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

Am I the only one?

[kebes]

On the subject of MythTV (or equivalent). I like putting together computers and tweaking linux as much as the next guy, but I was thinking the other day that I might be willing to buy a fully functional MythTV box.

I really want a MythTV, but I don't have the time right now to really play with it and search for the best hardware. I was thinking that I'd be willing to buy a computer, with linux and MythTV all installed and configured properly (to work with my local cable box even?). Having someone else take care of all the hardware and software installation details would be great.

In the end, I may just build it myself, but there are lots of people I know that don't have the time, patience, and/or knowledge to build one from scratch, but are smart enough to take advantage of such a system (and maintain it). Does anyone know of a company offering such a service? Does anyone think that this has merit as a business idea?

Re:Am I the only one?

[karnal]

Holy heck.

I just priced one the other day. it was about 500$ for all components included.

50$ mobo
50$ case+PS (don't need a high capacity PS for this one)
50$ CPU (don't need a real fast one, see below)
50$ RAM (512MB, generic Mushkin or similar)
60$ DVD-Burner (can go cheaper here; figured may as well have the latest burner tho)
30$ Cheapo video card with reasonable SVID out
60$ Cheapo HDD (have storage space on the net.)
100$ PVR-150 (Comp-USA price, lower elsewhere)

This will get you a basic PVR for under 500$. The only thing I would do is beef up the HDD and you're up to 500 then (if you don't have a central server; I do already!).

I'm actually thinking about throwing a PVR-150 in the server to do the timed recordings there; then I can use a generic tuner that I already have in my MythTV box. Additionally, I already have a 30GB HDD and a Geforce4 to throw in the box, so that cuts my costs down even a little more.

You could even scrape older parts (P3 or Athlon ~1ghz) together if you're using a PVR-150, since it does all the encoding by itself. Decoding is fairly easy; encoding is kind of rough (even MPEG2 - My 2800+ sits at about 50-60% encoding one stream realtime of MPEG2 640x480 + Mpeg Layer3 audio)

Re:Howto build Media PC

[Fortunato_NC]

I'm a Mac fanboy, and I'll say there is a step three.

3. Wait for a stable release.

While CenterStage looks promising, it's a new project that hasn't even reached its second alpha yet. Let's give the developers some time before we start giving people unrealistic expectations.

(I've got a lot of hope for this project - the fact that ATI has already contacted the developers to add support for their Remote Wonder products is awesome!)

Missing the Point

[jamacdon]

I think some people don't see the bigger picture behind a PC based home theater. It is not like just plugging a tuner card into your PC and using the software that comes with the card to watch it.

With PC Theatre software, the program manages your recordings, schedule of records and ties into other medias such as videos, mp3 and CD collections and even digital cameras.

Also, when you have a PC based home theatre you usually have the output running through a highend sound system and large screen TV or project, not your 17" monitor and $12 speakers.

Beleive me, once you start using a properly configured PC based TV system, your methods of watching TV completely change.

Re:Buy of the shelf

[RichardX]

For what it's worth, I've at times deliberately attempted to destroy or damage components with my body's static electricity (y'know.. dancing around on nylon carpet while holding a stick of RAM in each hand, that kind of thing), and I've never yet managed it.

I live in hope though.