Making use of my outgoing PC...

I'm going to get a new PC soon and I was wondering what to do with the old one. Leave it in a cupboard, make a Call of Duty LAN, test my programmes etc... then a friend suggested I use it in my lounge as a media centre: to record tv, schedule recording etc, with Windows Media Centre.

Anyone know a good tutorial on what extra parts/cards/software I'd need etc?

Get an old arcade cabinet and build a MAME machine :)

You'd probably need a more spiffy PC than that to run WinXP Media Center Edition. All you need is a TV Tuner and Video Capture card. You may not actually need the TV tuner if you're planning on recording the output from your TV.

Really? I didn't realise, I thought it wasn't so intensive a task... I've got cable so I'd go from the set top box to the PC.

I did the same and after trying a few apps I ended up using MediaPortal (www.team-mediaportal.com)
It's an opensource media centre replacement, pretty stable, good community, well supported, regular updates and most importantly, doesn't need a monster machine - your spec should do just fine. I'm running it on a 1.4Ghz Celeron machine with 1Gb of RAM and a Geforce 4MX - no problem.

I use a pretty similar set up with no problems (Using a GF5200).

I just bought a cheap Digital TV card (Compro DVB-T200) and installed Media Portal.

It works a treat.

[edit]
Bugger...Just noticed the cable thing...and Elf beat me to the Media portal recommendation...It is really rather good though.

Oh...and I got an OEM MCE remote kit for about £15-20 to control it all!
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That machine is plenty good for a media center box.

I would go with SageTV though as it has the best feature set for it's ease of setup. And I've tried them all. The only setup that was better was MythTV (linux) but it's a nightmare to get set up correctly, and if you breath on it funny it might crash (though I've heard that recent updates might have fixed the stability issues). Media Portal was decent but it wasn't polished enough for my tastes.

The only thing you'll need other than what you have now is a tuner card (a hauppauge 150 will be plenty good enough) with HARDWARE MPEG SUPPORT, and if you want the computer to do the channel changing you'll need a USBIR receiver/transmitter and IR transmitter led cable. Other than that you should be good.

Wicked, thanks guys. One thing - my cable box doesn't have the same IR standards as the rest of my remotes. I recently got a universal remote from Kameleon and it won't learn the cable box functions. I contacted them and they said:

Would this be a problem for the media centre to change the channels too?

Red-Eye...Not a particularly cheap solution though. :o/

http://www.usbuirt.com/

It MIGHT have a problem... what's the cable box name/model? I'd shoot that info to the usb-uirt people and find out.

I don't think it'll work as is. I've seen Red-Eye mentioned in conjunction with USB-UIRT on many occasions for controlling NTL/Telewest cable boxes.