Handle With Linux

Linux MCE is superior to windows MCE

* Cost

The number one reason for choosing Linux, people have reported building a Linux media center with $400 total cost. Top that! Of course if you have unlimited budget this is not an argument. On the other hand what can be defined as unlimited? With equal money you will always be capable of building more. That's why big movie studios use Linux.

* A whole house media system build with cheap diskless hardware

Have some old PC's laying around? You can use them as pxe bootable thin clients for your Linux MCE system, most cheap graphics cards support tv out for a while now. Make a pc pxe bootable over the network and use it as a media director. And you can have one master system serving media throughout the whole house.

* Integrated voice over IP and video over IP

As asterisk is integrated into LinuxMCE you get a full featured voip telephony system. This gives you limitless features which are normally only on very expensive telephony hardware.
Videocalls, videoconferencing, VOIP, and personal voicemailboxes for each member of your family are possible. The system can keep track of where you are in your home and route incoming calls to the nearest phone (or to your mobile phone when you're not at home).

* Home automation features

Linux MCE has home automation features which make it possible to control all kinds of things in your house trough mobile phones or internet connected computers. Check if the lights are out? turn up the heater before your going home if your visiting friends? It can all be done with one central server which is in the same time recording your favorite tv program.

* Home security

It's possible to connect many devices to your LinuxMCE which are capable of guarding your house and for instance stream video data to a off-site location. Recording what is happening at a security breach, so even if they burn down your house you can record and keep save evidence.

* Parental control

You can limit what is visible on the thin clients at the times you want, so your children wont have a signal when it's bedtime.

* No limits on tuners

LinuxMCE is not limited to 2 analog tuners and 2 digital tuners as is windows MCE. This is hackable in windows MCE, but standard it's limited.
In Vista outside the US it seems your limited to 2 tuners unless you install addons and to get support for the maximum of 8 tuners you need vista ultimate.

* Future proof

You can never count on windows to be future proof. When using Linux as the base for a media center you'll be sure of having a future proof system. If new technology comes up and new features can be added to your system, you have the most change of being able to mix the stuff you want to keep, with new things in Linux.
Windows is going to a new version every now and then, and new hardware wont be supported by your old windows while old hardware wont be supported by your new windows.

* Unlimited users logging in on the same time

The amount of users logged in and using the media center is limited by hardware and network capabilities alone. This is definitely not the case with windows media center. There's a hack to make windows mce 2005 run 3 simultaneous rdp sessions. But in Linux you are free to have as many users as you want.

This is just a short list, if anybody can come up with more benefits of Linux MCE, feel free to leave a comment. And correct me if you think I'm wrong. Comments will be reviewed and can take up to 10 hours before they get published.
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