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Is windows 2005 MCE worth it?

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: If you want to make it work as a PVR/TiVo, jukebox, etc hooked up to your stereo and TV, it's a lot of work, but a rewarding project. Prepare to replace hardware, search for drivers, and try every possible combination of software, drivers and settings. In the long run, once it's up and running, it's the best, most robust, most hackable PVR/media sytem available IMO.

If you just want to use it instead of Pro or Home on your desktop computer with a monitor, go for it. There's no reason not to.
 
I think that Mythtv is quite a bit more flexible then MCE. You can have multiple front ends (display computers) and multiple backends (storage, database, video capture computers).

Your not limited to 3 cards, and you can have multiple video sources (MCE is limited to one source at a time). So if you own a redneck-style 8 foot sattalite dish, or a digital dish, or digital cable + standard cable you can have a capture card (or several) for each and have them all work together.

Then there are a veriaty of modules to extend the capabilities of the device, plus you can run older tv cards that don't have hardware encoders (but the best you can get for Linux is Hauppauge WinPVR-250 and 350 series). For broadcasted HDTV you can get the HDTVpc card, which only works in Linux, although I don't know if it works with Mythtv, yet. (it will eventually if not already)

There is no DRM associated and the formats you record in can be played back with regular free software.

With other software such as VLC media player and Icecast you can setup video and audio streams, even over the internet, if you have the bandwidth.

My Mythtv setup consisted of a Hauppauge WinPVR-250 and a ATI Wonder VE video capture cards. The Hauppauge includes a hardware encorder and it would work with MCE. The ATI Wonder is NOT a All-in-Wonder card (newer ones don't work in Linux), it's just a plane-jane bt848-based (thats the chipset) video capture card. You have to use your CPU to encode in software. bt848 and bt878 can be had for low low bucks and are the most generic cards you can get that still give decent picture quality and work with Linux.


Then there are other aspects of Linux that are nice due to it's role in server rooms. Such as the ability to have very high quality software RAID. (best OS for that that I know of) and is superior in performance to all motherboard-based RAID 0/1, and even most of the decent hardware-based RAID setups you can get.

Of course it's not as nice and real hardware raid (almost all onboard RAID are realy software RAID, they are like WinModems or software modems were they use special drivers to unload the work on the CPU).

With a good dual cpu box, a hauppauge winpvr capture card with hardware encoder, and 2 cheaper cards. On top of that if you get 4-5 200 gig harddrives and run them in RAID 5 configuration. Put that guy in the closet or something.

Then use a Xbox or a Mini-ITX box or a very quiet computer for your living room you can have a nice setup for a couple thousand dollars or so. If your a real TV freak you could have a half a dozen computers in the basement and have every channel you watch being recorded 24/7 (probably at a fairly high compression) and you can pick and choose what you want to watch when you want to watch it.

Or you can be like me and have a old capture card laying around, buy a 130 dollar WinPVR-250, a extra 120gig WD harddrive, stick all that in my desktop computer use that as a backend, then take a freebee 800mhz celeron PC box and use that as a front end via a Nvidia card with TV-out. Then you can have a workable solution for a couple hundred bucks.

Either way it's a nice, flexible solution. (there are even Mythtv front ends for Windows if you want.)

Trouble is that you have to know a bit about Linux. It's not incredebly difficult setting up a simple Mythtv box. About as hard as getting a W2k box installed on a Raid 0 card and gettng it all up to date with the newest drivers and such... If your already a bit familar with Linux.

people like this have pre-made packages and directions aviable for building a box from the Fedora Core linux distro.

It's kinda interesting if it's your thing.

Or you can go with MCE. It has the advantage of having cheap special purpose front ends called media extenders.
 
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