AIW 9600 Pro & Win Media Center

Anyone know if AIW 9600 Pro will 'play nice' with Windows Media Center in Vista or Win7(32-bit)?

Converting 'retired' desktop to a dedicated "Media" box and need to know which Media Center OS to go with.

Understand that WDDM 1.1 standard for Win7 Media Center [vs. WDM 1.0 in Catalyst drivers] somehow limits capabilities.

Also have read of video capture problems with native Win Media Center, requiring Sage TV or other DVR intermediary.

Appreciate any insights/experience/guidance!

System: Pent4 2.8GHz, Asus P4PE, 2G RAM, 500G PATA + 1TB SATA [on PCI controller], Adaptec AVC3610, CD-RW+DVD-RW optical drives

basically these days, its not worth it using any AIW device lower than an x1300, but even those have limited support. Your best bet is simply to buy a new, dedicated PCI/PCI-e 1x capture card, and use any old video card that supports hardware acceleration of content (anything in the HD 4000 or Geforce 8000 series or above).

As for recording, I would not advise using windows media center as it records in an encrypted file that you cannot open up, edit out the ads, and save/convert. I would use something like BeyondTV for recording, though SageTV or a number of others work well. If you want to use windows media center, I'd suggest tracking down a copy of Windows XP Media Center edition, as windows Vista and windows 7 do NOT have good support for the AIW cards.

Another option is to look into the Linux side of things, where you can have MythTV installed through Ubuntu. It is all free, much lower weight than windows, and has much better support for older hardware you will be using. It's at least worth a shot since its entirely free and if you dont like it, you can just reformat and start with something else.

If you would like to be able to use this as an all-in-one system, that can record media and playback all your content in an easy to manage way, you might want to look at something like MediaPortal which is a free, open source software.

But personally, what I have done is just use my home theatre PC to play back content, all the recording and editing is done on a more powerful desktop.

Another one i can suggest trying to use is going to be XBMC.

Here is the read up courtesy of wikipedia
XBMC
Enjoy

Much thanks to you & starwarskid91 for analysis/suggestions!

I love XBMC, in fact I use it on my own HTPC, but it doesn't have any native support for recording shows off a built in tuner, most of the support comes from ported software addons which can be a pain to set up. So I would suggest using a software package that has a built in media recorder that is easily accessible, unless you like tinkering with software