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How to build your own PC - Part 8 - The Finale

Technology editor Chris Gardner, with the help of Need A Nerd, demystifies the personal computer by building a media centre from scratch. This week they look at using Windows 7 to listen to music, watch DVDs and live TV.

The ability to play music and watch DVDs on your computer had been built into Windows since 1998 when Microsoft built Windows Media Player into Windows 98.

Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest operating system, comes with Windows Media Player 12 pre installed, which is ideal for listening to CDs and copying them to the hard drive or an MP3 player and playing DVDs, but most people won’t find the more functional Windows Media Center, with which you can also watch and record TV providing you have a digital TV tuner installed, unless they go hunting for it.

Media Centre can be found in the Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise editions of Windows 7 by clicking Start>All Programs>Windows Media Center.

The first time Windows Media Center is started it needs to be setup and most users can get away with running the Express setup which will detect any digital television tuner, installed, and tune into the channels available on Freeview.

Before running Windows Media Center for the first time its necessary to have a Freeview compatible television aerial installed and connected  to the computer.  In the case of the Hauppauge! WinTV-NOVA-TD-500 digital television tuner, recommended by Need A Nerd, a cable splitter is needed to provide two cables which plug into the tuner’s dual sockets at the back of the console. The tuner, which is capable of recording two channels simultaneously, will only record one if only one aerial cable is plugged in.

Once it’s set up Windows Media Center can be used to play CDs and digital music files ripped to your Music folder.

Windows Media Player 12, which is configured to rip CDs into Microsoft’s WMA files, can easily be configured to rip more future proof MP3 files by clicking on Rip settings and changing the file format to MP3 and the bitrate to 192mb/s, which is good enough quality for most uses.

The best way to listen to your music, in Windows Media Center, is coupled with a slide show of the photographs on your hard disk drive  and there’s all sorts of settings that you can play with. Just be sure to exclude, or delete, that folder  with the pictures of the ex girlfriend if your watching with your latest girlfriend.

Windows Media Center doesn’t distinguish between TV series and films on DVD so to watch a DVD of any variety launch the software and click Movies>Watch movie. The disc will play.

One of the best things about Windows Media Center is if you stop a DVD part of the way through, leave the disk it in the optical disk drive and turn the machine off it will go back to that point in the disk when you restart the computer and click on Watch movie.

To watch television click TV>live TV.  You can use a mouse or keyboard to flick through the Freeview channels, or most digital television tuners come with a television remote. If the phone ring at the show’s cliff hanger you can hit rewind, even if you haven’t recorded the show, to the point you missed and play it again Sam!

The red button, both on screen and on the remote, will record whatever is on screen. Two clicks will record the series, so long as the computer is on when the show starts.

Clicking TV>guide provides a table showing what’s on in the next hour or so, and clicking the box with a show’s title in allows it to be recorded when it comes on. It really is very simple as it eliminates any need to mess around with start and stop times.

Television shows are recorded, in all their high definition glory, to the hard drive and can stay there as long as there’s room, burned to a DVD or deleted.

If the machine is connected to a home network, which is very easy to do using Windows 7 Homegroup feature, recorded television can be viewed on another machine in the house.

If radio’s your thing Windows Media Center can pick up, and record, Radio New Zealand National and a couple of other stations with its Freeview reception. Full radio coverage can be gained by installing a digital radio tuner in one of the motherboard’s PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) ports and connecting it to an aerial.