Tv?
David

/raises hand

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/raises hand

Ok you my answer ?

Do you copy as is or do you shrink with program?
I would like to save my dvd's and sort by catagory.
Thinking of using external harddrive.
thanks for any advise you could give.

David

OK

You will want this AWESOME plugin for MCE - My Movies

Now the next question is, encode or just shrink. What I do is encode the movies I don't care too much about to mpeg4 to save space. The others I shrink the entire DVD to ISO format which can preserve the menus and everything if you want. The latter just eats up a ton of hard drive space.

To encode to mpeg4 you can do lots of things, I use DVD Decrypter and AutoGK to get the job done.

To simply shrink or rip the DVD to ISO I use DVD Shrink.

To play those ISO's in My Movies you need Daemon Tools.

What you end up with is an onscreen, searchable, browsable database of your movies using the My Movies plugin. Another outstanding thing about is you can enter your movies into its database but tell it to leave the movie offline. So if you selected it to play it will tell you to go find the disk and put it in the DVD drive. If you have a numbering system it could tell you what number to go grab out of your DVD shelf, etc.

Ripping the movies to the hard drive does take some time, but for me and many of my friends it's not something we'd give up. Couple of my buddies love it because it keeps their kids from ruining their disks.