August 23rd, 2007
Vista Media Center takes over the living room
Cabling and connections
I had read horror stories about flaky, inconsistent HDMI connections, so I was prepared for the worst when it came to connecting the video outputs. I have a DirecTV HD-DVR with HDMI output, and the ATI Radeon 1300 Pro card that came with this Dell included a DVI-to-HDMI cable. I ran both those cables to the HDMI inputs on the Onkyo SR-505 receiver and then connected the HDMI output from the receiver to the TV. And …
It worked. No hassles, no lost connectivity when switching between signal sources, perfect quality images. It typically takes a second or two for the signal to re-sync after I switch inputs, but that doesn’t even rise to the level of annoying.
And the single most important piece of hardware, the glue that ties it all together, is the Logitech Harmony 680 remote control. We’ve been using this remote (alas, now discontinued) for a year or two now, and it only took about 20 minutes at Logitech’s website to enter the model numbers of my equipment, pick the activities I wanted the remote to offer, and download the saved settings via a USB cable. This is the only all-in-one remote I have ever been completely happy with (and I’ve tried them all).
Stability and reliability
What can I say? This thing just keeps running and running. The Windows Reliability Monitor index would be a perfect 10 except for a couple of power outages, one my fault and the other caused by our local electric company. (Note to self: The living room could use an uninterruptible power supply.) In six weeks of every activity, it hasn’t hung, slowed down, or refused to appear when commanded.
The only glitch I’ve seen is an odd one: Twice in the last month the audio has stopped working for no apparent reason. The first time it occurred, I thought a power surge had blown out the sound card, but after troubleshooting every physical connection and coming up empty I was able to fix it by reinstalling the Creative drivers. The second time it happened, I was able to restore audio in a few seconds by switching to the analog connection and then switching back to the default digital connection. If it happens again I’ll talk with Creative and Microsoft and see if they have any clues.
The bottom line
This will drive the Vista-haters crazy, but it has to be said anyway: When people see this system in operation, they actually say “Wow.” They’re especially impressed by themed slide shows from Photo Gallery, which are much more visually appealing than the default Media Center options. Without exception, everyone who sees it asks what software I’m using. They’re invariably surprised when I tell them it’s Windows Vista Home Premium, with no extras.
It’s surprising how much you can do with the 10-foot interface as well. When I plug a digital camera into the front-panel USB jacks, a Media Center dialog box pops up so I can import the pictures and view them immediately. At a gathering of family and friends a few weeks ago, four people were shooting photos during the course of the party. At the end of the evening I imported everyone’s photos to a Media Center folder and then put on an impromptu “instant replay” slide show.
Although I put a TV tuner card in this system, I hadn’t originally intended to use this feature right away. But just for fun I decided to hook up a tiny indoor HD antenna to see what kind of reception I could get. I was shocked to find that the antenna successfully pulled in all but one local digital station. The tuner, in fact, was much more sensitive than the over-the-air tuner in our old DirecTiVo or the new HD-DVR. This coming weekend, I’m adding an outdoor antenna and connecting an SD DirecTV box to the other tuner input.
All of the media files on the 500GB drive are shared over the network. On my office PC, I’ve set up Windows Photo Gallery to connect directly to the shared photos folder so I can tag, sort, crop, and repair images from the more comfortable two-foot interface. The music collection is shared with every PC in the house as well, which means I no longer have to struggle to keep each of these collections in sync.
And everything is backed up perfectly, thanks to a Windows Home Server box that I’ll be writing about next. The system backs itself up automatically every night, and I’ve tested its restore capabilities to confirm that it really is working.
I haven’t spent any time at all benchmarking this system. It gets a 4.2 on the Windows Experience Index and it’s impressively fast in every operation I’ve tried so far, but anyone who’s ever put together a home theater system knows that speeds and feeds pale in comparison to the only metric that matters: Spousal Acceptance Factor (SAF). I asked my wife, Judy, to rate this system on a scale of 1 to 10. She gave it a solid 8.
That’s good enough for me.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 08/23/07
