Build Your Own Media Center

[Mike]

BUILD YOUR OWN MEDIA CENTER

A PICTORIAL GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS

Written by bella

Special thanks go to Davis Hampson, Pantonius, GlenR, Chris Maddern for their editing assistance!

The guide comprises of the following sections:

Part 1: Budget and Research
Part 2: Building the Mediacenter
Part 3: Install Windows Mediacenter Operating System
Part 4: Make Back Ups
Part 5: Install Updates and Continue Building
Part 6: Install the Mediacenter Video Decoder and FFDshow
Part 7: Windows Media Center Setup
Part 8: Media Center Plug-ins
Part 9: Re-install Media Center
Part 10: Connect Your PC To Your TV
Part 11: Problem Solving

This guide is designed for beginners and has been kept as simple and easy to use as possible. It describes the path I have taken to successfully build a Media Center PC. It is been based entirely on my own experiences building my first Media Center PC from scratch and details the specific parts I used. If you are going to use different components such as CPU or AGP/PCIe cards, please refer to the manufacturer's guide and replace my text with theirs.

Photos and examples used in this guide are from the parts I used in my build and a few pics from my other PC.

This Media Center was build to a strict budget. With the MCE remote included the total cost came to $861.00 Aussie Dollars.

I hope my experience will help to answer any questions you may have and if you have ideas for additions or find any errors, please let me know or send me your contribution by PM or let's discuss it below - however I don't want to discuss which PC parts would have been better etc because it's too late now

In addition to the assistance provided by the people mentioned above, I would also like to thank the hundreds, if not thousands of members of this community for adding to my/our collective knowledge - without all this I would never have attempted this adventure!

bella

Download the guide as a PDF
Download the guide as a zipped HTML document

[Mike]

OUTSTANDING BELLA!!

Many of us have talked about doing this but you actually did it - big effort and on behalf of us all - THANK YOU!

Now let's see how many rep points you can build up after providing this - plenty I hope - so let's start the ball rolling with a bunch from me

Mike

[blackjet]

Thankyou, Excellent.!!!! This document should be compulsory reading for everyone who joins this community...needs to be pinned to the top of the community page and the new posts page..

[bella]

A special word of appreciation for Mike our administrator who spent an unbelievable amount of time in getting this article in the right shape.

Few people realise what amount of time he spends on keeping this site up and running.

eddy

[philzgr8]

Great effort Bella. I'm sure there will be countless users who will greatly benefit by the amount of work you have put in.
Cheers

Phil

[arkay]

Yep, thumbs up Bella. Great job!

Cheers,

Arkay.

[bella]

My article a STICKY? I must be dreaming!

[bella]

I was.

[Mike]

No you weren't:

"Sticky: Build Your Own Media Center"

[egsi]

Awesome Article. Just letting you know we appreciate the time you put into it!

[bella]

Thanks Egsi,

It took a while to complete it but I really enyoed doing it.

[Mike]

I received a PM from NevilleW telling me that he'd converted the HTML version of Bella's guide to PDF for easier printing and making notes.

He also uploaded it to Mediafire to save me bandwith and since every bit helps, I see no reason to change that.

I've edited the first post in this thread providing a link to the PDF and also added one below, if however at some point the file becomes unavailable, please PM me and I'll activate the copy I have on my server.

Great idea and much appreciated Neville!

Mike

Download Bella's guide as a PDF