Getting the Scoop on the Media Center Edition PC

A Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC embodies the evolution of the home PC from a powerful computing platform to a full-fledged digital media hub — a central gateway that consolidates your entertainment choices and allows you to access those choices with a single remote control. Through your MCE PC, you can control audio and video signals, DVDs and CDs, TVs and computer monitors, keyboards and remote controls. Anything you can do with your home-entertainment system, you can now do through your MCE PC. Way cool!

Media Center PCs are entertainment PCs because they're outfitted with the following:

Mid- to high-end processor: Media Center PCs sport the faster processors — at this writing, HP is shipping its Media Center PC with a 3.06-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor. Wow!
Tons of memory: MCE PCs have a minimum 256MB RAM (random access memory); most have 512MB or more.
High-capacity drives: All MCE PCs ship with at least an 80GB hard drive. Viewsonic's M2000 PC ships with a 160GB drive — enough space for 140 hours of video or thousands upon thousands of audio tracks.
CD and DVD drives: All MCE PCs have an optical drive that can play back CDs and DVDs. Many can record CDs, and a few can even record DVDs.
Advanced audio/video and graphics interfaces: MCE PCs have high-end audio and video cards that can handle digital audio and video — just like the chips inside a fancy home-theater receiver or a high-end digital television. The graphics card in an MCE PC can be used with both computer displays and televisions — at the same time. In MCE 2002 PCs, these graphics cards were typically members of the NVIDIA GeForce4 family of processors. MCE 2004 PCs will ship with either NVIDIA or ATI Radeon cards.
Surround sound speakers: To fully enjoy your movie soundtracks, you're going to need surround sound, just like you get in the theater. Surround sound 5.1, its official designation, consists of five speakers — front left, front right, front center, rear left, and rear right — plus a subwoofer for those deep booms when something gets blown to bits. Various computer manufacturers have teamed with the leading speaker vendors, such as HP and Klipsch, and Gateway and SoundBlaster.
Expansion slots: PCs are designed to grow up — they're like kids that way. So most desktop PCs have a bunch of expansion slots that enable you to add capabilities to the PC as your needs dictate. Laptop PCs, for reasons of space, have much less in the way of expansion. Most MCE PCs have the following types of expansion slots:
• Optical drive expansion slot: This is a slot for a second optical drive, so you could, for example, have a CD recorder in one slot and a DVD recorder in the other.

• Hard drive expansion slot: Many tower-style MCE PCs have a slot for a second hard drive for extra data storage.

• PCI expansion slots: Most MCE PC internal cards connect to a PCI bus, which interconnects any internal cards and sends data between them and the CPU. Extra PCI expansion slots leave room for additional cards, such as wireless network cards.

• Memory slots: You can expand the RAM in the MCE PC by simply inserting a memory card. The number of open memory slots depends on what was installed when your MCE PC was built. Unless you bought 1GB RAM or more, you should have slots available for adding additional RAM.

Networking connectivity: All MCE PCs have at least an Ethernet port for connecting to a wired home network. Many have built-in wireless networking systems as well, so you can hook up to a standard 802.11 wireless network.
In addition to these features, which are shared by many other computers, MCE PCs have a few unique requirements that Microsoft imposes on its MCE partner PC makers. These items are not found on your typical off-the-shelf PC. When you open your Media Center PC box, you're likely to find most or all of the following components to facilitate your entertainment experience:

A Media-Center-compatible remote control: All MCE PCs come with an infrared (IR) remote control that lets you sit across the room and control your MCE PC's audio, video, and digital photography functions without using the keyboard or mouse. You can even record live TV with a single press of a button.
A remote infrared sensor: All MCE PCs come with an IR sensor (usually connected to a USB port on the computer) that works with your remote control — the sensor picks up the IR (light) signals from the remote and sends them to the computer as commands. Many MCE PCs also include a capability for the IR sensor and remote control to pass standard commands (such as channel up or down) to your cable set-top box or digital satellite system (DSS) satellite receiver.
A TV tuner: All MCE PCs connect to a TV antenna, a cable TV feed, or the output of a cable set-top box or satellite receiver for TV viewing. The TV tuner is used with some other elements of the MCE PC (such as the hardware encoder) for recording live TV.
A hardware or software encoder: MCE PCs can record television programming onto your computer's hard drive for later playback and for neat features such as pausing live TV. A hardware encoder takes some of the load off the main CPU (the Pentium 4 or Athlon XP chip), making the recording and playback process work better and faster. The hardware encoder is a computer chip that converts video to and from a digital format known as MPEG. Some cards, like the ATI cards, use software encoding with a faster processor, instead of a hardware encoder.
A TV output: Although you can watch TV on the standard PC monitor attached to your MCE PC, all MCE PCs can also be connected directly to a TV — both traditional analog TVs and newer digital (or HDTV) TVs — so you can enjoy your MCE content on the big screen.
A radio tuner card: Some of the newest MCE PCs include an FM radio tuner that lets you pick up standard over-the-air FM broadcasts that you can listen to and record with your computer.
A digital audio output: If you have a home-theater system and an A/V (audio/video) receiver with digital connections (like the ones you use with many DVD players), you can interconnect these entertainment devices to the audio outputs of most MCE PCs. This type of digital connection gives you higher-fidelity (better-sounding) audio, and lets you listen to digital surround-sound content in all its multichannel glory.
This 5.1 channel digital audio will work only during DVD playback. Media Center doesn't support 5.1 digital surround sound for TV, even if your TV provider (digital cable or satellite) offers it.