On the surface it seems like a simple task. Microsoft has provided some fantastic tools and capabilities with XP, Vista and Windows 7 Media Center. To maximize the functions that you will most likely want to leverage I highly recommend connecting your Media Center to an XBox 360. If you are only wanting to leverage the out of the box features of Media Center then any media extender will work fine. However, if you are looking to stream video from the internet using a service like PlayOn you will need the XBox 360.
Generally all of your set up will go according to the documentation provided from Microsoft. The primary hurtle that I had to overcome was bandwidth. I tried numerous flavors of wireless and routers to no avail. I was able to stream small wmv files but not live television of heavy video full screen mp4 or mv4 format. Which by the way you need a patch from Microsoft for and a constant live internet connection to receive. I finally found my solution in a small relatively inexpensive device from Netgear. I really wanted to avoid running Cat 5 or Cat6 through the house and it was obvious wireless was not going to make the grade. The ingenious device I found was a device that allows you to re-stream your internet traffic through the Coax cable already in your home. Note this device only works with broadband and cable delivered by cable not DSL or Satellite.
MCA1001
MoCA Coax-Ethernet Adapter
This adapter allows me to achieve up to 200 mbs speeds and the XBox reported immediately full support for 1080P HD signal. I leveraged this to essentially turn every cable connection in my house into an Ethernet port to deliver high sped internet access in every room of the house. No worries about QOS, interference or performance. I can report that I currently support four flat screen televisions streaming live television/ and or steaming video from the internet from a single Media Center PC.
In my next post I will tell you more about how I am getting television from hulu.com, crackle.com ABC.com and NBC.com as will as several other networks streamed over the internet for free instead of paying the cable company for those channels