HD Beat is endeavouring to put together an HDTV Media Center PC for less than a thousand smacks.

The closest I ever came to a Media Center PC is my VAIO desktop with a tuner card and PVR software. I used it for a little while. I sent the audio and video over cables to my TV in the other room. There was no direct line of sight for my remote, so I set up something to bounce the signal off of. (The VAIO came with a remote.) It actually worked, though it was a bit of a pain to always aim the remote just so. Once Rogers offered their own PVR to us Canucks I switched an the experience has been much for the better. And thus ended my media center experiment.

But the next generation of consoles threatens to bring it back. Since I’ll be buying one anyway, if the PS3 can stream content from my PC I’ll have to start thinking media again. Although I guess the PC in this case would be more storage than media center.

HD Beat - HDTV Media Center for Under a Grand
HD Beat - Sub-grand WMCE 1: the base system
HD Beat - Sub-grand WMCE 2: more memory and better graphics
HD Beat - Sub-grand WMCE 3: add the HDTV tuner card