Hi all,

I'm pondering my next gadget pickup/fiddle, and I'm thinking of getting a 2nd hand, 10" screen, tablet PC for use in our kitchen for MCE.

The intention is that it'll have no tuners in it (although I suppose it could have a USB DVB-T) and that I'll just point it to the main MCE machine for recorded TV, music, DVDs etc.

I'd always read that it was not possible to use a PC as a true extender, but I wondered if anyone had cracked this yet?  This would be on MCE2005 and on an XP Tablet.

Would it be possible to either put the MCE components onto a tablet PC, or install MCE on there and not "break" the touch screen functionality.

I suppose an option would be to use SlimServer and web guide, but I'd quite like to stick with MCE...

I'm looking at doing exactly this but until now my problem has been the lack of a suitable screen, as I was considering using a normal small hidden PC with a touch screen. My conclusion was that as most touch screens seem to emulate a mouse, using a touch screen would be quite successful.

I tried this by simply navigating MCE using only the mouse and not a remote. Seemed workable.

A device that caught my eye is Pandigital's upcoming 15" Kitchen TV. My thoughts are to ignore the TV part of this and just use the vidoeo inputs. The advantage of this device would be that primarily it looks very nice in a kitchen environment, is splash sealed and is supplied with various interchangeable surrounds and brackets. It has a touch screen, nice 1280 x 720 16:9 size and is sensibly priced but it's quite unclear if one can access the touch screen functionality as an emulated mouse.

Here's a link or two:

http:pandigital.net

http://pandigital.net/pressroom/CNET%20Kitchen%20TV%20article.pdf

If anyone gets to play with one, can they post?

RS

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Richard Sargeant, MCSE, MCT

Cafe.Racer:

I'm pondering my next gadget pickup/fiddle, and I'm thinking of getting a 2nd hand, 10" screen, tablet PC for use in our kitchen for MCE.

If you're going the 2nd hand route you might like to look at a Compaq TC1100 with the docking station. It's not a quick machine but should be up to playing SD quality video. The docking station however is quite flexible in how it holds the laptop and was one of the more innovate features of the tablet PCs that came out. (Don't be fooled into getting the older TC1000 as it has some awfully slow CPU)

Cafe.Racer:

I'd always read that it was not possible to use a PC as a true extender, but I wondered if anyone had cracked this yet?

Don't believe so. WebGuide is the closest there is, and IMHO, now that Microsoft owns WebGuide I don't see them ever releasing "SoftSled".

Cafe.Racer:

  This would be on MCE2005 and on an XP Tablet.

Would it be possible to either put the MCE components onto a tablet PC, or install MCE on there and not "break" the touch screen functionality.

Media Center Edition and Tablet Edition are both different versions of XP, albeit both based off XP Pro. There is no official way of installing the components from one version onto the other. I've seen threads on TGB regarding hacking MCE onto W2K3 so you might be able to take the steps from there to force MCE onto Tablet Edition. But it would be a complete Frankenstein build of XP.

Of course Vista includes both Media Center and Tablet functionality out of the box, and I do think a touch screen interface would work very well for Media Center in the kitchen.

 

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MCE2005 (Reluctantly decided not to upgrade to TV Pack - will see if 7MC fixes the issues) | AMD64X2 3600+ | 1Gb Ram | 3x500Gb SATA | Hauppauge PVR150 | nVidia 7300LE silent GPU | Pig ugly big black case | Virgin Media cable | Xbox 360 wired extender

Actually, I was thinking of one of the Fujitsu Siemens Tablet units - they are on the  slow side, but bloody cheap 2nd hand. (Sub £100 on eBay).

I've discussed this with a friend who tells me that these units come with XP or even 2000 on them, because they were pre-tablet PC, so the drivers for the touch screen must work with MCE2005.

Oh right. I'd assumed one of the, for want of a better word, "proper" tablets. You can ignore all my hacking-XP-around comments then. If they came with XP originally then, yes, the drivers should work on MCE2005.

I had a quick look on eBay - they all seem to be P3's - is that right? Is that going to have enough grunt to handle video output? What graphics chip do they have? MCE2005 does expect DX9 with (I think) 32Mb. The DX9 thing isn't fixed though as I originally ran MCE on an ATI9100 which is only DX8, and there are hacks around for the memory check.

 

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MCE2005 (Reluctantly decided not to upgrade to TV Pack - will see if 7MC fixes the issues) | AMD64X2 3600+ | 1Gb Ram | 3x500Gb SATA | Hauppauge PVR150 | nVidia 7300LE silent GPU | Pig ugly big black case | Virgin Media cable | Xbox 360 wired extender

I have been kicking around the same of idea of using a tablet in the Kitchen but I might be taking a whole different route. 

What about using a motorized 7" Flip down monitor normaly used in cars like the one posted below? 

http://cgi.ebay.com/Sony-XVMR75-7-inch-Motorized-Flip-Down-TFT-LCD_W0QQitemZ280216715646QQihZ018QQcategoryZ67764QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It's cheap, less than $150.00 and pairing it with the Linksys Extender?  I think the "cool factor" would be super high, the screen would be hidden under the counter until you power it up and it flips down on it's own.

The problem I see is you would need a DC to AC converter and the audio would have to run from the extender to a seperate audio receiver hidden somewhere with a IR extender to control it.  Plus speakers going from the reciever to somewhere in the kitchen. No touchscreen of course but the trade off is it could playback your HD recordings through the extender.

Can anyone comment on this setup?  Thoughts?

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E4500
4gig Ram
500gig hdd
Nvidia 8500gt
Nvidia DualTV Tuner
HDHOMERUN Tuner
Vista
Linksys 2100 Extender
WHS 2TB storage

I had thought abuot something similar, but the DMA's are pricey and I'm not sure they have the right video outputs?

That, and the extra speakers etc, put me off - if you're running a DMA, might as well run a nice big screen, and I doubt you could get the touchscreen to work with the DMA?

@Mark, yep they are "slow" but CHEAP, also portable...  could take it away on holiday if it'll play off USB sticks or upgrade the HD