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Home Entertainment PC Mod
Hughesey writes "With PC's beginning to enter the Home Entertainment scene, OC-Melbourne have come up with the perfect way to integrate a PC into your Home Theater setup. The OC-Melbourne HEPC. Quote From the Article: 'So now we have a PC that is capable of replacing many separate devices (such as a DVD player, and consoles), but lets admit it, that big beige case probably looks far worse than the hardware its replacing. Some people have gotten around this by using specialised cases such as those from Shuttle, or fancy aluminium cases such as those from LianLi. These cases, however, still don't integrate seamlessly into modern home theater systems, as they still maintain their "PC" look. Enter the OC-Melbourne HEPC...'"
The box can be hidden. It's the poor integration of various bits of software that is the problem with integrating into a home theatre system.
Having to pull out a keyboard to do certain things, poor flexibility in IR remotes for PCs (and their integration to software), having to reboot Windows when it gets grumpy, and so forth, are the reasons why it's painful to get a PC as a regular part of your home theatre. The box color or size is trivial as compared to those issues.
-me
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
How do we ditch the fan?
Even the quiet fan on a PS2 is clearly audible in quiet points of a DVD or CD. No audiophile will tolerate this sort of interference
There's something about these 'Home Entertainment' systems that is deeply disturbing. They sit in a corner of your living space like a modern shrine, exciting in their adherents the same passivity and receptiveness as the old places of worship.
The worshipper sits before them slackjawed, Pringles are the Body of Christ and Sunny Delight their communion wine. The worshipper becomes the holy consumer, contributing nothing but willing to pay, and pay again for his 'entertainment' to any creature that can make them forget themselves for a while longer.
There is a strange social aspect to these systems, too. The size of your television is important to men. Self-loathing eats away like a cancer at the man who cannot afford a television at least as large as his friends; why, he is not only willing but eager to go into debt to avoid this Terrible Shame. And the man who buys his first DVD player knows he is someone.
Yes, someone who will be paying inflated prices for 'entertainment' on DVD from now on. For just like the Old Religions, there is a coinslot built into the edifice.
It doesn't have to be this way. You don't have to build it into your life day by day.
...which has actually been done before. I have also seen PC's crammed into old CD Player cases. While a fairly nifty hack it is by no means what a home entertainment PC system should look like.
/. headlines becoming more and more full of hyperbole?
This is what a PC disguised as a cruddy VCR looks like.
Is it just me or are
Once more unto the breach dear friends...
Currently, computers cannot, and will not, simply fit in with home entertainment setups. There are several reasons why:
1. Inconvenient input devices. Though wireless keyboards and mice (and integrated wireless keyboard/trackball) are all very well, what you're after most of the time is simply a remote control. There was a device made by Animax called the Multimedia Magic, which was perfect for the job - it even allowed you to control the mouse and type addresses into IE - but it doesn't have W2K drivers at the moment, and it relies on an external IR receiver. Perhaps some universal IR input device standard should be made, so that you can have an IR input port on the front of your PC, and use any input device you wish with it. Difficult to set up, I know, but it's an idea.
2. Appearance - whilst there are many nice PC cases around at the moment, getting one small enough that looks nice is difficult. That said, the Dell Optiplex GX150 is a sleek little thing - I can't get on with its laptop-style drives though. Also, it's not configured for home entertainment.
3. Graphics systems - some PCs don't come with TV-out, which is pretty much a necessity, unless you want to buy a very big monitor and shove a standalone TV tuner in.
4. Noise - covered by previous posters, getting a silent PC is nigh on impossible. It would be possible in theory, but you'd need some hefty heatsinks sticking out of the back, which could compromise the appearance.
5. Squeezing it all in the box - for a decent HEPC, you'll be wanting 5.1 sound output, a decent graphics card with S-Video out, a reasonable processor, large hard drive to store your (il)legal MP3s and DivXs, DVD reader, decent processor, etc etc etc... the Shuttle SS51 looks good for this, but again, it's only one system and it's not ideal. It does look quiet though...
6. Not many people want one - whilst I feel I am making a circular argument here, there must be little demand for HEPCs because there aren't any ideal devices.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
There's nothing like blurting out religious metaphors about home theater enthusiasts to score a little karma! You know our geek community is getting bad when there are sociology majors trolling in our forums.
You're a very poetic troll indeed, but a troll is a troll and it's unfortunate you weren't moderated as such.
People just want to replicate the movie experience at home, nothing more, nothing less. It's a money pit, a dubious one at that, but what hobby isn't?
Cheers.
I'd like to make some comments from the point of the research I've done so far on this subject, in relation to some of the things you've said.
First, on hard drive failure:
Hard drives fail. This seems obvious to me, I was a network admin in college and I saw a lot of hard drives fail. Pity the poor fool who tries to transport them.. click click, click click.
My Tip: Burn. CD burners are cheap, reliable, and the media is super cheap. Yeah, an entire movie won't fit on on CD. But you won't be playing from the CD, the idea is merely to have a copy on permanent media in case of HD failure - then put it back on the new HD when you get it. So, make sure you have your media box hooked to your LAN and copy those files to your CD burning machine. No burner? Buy one. - Note: My Pine drive shipped with Nero full version, thus I recommend buying one, because otherwise I would have bought it seperately anyway.
Noise:
Computers are noisy. This is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome in a entertainment center pc.
My Tip: abandon convention. To combat noise, I'm looking at using a specialized watercooled case. I realize this case doesn't fit the traditional entertainment device size/configuration - but I've abandoned that notion and just committed myself to buying the quietest setup I can find and figuring out a way set up my entertainment center around it so that it doesn't look out of place. I have to admit, at first, a "dumb terminal" type setup seems like a good idea, but most of the stuff has to run from the client, not the server. You basically aren't buying yourself any help because your powerful video card and processor have to be on the client anyway, and those cause heat - so even a dumb terminal is going to be noisy.
TIVO Functionality:
A must-have. Clearly an entertainment PC is only going to be more than a fancy looking DVD player if you include video capture and playback.
My Tip: ATI All-in-Wonder. The ATI All-in-Wonder is still the best video capture card on the market. Note that it comes with a remote. NVidia has one now, but reviews are not as glowing. Program guides for both are free.
Output:
TV resolutions aren't very good. My research suggests that even new, fancypants TVs resolution isn't good enough to use for a computer.
My Idea (not advice): projector. Currently I'm considering buying a high resolution computer projector for about the same cost as a very nice TV (a.k.a $2,000-$3,000). I've seen one of these at one of the places I've worked, and I was impressed. It showed both a 1024x768 computer screen and DVD playback very well. (Comon, I *HAD* to play a DVD on it!) The only issue here is obviously light - projection does not work well in a room with a lot of light. Even though otherwise this is an ideal solution (huge screen, relatively low cost, high res) - I'm not sure I can live with the tradeoff. I imagine for normal TV viewing I will still go with the regular TV I already own. My super-sneaky idea for a "close" monitor - build a flap to come up closer to the projector. I doubt the text would be readable, though. I'm still mulling over the possibilities.
// harborpirate
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