9. Is PC-Based HDMI Ready For Prime Time? Continued

The best thing to do, says Baumann, is to leave the receiver or TV in Auto Detect mode, so it can switch into (and out of) high-resolution format modes as it recognizes them coming from the PC, while still decoding standard 5.1 compressed Dolby Digital or DTS outputs when the are detected on the HDMI link. We think this is a little whacky, and certainly no long-term solution, and speaks further of a need to explicitly and complete accommodate these new, high-bandwidth, high-resolution audio formats for HDMI. This explains why Baumann was careful to note that the AMD/ATI cards support HDMI 1.2; 1.3 introduces requirements for explicit and complete support of high-resolution audio, among other things.

We'll watch all of this carefully, but in the meantime, spending money on HDMI-enabled PCs or related gear is only worthwhile if you can live without the highest-definition audio output from HD-DVD and Blu-ray media, which is their strongest feature next to high definition video. You should also understand that video processing on high-end standalone players of either kind is likely to be at least a little cleaner and sharper than what a PC can produce. For many, it's a matter of deciding which takes precedence: being an A/V purists, pursuing the best possible audio and video or integrating as much capability into their media PC as the hub for home entertainment.

Parting Shot: MCE For Do-it-Yourselfers

Be warned that the road to a running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 system can sometimes be both trying and long. During the build process for our recent stories, we had to reinstall MCE many times and found ourselves a bit frustrated by the internal checks it uses to keep installations from moving from one hardware configuration to another without a reinstall. The OS does a cyclic redundancy check on hardware items and once enough of the underlying system changes to trigger a violation, it refuses to run on the current hardware. We understand Vista works the same way, too. We got around this by using an image of plain-vanilla Windows XP with SP2 slipstreamed to provide a jump start when installing new systems or repairing old ones, because it gave us enough functionality to re-image the drives on the target system to our liking. We hope you don't have to do so many installs, but it's a trick worth knowing about.

We also found a pretty good driver scanner for our systems in bringing them up to snuff before benchmarking. We got it at PCPitStop.com. The scanner is from TouchStone Software at driveragent.com. After downloading an ActiveX component to your desktop, it does a good job of scanning your drivers and telling you which ones it thinks are out of date. You have to pay a subscription fee to gain access to the downloads linked to each purportedly out-of-date driver, but that detective work is worthwhile by itself for those who can dig driver information out of Device Manager and figure out how to look for freely-available updates without extra help. Though we didn't always agree with Driver Scan's findings - we noticed that the database seems to lag a couple of weeks behind when new updates are released - in most cases it got things just right, and saved us time and energy in figuring out what we needed to find or update. Whenever the service conflicted with what we knew, we used dates and version numbers to decide which drivers to keep and which ones to replace. So should you, except when newer drivers introduce problems on your hardware, and you find yourself forced to roll back.

MCE itself is available primarily as an OEM product. You must supply a receipt for a motherboard, hard disk, RAM and CPU to qualify for purchase at some retailers, so be prepared to furnish such information on request. That said, you can find a full version online for $110 to $120, which is a great deal considering that Windows XP Professional upgrades cost $200, and full versions with SP2 cost $279. That probably explains why MCE has out shipped Windows XP for the past two years or so, according to Microsoft.