I mentioned in a previous post that I would tell you some more about my media setup in our house, so I thought I’d take a few minutes and do that now.

In my living room, I have a Dell XPS 420 PC running Windows Vista Home Premium.  The 420 has two ATI Digital Cable tuners attached to it, in which I have cablecards to receive HDTV through Comcast, and a Blu-ray drive as well.  The 420 is connected to a Bose Lifestyle V20 home theater system.  I also have an Xbox 360 Elite connected to the Bose system.  The Bose outputs to a Samsung LN46A650 46″ 1080p LCD TV.

Upstairs I have two more Xbox 360s attached to LCD TVs in two of the bedrooms.  Each of these Xbox 360s have Linksys WGA600N Dual-band Wireless-N Gaming Adapters connected to them, allowing them to connect to my 5Ghz 802.11n network.  This allows me to not have to connect the TVs to a coaxial cable jack and place them where it is most convenient in the rooms.

The Xbox 360s in the bedrooms act as Media Center Extenders and are set to boot directly into the Media Center interface.  We can stream live HD TV, recorded programs, music and any other content stored on the network to each TV in the bedroom, even simultaneously.

As I’ve already stated on the site, I have a Drobo attached to the media center PC in the living room, providing a little over 4TB of storage for media.  The great thing about this system is that all of our media can be accessed from any TV in the house, whenever we want.  As soon as I manage to get all my DVDs ripped to the Drobo, that is.  It’s a time consuming process, but well worth it for the convenience it offers down the road.

I’ll be talking about Windows Media Center more as time goes on, including some of the plugins I’m using and some I wish existed.