Media Centre III - The Reckoning

Well, we've made some headway with my Media Centre trial! After the PC spent a week "Updating Media Library...", it's finished! And it works! I didn't change anything - I jsut left both machines on for a week, and left them alone. Even if I change some ID3 tags, or move some mp3's around on the source PC, it only takes a 5 mins to update the library on the media centre machine, and then it's right again! I had feared that it would require another week to sync up, but it seems to be smarter than that. I had turned off the "Retrieve additional information from the Internet" option on the media centre machine, but I'm not sure if it actually made a difference. I'm planning on turning it back on, and seeing if it needs to re-index the share.

So why did it take a week to do it's initial sync? No idea! Am I happy that it's finished? Yes!

The hardware is starting to show through a bit now - scrolling through the media library is slow, and occasionally the music playback will pause for a second as the PC needs to do something more important. But overall, I think it's acquitted itself very well, given the very old and basic hardware that it's being run on. It certainly is running better than I expected, and better than it has any right to. I might try upgrading the RAM to more than the 1Gb that it's currently got, but I suspect it's still mainly CPU bound.

Media Centre, however, has past the acceptance test. Jess was using it over the weekend, and was easily able to find the album she wanted to play and get it going. I particularly like the "now playing" screen with the album art scrolling down in the background - very visually effective, and good for our plasma TV, since the screen image is constantly changing.

The next step will be to budget for an upgrade to the main PC, which will allow us to shuffle it's current insides down to the media centre machine, and give it a fair upgrade in the power stakes. I'm reasonably confident that that will see Media Centre start to really hum along. In the meantime though, even with the slight performance issues, it's sold on me.