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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."
I got the idea into my head a while back that my PC would do everything. I'd have every piece of electronic and entertainment equipment in one box. I would be able to watch DVDs, TV, play CDs and MP3s, fake Tivo, Fax machine, answering machine all from my PC. All controlled via remote and piped to my TV.
It would be incredible.
Then I realized that I already had all of that stuff and it all worked perfectly. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.
D
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Why build your own PC?
Why build your own car?
Why build your own house?
Why do any of the above when you can just purchase the finished product outright which might be better than what you could build? Because we can.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Posters here seem to have demonstrated pretty clearly that even that's not close to cost-effective, unless you have almost all parts already and don't care about much of Tivo's functionality.
You do this stuff for fun, not to save money.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
All the other functions of a HTPC aside, the PowerMac G3 I'm using does one thing I can't replicate with a one-box solution: it records HDTV over FireWire. A DVHS deck would cost me way more than the $100 + $75 FireWire/USB card I paid for the G3. Even then, the DVHS deck uses tape opposed to random access hard drive.
It's not exactly a TiVo, but it time-shifts HDTV just fine. Since there is so little HD content anyway, I have no need for an HD TiVo anyway.
this is my sig
I'm sure given more time I could think of a few more, but that covers the majors. It wasn't any cheaper than a standalone unit for some of these functions, and it isn't quite as easy to deal with, but it was fun to build and tweak on. Plus it has the added benefit of being upgradeable.
One thing that this article doesn't seem to touch on is noise. When I first built mine the noise was intolerable. I ended up having to replace the PS, CPU fan and case fans with quiet models, and lining the case with Dynamat to cut the noise down to where it didn't bother me.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
This will only to appeal to a small segment of the population, but I speak from experience with anime (this could apply to any foreign works, though). There are times DVDs are released without subtitles in a language you can read or dialogue in a language you can understand. There are people out there (fans) who will go through the trouble of created timed subtitle scripts. So, if you have a PC and a region-compatible or region-free DVD player, you can enjoy this new video (which you payed for) with working subtitles!
This becomes more interesting when you learn that a lot of entertainment goes through a localization process when they are being brought over to foreign markets. One prime example is how virtually every Hong Kong movie must have gangster rap in it... >_< So, sometimes people want to watch the original version.
That's one advantage I can think of for HTPC.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
It was little more then 50 years ago that people could easily build their own cars.
There's also a very strong community of personal aircraft builders. (I know one, it impresses the hell out of me that he's building this thing and intends to fly it.)
I enjoy building my own PCs because I can pick and choose to my taste.
Where do people think innovation comes from? Big corporations paying for new designs? The majority comes from people PLAYING with ideas and creating new things!
So i've been running an htpc for a bit, and i love it.
In fact, even my wife loves it.. which is a feat
I used it for mp3 playback, streaming mp3's, dvd upsampling and playback and television watching. I use a 100 hour directtivo for pvr stuff.
It's an athlon 1800+, 512 megs of ram, radeon 9000, guillemot soundcard with hacked drivers running optical out to the receiver
It's in an antec sonata, and is using zalman cooling stuff for everything.. the vidcard has no fan.. That machine is quieter than the tivo.
It's all running vga straight back to an infocus x1 projector showing on a 92" vutec silverstar screen
I control it all with a gyration ultra mouse/kbd combo
Software wise, i use zoomplayer with the cinemaster video codecs going through ffdshow for dvd playback and dscaler for tv watching. It's all running xp professional because i'm not particluarly linux savvy.
That setup has replaced my television completely. dscaler does a wonderful job of managing the tv signal, and zoomplayer is just phenomenal.
When we did LOTR:TT extended cut, i ripped both discs to the hard drive, added in trailers on the front end, psa's from the 60's, and spliced in a 10 minute dancing candy intermission in the middle.
Just hit play, and it goes magically.
The only complaint i have is the lack of useful hdtv cards. You can receive ota signals, with minimal pvr support, but that's it. Nobody supports signal over cable lines, or anything fancy.
I assume i'll need some sort of gray market hardware in the future to do that..
Oh yeah.. the total cost of all of this was less than a decent lcd hdtv set.. and you get a whole lot more..
If you can't convince you're wife/significant other with the raw windows/linux interface, look at some of the frontends. I used myhtpc (myhtpc.net) for a bit, and it was first rate..
I abandoned it since my wife is savvy enough to figure it out herself..
For more info, go to avsforum.com and read their htpc forums.. or linux htpc forums as you desire..
Highly recommended.
Right. I did a chapter on HTPCs recently for "Hardware Hacking: Have Fun While Voiding Your Warranty". IMHO, the two reasons for building your own HTPC are aesthetics and control. The latter meaning that you don't anyone else deciding how your commercial skip will work, or what you will and won't be allowed to network.
Generally speaking, you won't be able to build a custom HTPC for less money than a commercial HTPC(-like) device with the exact same functions.
My major points are being able to play my music collection through the same box and MAME.
I have a few hundred CDs sitting in boxes, I would like to keep them there and listen to the ripped versions.
When somebody builds a box that can do both of those on top of what they do now, I'm in.
I disagree on asthetics, anyways. My main reason for building a HTPC is simple: I already have all the components through other means and aquisitions, with the exception of an LCD projector. $500 on eBay, and I have a full theater.
I don't care about asthetics for two reasons: 1) the system will be behind the main seating area in a cupboard that's closed (but vented to avoid overheating issues), and 2) when I'm watching a movie, I'm actually watching the movie, not the equipment. Sure, when I get bored with a show, I may gaze at the equipment from time to time, but not necessarily when I'm at my own place. It's more to see what other people are using.
Here is my DVR system. Actually, it's two systems. My DVR has a 1.4 Athlon, 256 megs of RAM, 10 gig HD for apps and OS, 80 gig for MP3s, 160 RAID-0 partition for recording, 120 HD for video storage/playback, and an ATI All-in-Wonder 8500DV. It's connected under the floor to the TV/receiver in my living room. Thus, you cannot hear it from the living room.
My second system is a cheap PIII 550 with an 80 gig HD. It too holds my MP3 collection and is primarily for playing music. However, it too is connected to the living room TV and reciever and can play previously recorded content via the network. Thus, when the DVR is recording something, I can still play music or watch shows.
Also, the music computer has two soundcards. Winamp uses my Audigy2 and everything else uses a cheap Hercules card. Thus, I can even listen to music while someone else is watching a recorded show!!!
Also, that music computer is wired to nearly every receiver to the house, so I can listen not only from the living room, but from the kitchen, bedroom, etc. (I'm working on getting the bathroom's wired with speakers.) And I should point out that ATI's Remote Wonder works throughout my huge two-story farm house.
With my homebuilt DVR systems, I can do the following:
1. Record shows, edit out the commercials, and burn them to DVD.
2. Pause, rewind, and fast-forward live TV.
3. Know what's currently on TV and what's coming up. (With ATI's Guideplus/EasyView software, included with its All-in Wonder cards.)
4. Access my entire 900+ CD collection in MP3 format from nearly every room in the house. (Via TightVNC.)
5. Create a playlist of ALL my favorite songs, which I can access with one button from my Remote Wonder. That playlist is over four days long; it's like having my own radio station!
5. Normalize the volume of my CD/MP3 collection via my Audigy 2 card. That's important. A roommate had one of those 200 disc CD players, but considering that nearly every CD has a different volume, I considered it worthless.
6. Rip my DVD collection so I can play them back without all the FBI crap, from nearly every room in the house.
7. And most importantly, I do not have to pay a monthy service, or have it randomly record shows it feels I might want to watch.
Sure, my system probably cost a lot, (I built them both out of mostly spare parts) but considering it does exactly what I want and there is no commercially available alternative, I find it extremely valuable. Heck, even my wife can use it!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Rather than computer. I did try though...in a quest for superior picture quality. I assumed that the computer would provide a better picture quality than my non-progressive scan DVD using the onboard iDCD Farjuoda de-interlacer chip set in my InFocus X1 projector. I was wrong. I did hook up my iBook to my MOTU 828 interface I use for music recording this was to get 5.1 audio out of the iBook. The MOTU has 24 bit decoders and optical out which went in nicely to the Sony amp. Anyway....from studying deinterlacers and how exactly DVD's are played back, mastered and what the aspect ratios and frame rate of film I concluded the quality of the DVD image resides in 1. the mastering technique, i.e. Film to digital transfer method used 2. The quality of the print used in the mastering 3. And the sophistication of the de-interlacing. Most progressive DVD players have deinterlacing chipsets that take the information from the DVD produce a progressive scan image. The quality and sophistication of these chipset varies greatly. Do some googles on "deinterlacing chipset". In addition they also provide proprietary functions to reduce and eliminate digital artifacts that are the result of image processing. When I used my iBook to play back the image I did get a higher resolution image but it was harsh and very non-film like. The deinterlacer built into the projector is designed to produce a "film like" quality to the image. Taking great pains to reduce the rainbow effect and other artifacts like pixelation, jaggies and chroma abberations that result form the hardware and convertsion. So keep in mind watching films on DVD's is a much different activity than watching HDTV. Film is an art is for the most part is still an analog process (barring the increasing number of digitally shot movies like 28 Days Later that was later converted to film) So having seprately engineered components to produce the appropriate signal is inherently going to be better. A DVD player to watch movies, HDTV tuner to watch HDTV and a monitor capable of producing quality images from a variety of sources is the way to go. That is if you are really picky about what hits the back of your eyeball.