Windows of opportunity: XP Media Center Edition

You can already watch television and DVDs on your PC, but who wants to watch a film perched on a swivel chair in a home office?

The launch of Windows XP Media Center Edition aims to migrate your PC to your living room, replacing your video recorder and DVD player to become the main entertainment system in your home.

Don't worry about having to live with a noisy, beige box; today's Windows XP Media Center PCs are quiet and look good enough to grace any living room.

Simplifying matters
The concept of the 'home theatre PC' or multimedia computer is not new, but putting together your own home entertainment PC means fiddling around with a lot of hardware and software.

What's more, using different software for different features, such as playing your MP3 music files or recording a TV programme, gets confusing and you may end up with a sizeable collection of remote controls.

Windows Media Center aims to bring together all of these features in one easy-to-use system. You can use Media Center to watch and record television, play CDs, DVDs and MP3s stored on your computer.

You can even create slide shows using your digital photos and relive your summer holiday from the comfort of your sofa.

Distinguishing features
What gives a Media Center PC away is the remote control, which is not necessarily a standard PC accessory. It looks similar to any other remote control, apart from a large green button with the Windows logo on it.

Pressing this launches the Media Center application, which has a single main menu that gives access to all the major applications. Navigation is very simple using the arrow buttons and you can always press the 'back' button to retrace your steps.

Box of tricks
No doubt you already have a video recorder and DVD player in your living room that work well enough, so why fix something that's not broken?

For one thing, having a single box that performs so many entertainment functions reduces the number of remote controls you have to fish out from the back of the sofa and should make life simpler.

Also, using a PC in this way means that you can also read email or surf the web without having to retreat to your home office.

One of the most handy features of Media Center is the function that allows you to 'pause' live TV.

As soon as the first TV tuner cards for PCs became available, there was a lot of excitement about this function, which lets you pause your favourite TV programme if the phone rings and pick up where you left off when you're ready.

What actually happens when you hit the pause button is that the computer starts recording the programme but freezes the action on your screen. When you press the pause button again, the computer plays the recorded programme from where you left off but keeps recording the rest of it at the same time.

This means that you can also fast forward any ad breaks when you start watching the programme again.

Turn on, tune in
Windows Media Center PCs can be supplied with either analogue or digital TV tuner cards. Now that there are plenty of channels available on Freeview, there is no reason to avoid digital, especially as it offers better quality.

Media Center has a helpful guide to help you tune in to all the available channels and an EPG (Electronic Programme Guide), which is updated from the internet.

The EPG categorises programmes by subject, which makes searching for a specific programme that much easier, and it is also possible to tell Media Center to record a whole series of programmes with just a few presses of a button.

Because Media Center PCs are designed to store large amounts of video, they feature pretty large hard disks. To give you some idea of the number of recorded TV programmes you'll be able to store on there, a 120Gb hard disk should give you about 40 hours of footage recorded on the highest quality setting.

There are lots of options for deciding what to keep and what to delete when space becomes tight. If you really want to keep an episode, you can mark it never to be deleted and you can copy recordings to a CD or DVD.

At present, there is no way to edit programmes in Media Center, but other software companies are planning to launch products that will make this possible.

Microsoft has included a copy protection feature in its video file format, so there could well be restrictions on this in the future.

The grass is always greener
There are some potential drawbacks to the system. Media Center works on the assumption that everybody has a permanent broadband internet connection and some options won't work properly without one, which can become frustrating.

The other drawback is that the sofa is not necessarily the workspace you need if you're working with a word processing application or spreadsheet, so you lose some of the practicality of a PC by putting it in the living room.

These aren't major faults, though. If you want a home theatre PC without the hassle of building one yourself, Windows Media Center is an excellent option.

Microsoft has put all of the features you could want in your living room into one box and given the software a friendly feel, and with PC manufacturers offering a variety of different styles of Media Center PCs, you are bound to find a model that will fit into your home.

Where to buy a Media Center PC

CFL Systems 01446 775985
www.cfl-systems.com

Elonex 020 8452 2444
www.elonex.co.uk

Evesham Technologies 0870 160 9500
www.evesham.com

Hi-Grade 020 8532 6111
www.higrade.com

HP 0845 270 4222
www.hp.com/uk

Hugh Symons 0870 849 0226
www.hughsymons.com

Mesh 0870 046 4747
www.meshcomputers.com

Packard Bell (PC World 0845 601 4901)
www.pcworld.co.uk

Quantum Microponents 0870 4000 122
www.quantum-micro.com

Time 0870 8303116
www.timecomputers.com

Toshiba 0870 444 8944
www.toshiba.co.uk

Prices from £1,000-£1,800. See www.computeractive.co.uk/activeprices for details.