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

Hard drive setup

[PxM]

The article says "Hard Drive(s): This is an easy one. Buy the biggest 7200 rpm IDE drive that you can afford." which is a bad choice. While it is good to have a fast main hard drive, it might be better to invest in a nice tower case and cram it with multiple slower hard drives in a RAID 5 configuration. Since a terrabyte (5x250GB in RAID 5) is only around $500, it might be worth it to have a central media server. This lets you rip your DVDs and CDs for easy access. These hard drives don't have to be fast since you won't normally be writing a live stream to them but just using them as a slow storage. The 7200 HD would contain the OS and enough temp space to capture and play live video without a problem.

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Re:Am I the only one?

[Tassach]

Do me a favor. Reply once you assemble and config the thing. That's 2 hours work, minimum.

You could look at it as two hours of work. I look at it as two hours of fun.

Plus, if he's not a geek, you'll have to support him while he learns

She's not a geek. Well, not a computer geek, at least.

What is your time worth?

What is a threesome with your wife and her best friend worth?