About three months ago, I took the plunge and replaced my two-year-old Tivo with an HP z555 Media Center, running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Why? I was pretty frustrated with Tivo's limitations, and I wanted to use the Media Center's kick-butt electronic program guide, which is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I also like being able to pull together, in one place, my photos, music, TV recording, and DVD viewing. Mine is in the family room AV cabinet and is purely an entertainment system, not used (much) as a PC. I also like having something I can upgrade and evolve over time, rather than having to forklift/chuck every time there's some new technology (like HD DVDs), which is the usual way of things with your typical purpose-built consumer electronics stuff. The waste of that just really bothers me.
The HP z555 is an excellent product. Perfect? No, but darned close. I wish HP would market this thing more aggressively as it's really nice. Why this one? I liked HP's thoughtful integration and industrial design, it's pretty quiet, fairly priced, and HP has been doing a nice job of supporting the product. I bought mine direct from HP, which now sells it for ~$1500. Computers4sure.com, also sells it for around $1550. There are a number of decent reviews on the net, and I won't repeat them, so I'm not going to rave about all the great features of this product. The focus of this page is this: The z555 is still a relatively new & sophisticated product, as is Media Center Edition, so there are a few minor rough spots I had to smooth down to get a spouse-approved entertainment experience. These are in no particular order (DISCLAIMER: these are MY opinions based on my experiences and are in no way to be construed as providing support or expert advice, caveat emptor, your mileage may vary, etc.).
Thanks for the memories. RAM is pretty cheap these days, so I upgraded my z555 from 512MB to 1 GB.
Cooling. I planned to put my z555 in my family room AV cabinet, and HP warns about giving the system good ventilation for adequate cooling. I wanted to be able to run mine with the cabinet doors closed, so my friend Rick Tidball and I did some surgery on the cabinets (OK, I did the design and he did the work; I'd saw off my thumbs if I had to do the job). We cut an opening in the cabinet kickplate and inserted a vent grille from Home Depot to create an opening for cool air intake. Next, we cut an opening at the top rear of the cabinet surface and installed a Cool-Vent II, made by Active Thermal. This was a bit pricey, but was exactly what I needed. It combines an attractive wood grille (you pick the wood), four DC-powered fans, a thermal sensor, a little controller logic, and an AC adapter. The controller will turn on the fans when the sensor hits 90 degrees fahrenheit, and will turn up the fan speed at 100 degrees. It shuts off when the temperature cools below 90. Mine is set up to suck cool air in from the vent grille near the floor, and blow the warm air out the top of the Cool-Vent. My z555 is on the top shelf, so its warm exhaust gets sucked right out the top.
Cool-Vent is pretty nice, but I'd suggest a few improvements for the Active Thermal folks: (1) add a screen or metal grille on the business side of the fans so your fingers or cables don't get whacked if they come in contact, (2) make available an option to order the unit with the fans reversed so the customer doesn't have to do that, (3) give the user a bit more control over the temperature settings used by the controller, and (4) don't hardwire the power adapter to the controller, stick a power connector on the controller box so it can be disconnected when mucking with cabling. These are all nits.
One last thing on cooling: a friend reversed the two fans (CPU fan and the side fan) inside the z555 and it now runs much, much cooler. Not for the faint of heart, but I cannot fathom what HP was thinking when they designed the airflow. Now my CPU fan blows the hot air out of the z555 enclosure and the side fan pulls cool air into the enclosure. DVDs used to come out very warm to the touch, but no more. Ditto for the top and bottom of the enclosure; they used to be very warm to the touch and are now very cool. All that contained heat can't possibly be good for the hard drive and electronics.
Remotes (which should be "remote", singular). The remote HP included with the product is decent, but falls short in one key area: it cannot power cycle another device besides the z555 and it cannot be programmed to adjust the volume through another device. In my house, she-who-must-be-obeyed really likes a simple setup, which means a single remote. I have to agree with her on this point. If simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, the HP remote is too complicated. You can spend a small fortune on an extremely nice product like the Logitech Harmony remote, but a simpler, cheaper solution for me was the Microsoft "OEM V2" remote, which you can find at places like NewEgg for only ~$40. This little puppy feels nice in your hand (curves reminiscent of Tivo's remote) and, most importantly, has a second power button and a volume control which can both be programmed via IR training. For some strange reason, the little booklet that tells you how to program this is hard to find so I'm putting the remote manual here. I hope my eHome friends don't mind. I was able to set up the MS remote to power cycle my old Sony AV receiver, and adjust the volume on the same.
Volume control? Speaking of which, I hooked up everything for the first time and discovered that Media Center does not attempt to adjust the volume levels when you're doing a simple S/PIDF digital audio out, which means you have to adjust the volume on the other end through your AV receiver. This was the right call by eHome (to avoid nightmarish scenarios where both XP MCE and an AV receiver are wrestling over the volume), but nothing in the HP or Media Center manuals mentions this, that I could find. It's not a big deal, but would be nice to know before you plan your setup. This is why the programmable volume control on the remote became an issue for me. As an aside, can someone tell me why no one in the CE industry makes a simple, good-quality 5.1 or 7.1 AV amplifier/AC3 decoder without all the cost/complexity of an AV receiver, with its bzillion connectors and complications? Way too much space and power and heat are accounted for in my cabinet by my five-year-old Sony AV receiver, which is being used only for Dolby Digital/ProLogic decode and to power an old set of Bose AcoustiMass 15 speakers (yes, I know, but they're white and small and sound decent and were therefore a purchase approved by the family room Decorating Police).
Closed Door Policy. If you'd like an inexpensive way of running your z555 with cabinet doors closed (assuming you've addressed ventilation), check out Terk's Leap Frog system. B&H sells it for ~$25. There are more compact/cool-looking systems, but they were almost 10x the cost once you'd finished buying everything. Don't recall who made this system, but it supported recessed installation, which looks more professional. I am too cheap and the Leap Frog gadgets work too well. By the way, the base Terk system you buy, which includes the base transmitter and a receiver, also includes a little IR remote that you can use to control another gadget inside the cabinet (like an AV receiver). You don't need to spend more money on a second receiver, though those are available for certain situations (multi-room, perhaps?).
Optimizing nVidia Settings. The z555 include a PCI Express version of nVidia's very nice GeForce 6600 GT graphics controller. There are a couple nVidia documents that are worth reading if you're planning to configure your z555 to get the absolute best picture quality out of your Media Center. Some of this content is in HP's documentation, and some of it is not. Check out the Display Properties User's Guide, which I see was just updated this week, along with the nVidia driver for Windows XP Media Center edition. nVidia's hardware and driver meet Microsoft's Designed for Windows Media Center Edition requirements and has passed WHQL testing. The other doc worth reading is the nView Desktop Manager Users's Guide. I have a Sony LCD Display (an FWD-32LX1) which is connected to the z555 via DVI. These guides are useful in telling you how to set up the graphics adapter to use 720p signals so that the Sony can be configured to take advantage of some of the WEGA engine's slick features, like scaling the video so 1.85 aspect ratio DVDs fill the entire 32" display (while the DVD industry dukes it out over HD DVD vs. BluRay...come on, guys figure it out and ship something for crying out loud!). One caution: nVidia appears to have left off the MCE display extensions in version 77.79. You can work around that mistake following the steps in this post on TGB. I haven't tried that yet myself. I hope nVidia fixes that!
Secret Decoder Ring. I decided to do a comparison of the InterVideo decoder that HP ships in the box with the z555, and nVidia's PureVideo decoder. I downloaded a free trial version of PureVideo decoder, and installed it and configured it after reading the user guide. I used Microsoft XP Video Decoder Checkup Utility, which is a free download, to switch between the two decoders to check out the quality and performance. In my evaluation, I found the nVidia decoder produced a better quality image and did not glitch as much during DVD playback. Your mileage may vary, but I liked it enough to shell out the ~$30 for some version of nVidia's released product.
Glitch-Free. Speaking of glitches, I highly recommend, if you do buy a z555, that you install ALL the updates from HP's web site before you start using it. A number of bugs were fixed since the original release, including a few that could cause annoying audio or video glitching during DVD playback. For an optimal, spouse-approved viewing experience, I also stripped out a bunch of stuff on my own system, to keep things simple. Since I'm running mine with the cabinet doors closed, and since early versions had bugs, I removed the "media info display" software. I also stripped out HP Tunes since I am not using it and it seemed to cause occasional glitching. I also removed the Symantec Antivirus software that was installed. With that, I now have a completely glitch-free MCE experience. I'm comfortable running a PC in my home without Symantec's antivirus because I have an edge firewall in my house (a SonicWall TZ170) with a gateway antivirus feature, for packet scanning on ingress, which brings me to my next tip.
SonicWall GAV+EPG Guide: Huh? I imagine the average consumer isn't networking crazed enough to spend $300 on a SonicWall TZ170, which is BTW a pretty nice edge firewall for home or small biz, but I did. I wanted something that was much more trustworthy than your typical crummy $79 hunk 'o junk, which will drop to its knees from even the most casual script-kid attack. I also liked the sound of the add-on content filtering and gateway antivirus services that SonicWall had available for the TZ170. I have teens and a technophobic spouse who could be counted on to fall for even run-of-the-mill social engineering virus attacks, and this seemed like just the ticket. I've been really, really happy with it...until I enabled SonicWall's Gateway Antivirus, which immediately broke the Media Center's Guide downloads. After a packet sniff or two, and hours on the phone and net with SonicWall, we discovered that a hidden support option on the TZ170 solves the problem. When you first login to your TZ170, you'll get to a page named main.html. Instead of hitting that, navigate to diag.html (e.g. http://192.168.168.168/diag.html) and you'll find a scary disclaimer statement, which you should study carefully before clicking on the "internal settings" button, which then takes you to a page containing a huge number of settings. Scroll to the bottom and click the one entitled "Enable HTTP Byte Range requests with Gateway AV". Click the Apply button, then go back to main.htm to restart your firewall. Once it's back up, Guide downloads will work again. Don't ask me why this isn't enabled by default on TZ170s, or worst-case, enabled by default when you turn on the gateway AV license, but it's not. My biggest complaint for SonicWall is that their logging shows NOTHING at all to give you a clue that GAV is the culprit in blocking Guide downloads; I discovered it through trial/error troubleshooting. Their firewall logging is otherwise really, really nice.
Reliable Extender Streaming. I have set up a Media Center Extender in the kids' play room. The extender is very cool because you only have to manage one gadget accumulating media in your home (your Media Center PC) and yet you can get to the content anywhere else in the house, just by plunking down an XBOX or hardware MCX anywhere you have a TV. If you're going to do this, you should hook up your MCPC to an Ethernet connection, then set up your MCX or XBOX with either Ethernet or wireless. If you're going the wireless extender route, there are a few things you need to keep in mind:
2006-05-02: In the "what's new in home networking" department, I recently bought a set of NetGear XE104 Powerline bridges. Initially, they had problems handling uPnP SSDP multicast packets, so I could not associate my XBOX 360 extender with my z555 Media Center. Intellon, who makes the silicon that powers the XE104s, let me test some new firmware which fixed the problem. I haven't thoroughly tested the bandwidth through these devices, but the Media Center Extender's Network Performance Tuner shows that it's sustaining enough bandwidth for standard definition TV streaming. The kids report that it works really well after a couple weeks of real usage. The Powerline crowd is promising a bandwidth bump in the future with Powerline AV technology, but for now this Powerline Turbo-based product is worth a look if you're trying to avoid new wires in your home.
Check out Gabe Frost's blog on connecting your digital home for reliable media streaming. Gabe is responsible for the network quality of service (QoS) software used in the new XBOX 360 Media Center Extender, which is now shipping in every XBOX360. This new extender is really cool, with an improved user experience (and of course, great QoS technology).
Last updated: 5/2/2006, by David Powell, david at fivepowells dot com