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Ahanix D5 Media Center Enclosure
VL writes "Ahanix has delivered an enclosure that gives you everything you would desire in an HTPC. The versatility of using MicroATX or Standard ATX motherboards, the look and feel of high end audio/video equipment and a VFD information center that gives the added information of what is playing. It comes at a hefty price tag mind you, but in this particular situation, you get what you pay for." Now that's what I'm talking about. Anybody know of any other commercially available cases as well suited to putting in a stereo system?
Nice but you can't compare the Overture with things like the Ahanix D5. The Overture isn't a clean case at all, it's rounded and plastic and so on. No wonder it's much cheaper.
For putting discs in it, of course. I also happen to have a headphone jack I put on the front of mine that I need to access regularly.
If you think a standalone DVD player is perfect, you don't have any imagination at all. How do you copy DVDs from your stand-alone DVD player to your PC? How does your stand-alone DVD player make backups of your DVDs?
Even for just playback... How did you get a region-free, macrovision-free, DVD player, that will allow you to skip track 0 (forced trailers) and has progressive scan, outputs to RGB, SVIDEO, DVI, and Composite, for $40? (Price of a DVD-Rom) And that's the short list. Things like volume normalization (attenuation control) denoising and deblocking, are invaluable, and rather hard to find in consumer equipment. Plus you could easily do things like have stock-quotes pop-up ontop of the video being played, or any of millions of other things.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Maintainability? Looks? The VFD displays look nice. A PC behind the entertainment center means that the center is away from the wall more than necessary. I know one person that stores his HTPC in a closet with the relevant cables running out.
Do game consoles do HD? PCs do, at least with certain Radeon models with a component video adapter.
I have an HTPC, but I use it as a deinterlacer for a video projector. The projector's deinterlacer and scaler sucks, so I feed a video signal to a hardware deinterlacing board and the projector gets fed an RGB signal. A standalone deinterlacer + scaler costs twice as much as I paid for the PC and the hardware interlacer. There are some cheaper DVD players (around $150?) that have a hardware deinterlacer / scaler chip, but that ignores other video signals.