After my recent musings on a Media Center 2005 PC I've decided that I'd rather build one than buy one. The idea is to place this box near the TV so I needed it to be fairly small and fairly quiet.

Here's what I've put together so far. It's working pretty well although I don't yet have a TV tuner card so things may go horribly wrong :-)

I've gone for a Shuttle SN85G4V2 case with their motherboard (and a nice handy integrated card reader on the front). Into that I've placed;

• AMD Athlon 64 - the 2800+ in particular. I tried to keep the "spec" down a little here in a hope that this would also keep the heat and the fan noise down a little.
• 1GB PC3200 RAM.
• 200GB Seagate Barracuda IDE Hard-drive (7200 rpm) - I went IDE for this as there seem to be some "complexities" around getting one of these motherboards from Shuttle to install a clean copy of Windows from a SATA drive and I didn't want the hassle.
• ASUS V9520/GeForce FX 5200. I went for this because it doesn't have a fan strapped on it adding to the noise. I figured (from reading around a lot) that it was sufficient to do the job for Media Center and, so far, it seems fine.
• NEC ND-3500A Dual Layer DVD/RW (an OEM'd version of it)
• NVidia DVD Decoder - you'll need a decoder if you want to play DVDs as, just like Windows XP, you don't get one thrown in.

What I've yet to get hold of is a TV Tuner card and a remote control so I'm currently running with a keyboard (which works fine but is less than popular in the living room).

I haven't got a TV Tuner card because the Shuttle is limited in terms of PCI slots (i.e. one!) and I'd like to have 2 TV Tuners within the box so I can do the "watch and record at the same time" thing. However, the new dual-tuner cards (NVTV, PVR-500) aren't quite available to be bought right now so I'm in a holding pattern until somebody ships one of these things (I've heard positive stories around both).

Other than that, my Media Center is up and running. I've copied about 2GB of photos onto it and around 10GB of music and it's playing DVD's quite nicely with full 5.1 surround sound going from the Media Center box into my surround sound amplifier.

I spent quite a while trying to get a decent picture out of Media Center on my old CRT TV. In the end it's not bad at all (and it's fine when you switch to watching DVDs) but it's clear that if you had a good quality LCD screen then the experience would be a whole lot more crisp and clear. I did the setup for the box on a 17" LCD monitor and the quality from across the room was excellent. I had originally wondered whether you would want a wireless keyboard in the living room so that you could (for instance) do a quick spot of web browsing but, certainly on my CRT, that wouldn't really work.

The PC is running pretty quietly. If I turn the volume down to zero then you can hear it but it's not bad at all and I haven't yet looked at whether I can ramp down the fan a little more (the Shuttle's cooling system seems to be doing a reasonable job).

I'm also interested in finding a decent way to rip DVD's down to DivX so that I can store a few of those on the hard-drive or at least have them on another hard-drive to copy over without having to wait for ever for the copy to complete.

So far, I've tried an awful lot of converters that go from DVD to DivX and I've not found one that really works. There's a huge number that produce poor video quality and the one that I really like (which is Dr. DivX from here) produces great video quality but seems to get the audio wrong.

If anyone knows of a great DVD->DivX converter (that I can try before I buy) then I'd be obliged.