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What's the Point of Building a Home Theater PC?
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has written Building a Basic HTPC. They discuss why Building a HTPC only makes sense if it can do something better than any other commercially available solution, as well as why HTPC should integrate act like a component not a computer. They also go into upsampling of DVDs to HDTV."
Building a Basic HTPC
February 03, 2004
Summary: You've read about building no-budget Dual Opteron workstations, and RAID-less storage servers and even air filters at FiringSquad. Today we'll be looking at Building a Basic Home Theater PC. If you're thinking Small Form Factor ATX, you haven't learned anything from our previous articles. This HTPC is designed for two purposes only: high-definition upsampling of DVD video and personal video recording. If you ever wondered how DVD's can look better when brought to HDTV resolutions even though the source is the same, read inside.
Introduction Page:: ( 1 / 10 )
The HTPC or "Home Theater PC" is a popular but often nebulous concept. Everyone would agree that a fundamental component is that the pc be connected to a television but what the HTPC is used for is something to debate. Some people use a HTPC to play games on the big screen, while others see it as a way to enjoy high-quality DVD, others see it as a music/video/image jukebox, and still others see it as a way to get a low-cost HDTV by using a desktop monitor rather than TV.
The problem with having a HTPC doing multiple tasks is that it becomes more difficult to integrate the software and yet your wallet gets thinner and thinner. Instead of starting off with a full-fledged HTPC, we're going to start with a very introductory approach to the HTPC and then through follow-up articles, add more features.
For this introductory HTPC article, we have two very specific tasks: DVD upsampled to HDTV resolutions, and a personal TV recorder. Since we're "lazy," our HTPC needs to perform like a real piece of home theater equipment as much as possible. The system should integrate itself seamlessly, and shouldn't force the user to think about it as a computer. The HTPC also has to have an advantage over a similar dedicated component ? there's no point in reinventing the wheel unless you can make it faster, smaller, and cheaper.
Why these two tasks?
We've designed this system as an ideal starting point for anyone with a "HDTV ready" television.
Having a PC-based TIVO is ideal for a number of reasons. The most important factor is cost. Both TIVO and ReplayTV charge a subscription fee and ridiculous premiums for larger hard drives. With a PC, you can add and replace IDE hard drives on a whim and also enjoy free TV listings. In addition, it is possible to enjoy higher quality video through a PC-based system through improved video scaling than would otherwise be possible with a standard unit.
Finally, ATI and other third-party software applications have media server applications that will allow their multimedia products to stream video to client systems on your desktop, and NVIDIA is expected to add this capability to its Personal Cinema line in the near future.
The upsampled DVD is the more important feature in our HTPC today. Even if cost is no object, the HTPC approach to DVD can offer better picture quality than any stand-alone unit. DVDs are recorded with 480 lines of resolution, however it turns out that upsampling the video to a 720p or 1080i resolution for HDTV and HDTV-ready televisions will offer the best quality.
It's a real phenomenon
One of the most often confused concepts is the idea that upsampling DVDs to HDTV resolutions will make DVDs look as good as HDTV. It doesn't seem as if this is possible -- the data is not present to begin with. The real answer is that while an upsampled DVD isn't as good as true HDTV, it will look better than a straight 480 progressive lines of resolution. Here's why?
HDTV-ready CRT
Like a CRT PC monitor, an HDTV-ready CRT can sync at multiple resolutions. The catch is that the electron beam is not designed to change in size depending on the resolution (it changes but not by design). Suppose you have a 19" monitor running at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200. While reading this webpage, look at the white background. Get as close to the screen as you can to study the white. dy
Building a Basic HTPC
February 03, 2004
Summary: You've read about building no-budget Dual Opteron workstations, and RAID-less storage servers and even air filters at FiringSquad. Today we'll be looking at Building a Basic Home Theater PC. If you're thinking Small Form Factor ATX, you haven't learned anything from our previous articles. This HTPC is designed for two purposes only: high-definition upsampling of DVD video and personal video recording. If you ever wondered how DVD's can look better when brought to HDTV resolutions even though the source is the same, read inside.
IntroductionPage:: ( 1 / 10 )
The HTPC or "Home Theater PC" is a popular but often nebulous concept. Everyone would agree that a fundamental component is that the pc be connected to a television but what the HTPC is used for is something to debate. Some people use a HTPC to play games on the big screen, while others see it as a way to enjoy high-quality DVD, others see it as a music/video/image jukebox, and still others see it as a way to get a low-cost HDTV by using a desktop monitor rather than TV.
The problem with having a HTPC doing multiple tasks is that it becomes more difficult to integrate the software and yet your wallet gets thinner and thinner. Instead of starting off with a full-fledged HTPC, we're going to start with a very introductory approach to the HTPC and then through follow-up articles, add more features.
For this introductory HTPC article, we have two very specific tasks: DVD upsampled to HDTV resolutions, and a personal TV recorder. Since we're "lazy," our HTPC needs to perform like a real piece of home theater equipment as much as possible. The system should integrate itself seamlessly, and shouldn't force the user to think about it as a computer. The HTPC also has to have an advantage over a similar dedicated component ** there's no point in reinventing the wheel unless you can make it faster, smaller, and cheaper.
Why these two tasks?
We've designed this system as an ideal starting point for anyone with a "HDTV ready" television.
Having a PC-based TIVO is ideal for a number of reasons. The most important factor is cost. Both TIVO and ReplayTV charge a subscription fee and ridiculous premiums for larger hard drives. With a PC, you can add and replace IDE hard drives on a whim and also enjoy free TV listings. In addition, it is possible to enjoy higher quality video through a PC-based system through improved video scaling than would otherwise be possible with a standard unit.
Finally, ATI and other third-party software applications have media server applications that will allow their multimedia products to stream video to client systems on your desktop, and NVIDIA is expected to add this capability to its Personal Cinema line in the near future.
The upsampled DVD is the more important feature in our HTPC today. Even if cost is no object, the HTPC approach to DVD can offer better picture quality than any stand-alone unit. DVDs are recorded with 480 lines of resolution, however it turns out that upsampling the video to a 720p or 1080i resolution for HDTV and HDTV-ready televisions will offer the best quality.
It's a real phenomenon
One of the most often confused concepts is the idea that upsampling DVDs to HDTV resolutions will make DVDs look as good as HDTV. It doesn't seem as if this is possible -- the data is not present to begin with. The real answer is that while an upsampled DVD isn't as good as true HDTV, it will look better than a straight 480 progressive lines of resolution. Here's why**
HDTV-ready CRT
Like a CRT PC monitor, an HDTV-ready CRT can sync at multiple resolutions. The catch is that the electron beam is not designed to change in size depending on the resolution (it changes but not by design). Suppose you have a 19" monitor running at 1280x1024 or 1600x1200. While reading this webpage, look at the white background. Get as close to the screen as you can to study the white. Now, change your monito
1) Play DVDs. More advanced features than standalone players, such as bookmarking (that allows you to skip that pesky 'forced' content), multiregion playback etc.
2) Play games on a big TV with decent 5.1 sound.
3) Play MP3s from a central server through your stereo.
4) Used by people with high end projectors to deinterlace video signals.
5) Confirm your geekiness.
in the article, he argues that using a pc vid card provides superior upsampling. i don't know about that, but the other points regarding flexibility and bang-for-buck are pretty self-evident.
Last year I found myself with an old AMD 800mhz PC, missing just the monitor (total value probably $100). I also have lots of divx movies. Converting the movies to MPEG, splitting them, and burning them to CDs so that I could watch them in my DVD player was a pain. Watching them on a computer was even worse. So, I hooked up my PC to the TV, put the PC on my wireless network, and now I have a "HTPC". Total cost to me -- $40 for a wireless network card.
Now I'm in the process of installing MythTV on that PC (total cost $200 for a encoder/decoder card), and I'll have an awesome PVR without having to pay any monthly fees.
There's no reason that your wallet needs to get thinner and thinner. If you are interested in a PVR (ie. Tivo), then you actually save piles of money by not having to pay the monthly Tivo fee.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
The Antec case is too big, it falls off the back of your other home theater components. And why use a Radeon? Who wants to *only* upscale DVDs to HD resolution? Isn't the point of watching HD being able to receive HD broadcasts too?
Alternative configuration:
Mini-ITX system (the case will fit on top of the TV) like those from casetronic.com, with a VIA 800 or better.
MyHD HD Tunerboard (will upscale DVDs and tune HD/SD broadcasts).
VGA to component breakout cable connected from the MyHD's output directly to your set.
Install XP or 2K, put the MyHD IR control app in the winblows startup folder, and never look at the windows desktop again, since the MyHD has an OSD on the HD output.
With this config you can tune HD broadcasts and upscale DVDs for less.
Maybe it wouldn't make as much sense if you are truely building from scratch, but this is slashdot. How many peeps here don't have a basement/closet full of spare parts. If you have a box sitting around, it's much cheaper than say a replayTV or MCE Windoze box. Part of building your own is the fun. Aside from that, you can cusomize your own box a lot more than a tivo or replaytv. Mame anyone? Check out MythTV for a cool OSS project or MyHtpc.net for a really cool, community driven front-end. For an all around informative site about hardware, and mostly windows frontend software, check out ruel.net It's more tweaking and screwing around, but more adaptable too.
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I seriously doubt if anybody has a monitor bigger than my 42" HDTV-ready projection TV... plus, using a computer as a platform usually means you have to put up with fan noise; it should be possible to build a consumer electronics device that silent (although Sony seems to insist on putting fans in theirs).
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Then I realized that I already had all of that stuff and it all worked perfectly.
And if you didn't already have all that stuff?
Or if you wanted to tidy up your A/V rack? I count maybe six individual boxes that could be integrated into one box.
For one thing, it ignores deinterlacing needed for HDTV. The minimum cost for a good standalone deinterlacer is about $900, a standalone deinterlacer + scaler: $2500. With a non-Booktree based TV card ($50) into an existing machine and running dScaler, you get most of that quality and a scaler.
You can get a quiet PC, you can find one here
Finally, I settled on buying a computer to do all of this. I had quite a few of the parts I needed; the only thing I was missing was an OTA tuner card, the DVD software, and the sound card. I already had decided on Windows XP (which I will explain below), so I was set.
The DVD software I went with was called TheaterTek and the benefits it had over a standard player are numerous:
- Ability to resize any move to any resolution including 1080i
- Ability to expand the movie to get rid of the black bars around the edge (i.e. anamorphic widescreen)
- Ability to save these changes for each individual movie
- Using Windows to further enhance the output using various filters (i.e. fdshow filters)
The output from this setup was incredible. Watching DVDs at 1080i with the image cleaned up is so much better than 480p. I highly recommend it.The other problem was getting the actual HD content from the main networks. Locally in Omaha, NE ABC, CBS, and NBC have been broadcasting in HD for a while, so an OTA tuner was the way to go. A stand alone box was going for $600 locally, and I had found a card that does it for $200, the MyHD OTA Tuner Card. The picture quality is incredible and the performance was great on my 850 Duron. It gave me everything the set top box would have done and also Tivo like functionality out of the box, something that still isn't available for HD yet.
As I mentioned before, I went with Windows XP as everything mentioned above is only available for that platform. Also, due to the mature video drivers on Win32 vs. Linux for the ATI card I went with, I was able to tweak more aspects of the output to the HD monitor through a program called Powerstrip. I tried DVD playback on Linux (mplayer), but it had no where near the functionality of the Theatertek software. Also, I did look into the pcHDTV card available, but it isn't nearly has mature as it should be for a commercial HD tuner card (the only user fiendly app I have found, MythTV, has very limited integration with the pcHDTV card. That is changing quickly, though).
All in all, I highly recommend making a HTPC if you have the time. Plus, you don't need that Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition crap to make it work, just plain old XP will do you fine.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Where do people think innovation comes from? Big corporations paying for new designs?
Yup. Exactly how much design comes from a tinkerer in his/her garage? Nearly all but a small fraction of a percent of innovation and design comes from large corporations.
Prove me wrong.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
The author says this HTPC does what Tivo does, but it cannot. It does not have software to download television listings and intelligently parse them based on user preferences. This elaborate P.C. setup cannot be told to even do basic Tivo tasks such as "record all showings of my favorite show".
This is not an equivalent device.
Since this was posted A.C., it doesn't appear to be a case of Karma whoring, and even if it where, I would gladly give up the mod points to view the article.
Chances are the moderator(s) who marked the parent to this post redundant, will not see this comment of mine. But I for one appreciate the effort to include the text so all can see. Perhaps the moderator(s) thought the text had already been posted in full (it hadn't). Even so, this was a very early post and should have been given the benefit of the doubt that earlier article text postings hadn't shown up yet.
Save negative mods for when they are really needed.
Like the guidelines say, focus on modding up.
Thankfully, most moderators modded this up informative, not redundant.
Letter To Iran
Just barely. An HTPC really is a good deal, depending on what you're trying to do.
It depends entirely on what you want to do. Consider my situation-- I had an HD-ready set, and wanted an OTA tuner and the ability to record HD broadcasts digitally.
Like a lot of people around here, I had an old PC laying around doing nothing. I bought an HDTV tuner card for $120 (used, new would have been $199) and stuck it in. Now I can record 10 hours of HDTV, and tune my local stations. A standalone tuner box would have been a minimum of $300, and the ability to record (maybe with a digital VCR) would have been another $300.
The MyHD MDP-100 tuner card has the nice side effect of being able to play back DVDs, and upscale the output to 1080i or 720p digitally. And because it's a hardware MPEG card, it doesn't need much of a system to run it. A PIII and 128MB of PC100 is well more than it really needs.
It wasn't $700 or $200, though-- it was $120. Aesthetically, it fits entirely behind the TV, and the one case fan isn't too noisy. Because I only use it for 2 or 3 shows a week, it's off the rest of the time and noise is not an issue.
Down the road, I'll build a better system-- but heck, even at $700, it beats out a 1080i DVD player (or standalone scaler and normal DVD), OTA HD tuner, and HD recording solution price-wise. A $30 ATI dongle lets me play PC games on the big screen in HD, too, so add an XBox with a component kit to that list.
They really can be price-competitive with a lot of other things, and a good quiet case and heatsink with underclocked CPU can really give you some advantages you can't get without spending a TON of money to do it another way.
When the HD Tivo is $300, *then* I'll have something to switch to. (but it still won't do the games, DVD scaling, or archive the HD shows to Xvid or WM9-- so my HTPC will probably soldier on.)
I have an Infocus X1, and it has a the DCDi chip from Farouja in it. It upsamples 480p to 800x600 automatically, but.. here's the funny thing. 480i looks BETTER on this projector, because the Farouja chip does a better job of deinterlacing and inverse 3:2 pulldown than the "Progressive Scan" DVD player I have. So I don't even use 480p, I use 480i over component for DVDs and Composite from my DirecTV dish (the DTV signal is only 480x480 resolution mpeg-2 and look actually WORSE coming out the S-video jack, it emphasises the MPEG-2 compression and makes everything blocky on the projector.. Composite smooths those out because it's blurry)
So the answer to the big question here is.. if you have a GOOD projector or monitor with a GOOD deinterlacer/scaler chipset, then you don't need a HTPC. If you don't, then a HTPC can get you good deinterlacing/scaling for your DVDs.
BTW.
http://deinterlace.sf.net for a Windows Deinterlacer
or
http://tvtime.sf.net for a Linux Deinterlacer.
Your $50 capture card and your $50 video card aren't going to perform well -- so the device will work like crap.
And you have a DVD burner lying around the house? Nice!
Your setup is very similar to mine. I use a MyHD card to output to the set as well.
But I wanted the desktop, too. So I bought a couple of VGA->Component RCA breakout cables and set things up like this:
Radeon HD Component Dongle -> Component RCA to VGA breakout cable -> MyHD VGA input
and
MyHD VGA output -> VGA to Component RCA breakout cable #2 (just like your current setup.
All this does is allow you to use the handy source switching built in to your MyHD card to toggle between 1080i desktop from the Radeon, and 1080i video from your MyHD card. Works like a charm.
Cables available here:
Short cable for connecting your Radeon to your MyHD
Long cable for connecting your MyHD to your HDTV's component input
With a few cables, you can do what the above poster did AND still have your desktop. Pressing the "HD" button on your MyHD remote will toggle between desktop and video.
Did you know that Tivo tracks not only what shows you watch, but exaclty what parts of shows you replay or skip over?
Yup.
Now, I know it's *supposed* to be anonymous.
And if you read the posts by people who have investigated this it is anonymous. The data that contains key presses, show info, etc. is sent without any identifying information whatsoever. TiVo has further stated that the data is stored in completely separate databases that have no interfacing between one another.
And you can always call them and opt-out entirely if you want. It's been confirmed that when you do so the data is never sent at all. (Which would make it very difficult to track)
But can you (or Tivo) guarentee that they will *never* be bought out be someone less ethical?
Nope. And if that happens then we'll simply have to see if they change the privacy policy, and what changes are made.
Can you guarentee that Tivo won't get a new CEO who decides selling your viewing habits to direct mail advertisers is more lucrative?
Won't happen unless they're bought out -- which is the only way the privacy policy can change in such a drastic manner.
The paranoia over viewing habits is really quite amazing. I really don't care that much, particularly since it's anonymized. Shrug.
If you only have component inputs, ATI's cards can output component HD with a $30 dongle you can order on their website. MMmmmm... giant HD video games.
HD tuner cards with VGA outputs can be connected with a VGA->Component breakout cable, as long as your HD card supports YPrPb (normal VGA is RGB). All the ones I've seen that have their own outputs support this.
My combo uses both, and connects the output of the radeon to the loopback input of the HD card (kinda like an old voodoo 3d accelerator) with another VGA->Component cable.
I use a MyHD MDP-100, which they no longer make. But the MDP-120 will do the same. You don't need one of these at all to get desktop/game output, though-- just that ATI adapter. (which only works with ATI cards-- the reason it's cheap is that the card already supports component out. It's just a pin rearranger.)
HDTV (or really ATSC) is only about 20Mbits/sec which is a relatively low data-rate, easily handled by firewire (400Mbits/sec) and older computers.
The hard part is the mpeg decoding, which, I assume in this guy's case, is handled by a dedicated decoder chip on the firewire device.
I'm building one as we speak, so I know a little more than most hearsay going on right now.
For not much more money, you can have the same exact performance, plus the added bonus of _burning_ recorded tv to dvd/vcd..
People saying it's expensive forget that as long as you have a hardware decoder, you're processor could literally be a pII.. hardware decoders do all the number crunching you need. the biggest requirement in this whole thing being a HUGE HDD.
on to my setup, i'm using my actual PC for now, slowly gathering all the parts.
heres why someone would do this insttead of tivo: (ms already knows this, hence MCE.)
It's a tivo... it's a jukebox... it's a game console... it's A COMPUTER.
sure, if you think of it as just a tivo replacement, it's one hell of an expense.. but if you think of it as a PC with about $100 exta dollas wrapped up in it, it's one hell of a deal. Plus its very cool imho
So what if you already have a home server PC? This was my situation when I started to consider a tivo box. I thought it silly to have essentially two equivilant computers systems up 24/7. So I added the PVR function and TV video out to the PC.
Asthetics are not an issue as the PC sits in a closet. I pass remote control commands to it via a IR->RF->IR remote extender. The system is *almost* headless except for the TV. I run a long s-video cable from the PC to the TV for display and run MythTV for the PVR function. All up, the cost of adding PVR capability to the system was about $200 -- which included a cheap tuner/capture card and a 180 GB disk. Myth gives me free schedule updates and a very cool web based interface for programming the recordings. Even my wife is happy!
To do this from scratch is tougher. A budget for the system would be upwards of $800 or even $1000 to get a reasonable machine. Off the shelf may be better unless you already have a server. Take a gander at Here for pix of my *unfinished* HTPC.
- AMD Athlon XP 1800
- Some micro-ATX MSI motherboard (I forget the exact model)
- 256 megs of RAM
- Yuan MPG600 tuner/capture card
- GeForce 4 MX440 (for TV out)
- Western Digital 160 Gig hard drive
- Antect Minuet micro-ATX case (it's a beautiful case and fits in perfectly in anyone's home theater)
- Extra case fan and anything else I can't think of off the top of my head
It's runs MythTV on Gentoo Linux and works perfectly (although it took some time to work out the bugs with the Yuan card). If anyone has a spare computer around give Myth a shot. It's a pretty impressive open source project. I've still got some stuff to finish configuring but before long I'll hopefully be playing Chrono Trigger with my XBox controllers after I looked up the weather and decided it was too cold to go out (but only after queueing up the television programs I want to record for the week).And you have a DVD burner lying around the house? Nice!
It should be pointed out that ReplayTV and TiVo devices generally don't have DVD writers either. Even those that do -- for substantially higher prices -- may not allow much flexibility in editing or authoring the DVD. So if you're comparing build-your-own DVR to commercial ones, a DVD burner isn't part of the equation.
That said, I capitulated and bought a ReplayTV, which my six year old uses with aplomb. (Her only disappointment was when I informed her that it did not have infinite capacity, and thus old shows weren't kept forever.)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
spare parts? So you just happen to have one or two capture cards just lying around...a 100GB or larger hard drive....a DVD rom...a proc ~= 1.5Ghz or up...and a motherboard/ram to match? You have these kind of spare parts lying around?
I've built a mythTV system and it is NOT cool or easy. It took me two months to setup my first one and a month to setup my latest one. DVD ripping/playing isn't exactly point and click on Linux...neither is selecting a capture card that just works. the most popular hardware based capture cards like PVR-250/350 use a driver called ivtv and it doesn't work side by side with bttv...which kinda screws you over if you want two capture cards on the same box (so I had to do the multinode route but it's unstable doing that). And dolby digital output with optical cabling and finding both a driver and a frontend (no xine doesn't work with every card) that support dolby digital pass through is another story entirely.
MythTV is on version 0.13 for a reason! It's cool if you know how to set it up right...and yes I did have to modify code on the slave node just to get it to work right (it didn't initialize my PCTV Pro card correctly).
But if you where being real about the spare parts thing...send some my way...because all my "spare parts" are from the 486 days.