Shuttle and Sony Media Center PCs
July 2004
Media Mogul Match Up
By Grant Clauser
While DVRs, DVD recorders and media servers have wide appeal for media happy early adopters, it's on the PC side of things that this kind of convergence is really taking shape. Media Center PCs tie together your television and audio system and control everything through a simple interface that you can read across the room and access with a single remote. These multimedia managers catalog your music, play games, record TV shows, store digital pictures and make DVDs out of your home camcorder movies.
Last year when Media Center PCs broke onto the scene, a lot of people scoffed at the idea of bringing a computer into the living room. PCs don't look like consumer electronics components, won't fit nicely on an equipment shelf, make more noise than refrigerator and are cumbersome to use.
With Microsoft's recent revamp of the Media Center OS and manufacturer's overhauling their designs, the latest generation of Media Center PCs more appealing, both in usability and in aesthetics. They are no longer the ugly and complicated PC beasts they used to be.
The two Media Center PCs looked at here, the Sony Vaio PVC-RZ54G and the Shuttle G46100 XPC are designed to serve your computing needs as well as replace an entire rack of A/V equipment. They include DVD recorders, TV tuners, IR remotes, media card readers and large hard drives for storing all your stuff. They are also designed outside of the traditional PC look in order to encourage users to place them in a living room rather than the den.
When in standard Windows mode, you won't notice any difference using these computers compared to any Windows XP system. Everything is right where you expected. If you want to listen to music, watch DVDs or videos stored on the hard drive, view digital picture slide shows or listen to Internet radio, you do so through the media center interface. The only Media Center Menu options that take you out of that is the Create DVD option, which then launches the DVD burner program from within the standard Windows interface.
With the TV tuner or your cable/satellite box hooked up you can watch TV, scroll through a program guide and record TV programs (much like a Tivo or ReplayTV). If you want to play games, work on documents or do any other non-entertainment type application, then you return to the XP interface. Switching from the XP screen to the Media Center screen is easier and more intuitive than the other way around. I dontt understand why the remote couldntt include a button to take you back to the Windows XP desktop, since it includes one to take you to the Media Center one.
To get the most out of the home theater PC experience I was going for, I hooked both systems up to a Marantz DLP projector, which gave me a really big picture. For the Sony system, I connected the included speakers, but the Shuttle I received only the computer, so I connected it to my B&K 507 receiver for audio, which I readily admit gave it an unfair advantage over Sony's sound system.
Sony Vaio PVC-RZ54G
$1,699 with speakers
3.2GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading
200 Gbyte 7200 RPM hard drive
512 Mbytes DDR SDRAM
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128 Mbytes VRAM
GigaPocket MPEG-2 encoder board/TV tuner
www.sony.com
The Sony system, billing itself as a digital studio, looks more like a traditional PC compared to the Shuttle. The case is a 15-inch tower, finished in the gray and silver Sony style, but it's still a PC tower and will be difficult to slip onto a shelf next to a TV, if that's what you had planned for it.
The RZ is a powerhouse armed with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 200 Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR RAM. Video processing is provided by a Nvidia GeForce FX5200 AGP card with 128 Mbytes of DDR video memory. Audio is powered by a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy LS. It also includes a 4x DVD+/-RW drive.
Since they had lots of space to work with, Sony filled the computer with ports and connections. There are a total of seven USB 2.0 ports, two Firewire (called iLink in Sony-speak), two S-video inputs (one in the front), RF TV in/out, Ethernet, headphone, mic, composite video and stereo inputs, analog and a DVI video output. The built-in media card reader is compatible with Sony's Memory Stick as well as Compact Flash, Micro Drive and Smart Media, but not MMC, SD or xD. The lack of SD support will disappointing for all those users of SD-compatible cameras, which is the majority of them these days.
A real drawback for the couch potato is that Sony includes a wired keyboard and mouse. It you plan on incorporating this PC into your entertainments system, particularly as a home theater PC, then you really need to use a wireless mouse and keyboard. The remote, of course is wireless, and looks like a fairly standard Sony remote, containing buttons for all the Media Center options (My TV, My Music, My Videos, My Pictures) plus a button to take you to the main Media Center menu.
I tried to connect the Sony to a 50-inch LG HDTV plasma via the DVI output, because this would give me an uninterrupted digital link; however, they proved incompatible with each even when I switched to the RGB input, so I returned to the Marantz projector.
The 3.1 speaker system that Sony bundles with the RZ is also a bit of a bummer. First, it's only a two channels, so you don't get the surround sound experience. Second, the subwoofer is seriously underpowered, yielding only muddy rumblings when I watched Independence Day. The stereo satellites are thin sounding and only come with a few feet of speaker wire, which can't be lengthened, so again, you'll find it difficult to make this a main TV-centric entertainment system. If you want better sound for movies and games I suggest checking out a Klipsch ProMedia speaker systems.
Sony packs a few perks into it's system, notably the Giga Pocket Engine for real-time MPEG-2 encoding and decoding for recording TV programs. The Sony encoder did an excellent job of making sure that recorded programs lost very little picture quality during the recording the process.
Games too looked great running on Nvidia's GeForce FX2000. The The graphics processor provided a lot of depth and detail to Halo.
On the software side, Sony has loaded the system up with Adobe Photoshop Elements, Sony Screenblast, Microsoft Works and quite a bit more. It's a nice package that gives you everything you need out of the box for all your media and average computing tasks.
Shuttle G4 6100 XPC
$999 without speakers
2.4GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading
120 Gbyte 7200 RPM hard drive
512 Mbytes DDR SDRAM
ATI 9100 integrated graphics
www.shuttle.com
The Shuttle G4 6100M XPC system is one of the first complete PCs to come from that company. Shuttle pioneered the small form factor computer by offering small cases for people to built their own systems around. Now their selling a suite of complete Windows systems, include this Media Center Edition. The design is striking, and best of all, small, so it integrates much more easily into an entertainment system. It's all black with a glossy black front, and looks very sharp and un-computer-like next to a TV or in a home theater PC setup.
Some of it's features are not as robust as the Sony, but it's also significantly cheaper. For $1,399 you can get the computer with a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse and a set of Logitech X-220 2.1 speaker/subwoofer. I tested the $999 barebones system, so I wasn't able to try out the speakers.
The XPC runs a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, 512 Mbytes of DDR RAM and a 120 Gbyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon 9100 is an integrated graphics chip that uses 128 Mbytes of shared memory. Onboard sound processing includes 5.1 surround and optical SPDIF in/out jacks, which the Sony does not include. The optical drive is a 16x DVD+/-RW drive.
Accessory connections include two USB 2.0 ports and one Firewire port on the front, a line in, mic and headphone jack. The built-in media card slots are easily accessible in the front and accept all media formats except xD. In the back you get two more USB ports, another Firewire, Ethernet, an antenna in, FM in plus analog audio ports and a subwoofer out.
For audio, you could use the optical audio jack to hook up to your A/V receiver, or connect the Logitech or similar powered speakers directly to the line-out in the back. When I hooked up digitally to my surround sound receiver, music and movies really shook the room.
On the gaming front, the Shuttle isn't a slouch either. I spent some long hours playing Max Paine one evening, and enjoyed the way the ATI Radeon rendered faces and shadow detail. The Shuttle isn't as loaded up with software as the Sony. It comes with Microsoft Works, Encarta, Streets and Trips, and Picture It.
Both Media Center PCs are very capable machines. The Sony RZ features and design makes it feel like more of a PC than a A/V component. While it still calls the den it's home, the Shuttle is built to be a living room PC. Both are great at movies, while the Sony had a little edge over the Shuttle in TV recording. Extreme gamers may also notice a difference due to the different capabilities of the processors and graphics cards, but I was very satisfied with both.
Living the media mogul's life with a media center PC isn't always the dream that Microsoft would make us believe. First, it's still a PC. There will be occasional driver conflicts, installation headaches, crashes, frozen cursors, security breaches, viruses, critical updates and times when for no explainable reason, the damn thing just won't work. There will be slow boot times and the paradoxical shut down via the start button.
But hey, we've lived with this stuff for years without sending too many of us packing off to Apple or Linux. When it works, and it does most of the time, Windows XP Media Center is a great way to get to the fun stuff on your computer without making it feel as much like a computer.
By Grant Clauser
While DVRs, DVD recorders and media servers have wide appeal for media happy early adopters, it's on the PC side of things that this kind of convergence is really taking shape. Media Center PCs tie together your television and audio system and control everything through a simple interface that you can read across the room and access with a single remote. These multimedia managers catalog your music, play games, record TV shows, store digital pictures and make DVDs out of your home camcorder movies.
Last year when Media Center PCs broke onto the scene, a lot of people scoffed at the idea of bringing a computer into the living room. PCs don't look like consumer electronics components, won't fit nicely on an equipment shelf, make more noise than refrigerator and are cumbersome to use.
With Microsoft's recent revamp of the Media Center OS and manufacturer's overhauling their designs, the latest generation of Media Center PCs more appealing, both in usability and in aesthetics. They are no longer the ugly and complicated PC beasts they used to be.
The two Media Center PCs looked at here, the Sony Vaio PVC-RZ54G and the Shuttle G46100 XPC are designed to serve your computing needs as well as replace an entire rack of A/V equipment. They include DVD recorders, TV tuners, IR remotes, media card readers and large hard drives for storing all your stuff. They are also designed outside of the traditional PC look in order to encourage users to place them in a living room rather than the den.
When in standard Windows mode, you won't notice any difference using these computers compared to any Windows XP system. Everything is right where you expected. If you want to listen to music, watch DVDs or videos stored on the hard drive, view digital picture slide shows or listen to Internet radio, you do so through the media center interface. The only Media Center Menu options that take you out of that is the Create DVD option, which then launches the DVD burner program from within the standard Windows interface.
With the TV tuner or your cable/satellite box hooked up you can watch TV, scroll through a program guide and record TV programs (much like a Tivo or ReplayTV). If you want to play games, work on documents or do any other non-entertainment type application, then you return to the XP interface. Switching from the XP screen to the Media Center screen is easier and more intuitive than the other way around. I dontt understand why the remote couldntt include a button to take you back to the Windows XP desktop, since it includes one to take you to the Media Center one.
To get the most out of the home theater PC experience I was going for, I hooked both systems up to a Marantz DLP projector, which gave me a really big picture. For the Sony system, I connected the included speakers, but the Shuttle I received only the computer, so I connected it to my B&K 507 receiver for audio, which I readily admit gave it an unfair advantage over Sony's sound system.
Sony Vaio PVC-RZ54G
$1,699 with speakers
3.2GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading
200 Gbyte 7200 RPM hard drive
512 Mbytes DDR SDRAM
Nvidia GeForce FX5200 with 128 Mbytes VRAM
GigaPocket MPEG-2 encoder board/TV tuner
www.sony.com
The Sony system, billing itself as a digital studio, looks more like a traditional PC compared to the Shuttle. The case is a 15-inch tower, finished in the gray and silver Sony style, but it's still a PC tower and will be difficult to slip onto a shelf next to a TV, if that's what you had planned for it.
The RZ is a powerhouse armed with a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor, 200 Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR RAM. Video processing is provided by a Nvidia GeForce FX5200 AGP card with 128 Mbytes of DDR video memory. Audio is powered by a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy LS. It also includes a 4x DVD+/-RW drive.
Since they had lots of space to work with, Sony filled the computer with ports and connections. There are a total of seven USB 2.0 ports, two Firewire (called iLink in Sony-speak), two S-video inputs (one in the front), RF TV in/out, Ethernet, headphone, mic, composite video and stereo inputs, analog and a DVI video output. The built-in media card reader is compatible with Sony's Memory Stick as well as Compact Flash, Micro Drive and Smart Media, but not MMC, SD or xD. The lack of SD support will disappointing for all those users of SD-compatible cameras, which is the majority of them these days.
A real drawback for the couch potato is that Sony includes a wired keyboard and mouse. It you plan on incorporating this PC into your entertainments system, particularly as a home theater PC, then you really need to use a wireless mouse and keyboard. The remote, of course is wireless, and looks like a fairly standard Sony remote, containing buttons for all the Media Center options (My TV, My Music, My Videos, My Pictures) plus a button to take you to the main Media Center menu.
I tried to connect the Sony to a 50-inch LG HDTV plasma via the DVI output, because this would give me an uninterrupted digital link; however, they proved incompatible with each even when I switched to the RGB input, so I returned to the Marantz projector.
The 3.1 speaker system that Sony bundles with the RZ is also a bit of a bummer. First, it's only a two channels, so you don't get the surround sound experience. Second, the subwoofer is seriously underpowered, yielding only muddy rumblings when I watched Independence Day. The stereo satellites are thin sounding and only come with a few feet of speaker wire, which can't be lengthened, so again, you'll find it difficult to make this a main TV-centric entertainment system. If you want better sound for movies and games I suggest checking out a Klipsch ProMedia speaker systems.
Sony packs a few perks into it's system, notably the Giga Pocket Engine for real-time MPEG-2 encoding and decoding for recording TV programs. The Sony encoder did an excellent job of making sure that recorded programs lost very little picture quality during the recording the process.
Games too looked great running on Nvidia's GeForce FX2000. The The graphics processor provided a lot of depth and detail to Halo.
On the software side, Sony has loaded the system up with Adobe Photoshop Elements, Sony Screenblast, Microsoft Works and quite a bit more. It's a nice package that gives you everything you need out of the box for all your media and average computing tasks.
Shuttle G4 6100 XPC
$999 without speakers
2.4GHz Pentium 4 with HyperThreading
120 Gbyte 7200 RPM hard drive
512 Mbytes DDR SDRAM
ATI 9100 integrated graphics
www.shuttle.com
The Shuttle G4 6100M XPC system is one of the first complete PCs to come from that company. Shuttle pioneered the small form factor computer by offering small cases for people to built their own systems around. Now their selling a suite of complete Windows systems, include this Media Center Edition. The design is striking, and best of all, small, so it integrates much more easily into an entertainment system. It's all black with a glossy black front, and looks very sharp and un-computer-like next to a TV or in a home theater PC setup.
Some of it's features are not as robust as the Sony, but it's also significantly cheaper. For $1,399 you can get the computer with a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse and a set of Logitech X-220 2.1 speaker/subwoofer. I tested the $999 barebones system, so I wasn't able to try out the speakers.
The XPC runs a 2.4GHz Pentium 4, 512 Mbytes of DDR RAM and a 120 Gbyte hard drive. The ATI Radeon 9100 is an integrated graphics chip that uses 128 Mbytes of shared memory. Onboard sound processing includes 5.1 surround and optical SPDIF in/out jacks, which the Sony does not include. The optical drive is a 16x DVD+/-RW drive.
Accessory connections include two USB 2.0 ports and one Firewire port on the front, a line in, mic and headphone jack. The built-in media card slots are easily accessible in the front and accept all media formats except xD. In the back you get two more USB ports, another Firewire, Ethernet, an antenna in, FM in plus analog audio ports and a subwoofer out.
For audio, you could use the optical audio jack to hook up to your A/V receiver, or connect the Logitech or similar powered speakers directly to the line-out in the back. When I hooked up digitally to my surround sound receiver, music and movies really shook the room.
On the gaming front, the Shuttle isn't a slouch either. I spent some long hours playing Max Paine one evening, and enjoyed the way the ATI Radeon rendered faces and shadow detail. The Shuttle isn't as loaded up with software as the Sony. It comes with Microsoft Works, Encarta, Streets and Trips, and Picture It.
Both Media Center PCs are very capable machines. The Sony RZ features and design makes it feel like more of a PC than a A/V component. While it still calls the den it's home, the Shuttle is built to be a living room PC. Both are great at movies, while the Sony had a little edge over the Shuttle in TV recording. Extreme gamers may also notice a difference due to the different capabilities of the processors and graphics cards, but I was very satisfied with both.
Living the media mogul's life with a media center PC isn't always the dream that Microsoft would make us believe. First, it's still a PC. There will be occasional driver conflicts, installation headaches, crashes, frozen cursors, security breaches, viruses, critical updates and times when for no explainable reason, the damn thing just won't work. There will be slow boot times and the paradoxical shut down via the start button.
But hey, we've lived with this stuff for years without sending too many of us packing off to Apple or Linux. When it works, and it does most of the time, Windows XP Media Center is a great way to get to the fun stuff on your computer without making it feel as much like a computer.
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