Home Theatre PC Guide

Greg Ridder writes "For those of you who are interested in possibly putting together a Home Theatre or Media PC, I stumbled upon an excellent guide. It discusses basic hardware requirements, four software choices (BeyondTV, SageTV, MCE2005 and MythTV), controlling your cable or satellite set-top box and much more. Based on the research that I've done in the past, this is the most comprehensive guide that I've seen to date."

Comments

HDTV solution

[Tiger4]

The article is well written and conversational for the layman. Great. But he doesn't really go into the one great unknown area oput there - HDTV.

What are the best HDTV capture cards, for Over the Air or for backside-of-the-cable/satelite-box? The article only touches on this, but it will be of greater concern for the home enthusiast/hacker in the next two years.

And by the way, what packages support this? MythTV, Freevo, etc.

Re:Buy of the shelf

[Anita Coney]

There is nothing hard about building your own PC. Like a brilliant person once wrote, it only takes two tools to build a computer. The ability to RTFM and a phillips screwdriver.

I've got four home built PVRs in my house. I like the freedom of not being tied to a corporation. E.g., not being screwed by Tivo's recent pop-up ads.

I like the ability to have the PVR do what I want, and not what some corporation wants. E.g., Microsoft's Media Center's inability to record shows to DVD.

But most of all I like the price. A PVR built by Sony would cost a couple thousand more than what you could build one yourself for. The ones I have at my house are merely built from left-over parts from my own system. But even if you built one completely from scratch, you could probably do it for less than $800.