I'm not really looking into using Vista, but I'd thought I'd make it available....

The media centre's PC specs are as follows:
DFI LANParty Dark P35-T2RS
Intel E2180 Dual Core CPU
2GB Crucial Ballistix 800MHz PC6400 DDR2
2x 300GB Seagate SATAII drives
ATI 2600HD XT PCI Express video card
PC Power & Cooling 480W PSU

The question is, how do want to manage your media files?
If you won't use the windows integrated media center thing the normal XP will fit your needs absolutely. I've tried XP media center and I wasn't really impressed by it - I'll keep managing my media files in other apps or simply in a good folder structure.

If you plan using HD content there's also no need for vista, XP can do this too.

Please don't consider this as a statement against vista, I have both running, XP and Vista, so finally it's a matter of your personal preference which OS you take.

Well, I don't really watch much TV at the moment on the big TV, but I want to use the media centre PC for watching streaming TV from TVUnetworks, SOPCast, and others on it too.  

Generally I watch regular TV on my main PC and use one of my three monitors on my main PC for TV watching while surfing websites, etc... on the other two.  

I think I would use my main PC for holding all the mp3s, movies, and other content and stream audio and video from it.  As far as recording goes, I have a Leadtek PVR2000 TV Tuner with hardware chips for encoding and decoding, but that will probably stay in my main PC as I'm more likely to have that PC on for when the show airs that I want to record.   8-)

I bought a Cooler Master CM-282 case for the media centre PC so it has a remote for controlling the O/S functions, however, I'm considering getting a wireless keyboard & mouse.  I have never played with XP Media Centre, so I was curious about it.

As for the media player...  I have always used Winamp and VLC media player for any machine.  I only use Windows Media Player if I have to.  I have a BeyondTV account and they provide a basic media interface and player too.  I have tried it, but would like something more feature rich with a polished look.

I use Windows 2000 Pro on mine, so far it handles everything I can throw at it.

I doubt that is a good option considering the hardware you will be running ;-)

If the Hardware is supported, I'd give some of the Linux packages a look.

I haven't heard good things about the Windows MediaCenter editions (any version).

@Gary - With the hardware I have, Win2K would run really fast...  :)  I will do a more granular custom install for this PC as I won't need features on it that I would normally want on a regular XP Pro PC.

@Falconfly - The best PVR software is MythTV but it's for Linux based machines.  However, you have to pay for the TV listing subscriptions.  Since I paid for a BeyondTV license, I would want to keep this media centre PC Windows based, as I would like to offload the TV tuner in the future to this machine.  BeyondTV has unlimited free TV listing subscription.

razrx wrote on 06.09.08 at 14:38:31:

@Gary - With the hardware I have, Win2K would run really fast...  :)  I will do a more granular custom install for this PC as I won't need features on it that I would normally want on a regular XP Pro PC.

I ran into big problems trying to run 2000 on a modern platform, with ATI drivers in paticular. Win2k support is in theroy with XP drivers but in practice a different thing.

Nothing to lose trying a Win2kpro install, you can always wipe the drive if it doesn't work out.

So if you already know which apps you want use, there's no need for a special media center OS. XP media center is as far is I experienced nothing more than a normal XP with this funny media center application as bonus.

Some years ago i would use a program called GeexBox (here is the site  http://geexbox.org/en/index.html) that i could boot-up on to any system and have all the functionality of a media pc without the need for an OS. Don't know if it's still used becasue i needed to use my remote & then Bluetoth keyboard that were not supported at the time. So I tried also Win MCE and all the features would work with certified MCE remotes or some MS b.s. like that...
So now i use WinXP with the tv tuner remote/ blue-tooth keyboard and am very satisfied with this set-up.