Computer companies have been trying to get off your desktop and into your entertainment rack for a decade. Ever since the invention of tuner cards for PCs and giant computer monitors that doubled as TVs, they've been pushing the "convergence" of entertainment and computing on a wary public. The reception from A/V enthusiasts has been, to put it politely, less than enthusiastic. Do we really want to put our home theater in the hands of a component with a cooling fan that drowns out dialogue, or that’s prone to crashing?

But the PC makers haven't given up. In recent years, Microsoft and its hardware partners have led the assault through a series of increasingly more capable Windows XP Media Center Edition PCs that you control from across the room via a wireless remote or keyboard. Attached to a big conventional or HDTV display and a surround sound system, these computers are actually better suited for sofa-centered leisure than desk-based productivity (though you can use them for work, too).

While they might differ in some details, all Media Center Edition PCs use the increasingly familiar blue Start menu with its alluring, lifestyle-driven buttons: My DVDs, My Pictures, My Videos, My Music, My TV — you get the idea. From this screen, you can wander down many paths of entertainment.

As an A/V component, one of today’s Media Centers can replace your DVD recorder, TiVo digital video recorder, and FM radio. It ingests all your CDs, home videos, and family photos, stores them on its hard drive, and lets you access them from the couch through intuitive onscreen menus. You can download movies or albums, or stream music videos from MTV and music from Napster.

And all Media Center PCs come with what is arguably the most comprehensive, searchable, and cross-referenced onscreen TV guide available — a Microsoft service that’s updated automatically and quickly via your broadband connection. The guide offers two weeks of listings and gives details like a show’s original air date, so you’ll know if an episode is new or a rerun. Best of all, it’s free and unencumbered by ads.

A Media Center PC hooked to a cable box or antenna is more viewer-centric than the DVRs offered by cable providers. The fastest speed for scanning through your recorded programs is really fast — 15 seconds to scan an hour — and each whack of the quick-skip button vaporizes a commercial.

All of this is good news — but who wants a bulky computer in his living room? Well, the latest Media Center models have slimmed down and are designed to be placed horizontally in an equipment rack, where they could easily be mistaken for A/V components. Larger, vertically oriented Media Center PCs continue to be available, too, but the two that I played with for this article — the HP z556 Digital Entertainment Center ($1,500) and the Sony Vaio VGX-XL1 Digital Living System ($2,300) — are a rack-standard 17 inches wide and look about as PC as a plasma TV.

The latest Media Center PCs have built-in Wi-Fi so you can wirelessly access an Internet ramp located in another room, and they’ve been stripped of the clutter of peripherals that shipped with early models. You no longer have to worry about plugging the plastic sensor for the wireless mouse and keyboard into a USB port — you don't even have a mouse since a trackball or touchpad is now integrated into the RF (radio-frequency) keyboard. Also gone is the plastic infrared (IR) receiver for the Media Center remote, which you’d put atop the computer, its wires trailing off for connection to another USB port and to IR emitters attached to your cable or satellite box. All the sensor/receivers are now built into the face of the Media Center, and if you do need a sticky emitter to change channels on your cable box, two sensors lead out of a port on the rear panel.

The operating software on the newest Media Centers — officially referred to as Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2 (don't ask) — now offers a wider array of easy-to-use functions that are all accessed from that blue Start menu.

Maybe the biggest changes can be found under Online Spotlight, Microsoft’s showcase of services, some free, some subscription-based. The offerings now include Akimbo's growing library of downloadable TV shows, MTV Overdrive for ad-supported music videos on demand, CinemaNow and Movielink for downloading movies, and GalleryPlayer for transforming your HDTV into an art museum. And that's just for starters.

With these kinds of services and capabilities, you can't help but get caught up in endless avenues of exploration as you point your remote at one of the new Media Center PCs. But sooner or later an error message rears its ugly head, and you realize that a platform so full of possibility is still, at heart, a computer, and underlying it all is everyone’s favorite whipping boy, Windows. And you have to ask yourself: is this thing really ready for prime time?

The HP and Sony PCs gave me a chance to find out. They share the same interface, the same TV guide, and most of the same features. But there are big differences that will make them appeal to different people. The HP proved adept at handling HDTV programming, while the Sony — which includes a DVD megachanger — made it the choice for managing a disc-based movie collection. Here’s our report from the frontier of entertainment computing.

HP Digital Entertainment Center

A wireless keyboard with a built-in trackball is about the only indication that HP's z556 Digital Entertainment Center (DEC) might be the offspring of office equipment. With its DVD player buttons across the front of its sleek black case, front-panel A/V inputs under a flip plate, and the TV channel or movie title of whatever you're watching crawling across its text display, the DEC really does look like it belongs in a home theater instead of on a desk. Unlike HP's other Media Center PCs, the DEC is designed for horizontal placement. It could fit in a stack of A/V gear, but since it's meant to replace most of your other components, it would be a pretty short stack. And it was quiet enough to slip in unnoticed.

HP

$1,500 • 3.0-GHz Pentium 4; 512 MB RAM; 250-GB hard drive (additional 400-GB Personal Media Drive, $350) • DVD Super Multi Drive with LightScribe disc labeling • Free TV program guide • FM tuner with pause and replay • A/V inputs digital and analog RF/antenna; composite- and 2 S-video; 3 stereo audio; FM antenna; microphone • A/V outputs DVI-D; VGA; component-, composite-, and S-video; 7.1-channel RCA surround sound; optical and coaxial digital audio; headphone • Other I/O 6 USB; 2 FireWire (4-pin, 6-pin); Ethernet; Wi-Fi antenna; 9-in-1 Flash Media Card Reader; 2 IR emitters for cable/satellite control; wireless keyboard; remote control • 17 x 4.5 x 16.5 in, 25 lbs hp.com, 888-999-4747

The DEC isn’t just a TV junkie's dream; it’s a system even an HDTV fan can love. For starters, it has three tuners — two for conventional TV and one for digital TV. You can record three channels at the same time, one of them HDTV, even while you watch a fourth show that was recorded earlier. There’s also an FM tuner that lets you pause and replay off-air radio.

After downloading the program guide, which can include listings for both off-air and cable channels, I set the DEC to record high-def shows from the major networks, including Lost and Monday Night Football from ABC, Shrek from NBC, and Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones from Fox. The HP’s 250-gigabyte (GB) hard drive can store 25.5 hours of HDTV or up to 180 hours of standard-def TV. And you can easily expand that capacity by popping a 400-GB Personal Media Drive ($350) into the front panel. (A more expensive version of the z556 DEC, the $2,200 z558 DEC includes the Personal Media Drive, twice the RAM, and a slightly faster processor.) When I recorded Attack of the Clones, the system went to the Internet and collected movie artwork and information for its menus, and even downloaded a mini-review. Played off the hard drive, the dub looked noticeably sharper and more detailed than the DVD release.

The DEC makes it easy to transfer an HDTV show to a recordable DVD to free up space on the hard drive. The system's DVD Super Multi Drive is compatible with DVD+RW, -RW, +R DL (dual-layer), and -RAM discs — it even directly labels recordable discs that are LightScribe-ready. Using a DVD+R DL blank (which, unfortunately, is not LightScribe-compatible), I copied an episode of Lost in all its pristine 720p and 5.1-channel glory in 40 minutes. With 8.4 GB of storage, each DVD+R DL disc can hold about an hour of HDTV. Though not all computers (and no DVD players) can play these high-definition discs, I was able to watch the Lost episode later on an Acer notebook using Windows Media Player, with no apparent loss in quality.

As enamored as I was with the DEC as a high-def DVR, I was disappointed that the HDTV tuner worked only with over-the-air broadcasts. Like earlier Media Centers, the HP has no high-def-capable component-video or HDMI inputs to accept the HDTV signal from a digital cable box. Microsoft and CableLABS, the cable industry’s research and development organization, have announced an agreement for CableCARD-equipped Media Centers, but they won’t be available until the fall of 2006, and current systems won’t be upgradable. Still, the DEC does let you tune in, record, and archive off-air HDTV programs with the best sound and picture they have to offer. Most Media Center PCs can’t even receive HDTV, much less record it.

Through all my TV watching and recording, music playing, picture viewing, Web surfing, and general poking around, the DEC was easy to use and responsive. Commands from the remote or keyboard were instantly followed, and the system didn’t crash.

The DEC has two kinds of sleep modes: a traditional standby mode where the computer only wakes itself up for unattended TV recording, and a new Away mode that wakes it up and starts playback the moment you pop in a DVD or CD.

Considering its three tuners, FM radio, superb handling of HDTV programs, and everything else this Media Center PC does, the $1,500 z556 is a great value.

Sony Vaio Digital Living System

Once a Media Center PC is loaded with music, photos, and home videos you’ve transferred from other media or downloaded from the Web, it becomes a grand repository of quickly accessible content. But the ubiquitous DVD continues to resist this trend toward ultimate convenience. Given the murky legal issues around copying a DVD to a hard drive, we’re for the most part still forced to rifle through a jillion jewel cases and insert one disc at a time to play our movies. DVD megachangers are a step in the right direction, of course, and companies like Escient, ReQuest, and Control 4 (see review) sell systems that control an external Sony DVD megachanger through an onscreen user interface.

Sony has gotten into the act with its Vaio VGX-XL1 Digital Living System ($2,300), which marries a sleek black-and-silver Media Center PC with a matching 200-disc DVD changer. So along with indexing and accessing a massive movie collection at the push of a button, the Sony system has all the capabilities of a full-fledged Media Center for managing your other home-entertainment resources.

Sony Vaio

$2,300 • Dual-core 2.8-GHz Pentium; 512 MB RAM; 200-GB hard drive • 200-disc changer for bulk ripping CDs, recording DVDs, and managing DVD library • Analog TV tuner for recording • Free TV program guide • A/V inputs analog RF/antenna; composite/S-video; optical digital audio; microphone • A/V outputs HDMI; DVI; component video; optical and coaxial digital audio; headphone • Other I/O Ethernet; Wi-Fi antenna; 4 USB; 3 i.Link (two 6-pin, 4-pin); multicard reader; 2 IR emitters for cable/satellite control; wireless keyboard; remote control • 17 x 14 x 19.5 in, 75 lbs sony.com/vaio, 877-865-7669

The megachanger is what sets the system apart, and it does some neat tricks. Before stuffing it with DVDs, for example, you can use it to copy your CD collection wholesale to the PC’s hard drive. I inserted a dozen or so discs at once, and the XL1 scanned each one and retrieved its cover art and track titles from the Internet at a rate of one every 30 seconds. Then I opted to let them all rip to the hard drive, a job that took 52 minutes. In the interim, I used the Media Center to watch some cable TV, check e-mail, and save screen grabs for this review.

The slot-loading changer also doubles as the system's DVD burner (the PC’s single-disc drive is play-only). This makes it especially easy to archive your DVR recordings to disc, though there's no way to edit out the commercials. Just select which series to copy from the menu, and the system calculates how many blank discs you'll need and prompts you to insert them in the changer. Then you can walk away or use the Media Center for other activities. I successfully copied a couple of episodes of South Park that I'd recorded from Comedy Central.

Of course, the real value of combining a megachanger with a Media Center PC is one-stop parking of your entire DVD collection, or at least your 200 favorite discs. The promise of this approach is that storage, indexing, and play functions fall into place with onscreen, computer-controlled efficiency and with disc descriptions and cover art downloaded from the Internet. All you do is point the remote.

After loading the changer with a batch of DVDs, I heard a whirring noise as the next disc clicked into place and then waited for about 30 seconds while the system figured out which movie it was and retrieved its cover art and information. After that, a menu of box-art images appeared onscreen. Then the process was repeated for each of the other discs. Later, I highlighted and clicked on 8 Mile. Having had enough of Eminem, I decided to move on to Paycheck. Total time to change discs was 35 seconds.

Like the HP, Sony’s Media Center proved reasonably robust and A/V component-like. The changer, not the computer, was noisy while it juggled discs. Of course, you wouldn’t expect to be changing discs during a movie. The computer didn't crash, but it did produce a gallery of obscure error messages, including "Stack Overflow" and "Your video card or drivers are not compatible with Media Center."

Aside from leaving out an FM tuner, about the only place Sony really dropped the ball in the XL1 is with HDTV compatibility. The one TV tuner isn't high-def, even for over-the-air broadcasts, so you can’t capture HD broadcasts to the hard drive. You can add a third-party HDTV tuner card, but you have to know what you’re doing. Worse, while its HDMI digital video output is HDTV-capable, the PC’s component-video output delivers only standard-def 480i video. That means you'll be watching some pretty fuzzy-looking menus and programs on your big-screen HDTV if it doesn’t have an HDMI or DVI input.

That was certainly the case when I fed the XL1's component-video signal to an older Pioneer plasma TV. I’d have bypassed the problem by using the Pioneer’s computer VGA input, but the XL1 is also the first computer I’ve encountered in years that doesn’t include a standard VGA output! Sony says that’s by design in this entertainment-driven system, and that restricting the component outputs to 480i is Microsoft's doing. But the component outputs on the HP Media Center PC were able to pass HDTV without flinching. To its credit, the display from the XL1 looked beautiful when I used the supplied HDMI cable to link it up to a new HDMI-equipped HDTV. (Sony also supplies an HDMI-to-DVI adapter for those who need it.)

I still couldn't get the XL1 to play any HDTV programs I tried to bring into the system. When I downloaded an HD trailer for The Interpreter from Movielink, the HP played it perfectly while the Sony kept issuing "video error" messages. Even Sony's technician was stumped.

Clearly, high-def lovers looking to record and archive HDTV programming will have to look elsewhere — though Sony says that early this year, it plans to replace the Vaio VGX-XL1 with the XL2, which adds an HDTV tuner, at the same price. In any case, by incorporating the megachanger, Sony has introduced some unique features to the Media Center, including the abilities to rip CDs in bulk, readily copy a whole library of TV shows to multiple discs, and, best of all, manage a big DVD collection with ease and elegance.

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