Media Center Setup

This is the media center setup at home. Basically I have created two wireless networks using a DLink 7100 access point (which replaces my venerable Orinico RG1000), a 5Ghz 802.11a network is used to communicate the Media Center PC with the Xbox360, this is to be able to stream video without the bandwidth being affected by the other devices at home which are setup to use the 802.11g network.

The 801.11g performance will degrade when a device which is 801.11b is attached to it, and drop the bandwidth to 11Mbps which is not enough to stream video, that requires around 22Mpbs, this is why is good to split in two sub networks.

On the Media Center PC I have setup Transcode 360 that will allow me to access to the DivX files from Xbox360, since it doesn't support MPEG4.

The setup works very nicely, with some glitches sometimes happening on the Media Center PC, when iTunes or Windows opens blocking dialogs. The Media Center is connected to the TV antenna, and decodes DTT (Digital Terrestrial Television), so I can watch and record TV from the Xbox 360 on the living room.

The PC is a HP m7280, it's got a dual code CPU, Pentium 820D, running at 2.8Ghz, and 2Gb DDR RAM. The sound card outputs 7.1 channels using a digital coaxial link, and the graphics card is a ATI x600 with 256Mb, not very impressive but decent. One of the nicest features of this PC is a removable USB disk with 160Gb that is inserted in the PC that can be detached. It is very handy to moving large files like video from one place to another.

For sound I have connected the PC to a Onkyo amplifier connected to low end JBL speakers, outputs 75watts per channel, it is not hi-fi but the sound it excellent for movies and games.

On the Internet connection side, I have re-flashed the 3COM router from Telefonica, which is already 4 years old, and configured it to connect using PPPoE. I found that this is an excellent router, with plenty of configuration capabilities, and a very good Web UI for configuration. The steps provided in ADSLNet . This router has plenty of security issues found, and there is many patches, but I am sticking to the oldest version of the firmware, 1.7 because I have the theory that nobody probably cares anymore about this antique anymore. :)