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Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC
planetjay writes "Tom's Hardware takes a closer look at Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC." The article considers noise, aesthetics, and remote control. See also recent Ask SlashDot on MythTV extras and my favorite DIY PVR Resource"
If you want just a cheap player without recording or TV the Philips DVP-642 DVD player can play regular DVDs, MP3, MPEG4, divx and xvid. Dirt cheap at places like Best Buy. Or get an Xbox with mod chip and Xbox Media Center.
Trolling is a art,
Tom's Hardware takes a closer look at Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC. "Hype aside, is it really possible to build a PC that is quiet and does everything that a high-end remote-controlled set-top box can do? And don't forget it's got to look good in your living room, too." I say YES! It was kind of refreshing to see them mangle some hardware forcing it into a small/slim form factor HTPC case, although it was less than refreshing to see them choose Windows MCE 2005 as their OS/PVR software. See also recent Ask SlashDot on MythTV extras and my favorite DIY PVR Resource
They are getting MUCH more restrictive with how and what you can record.
Also, considering that there's free and open source software out there (http://www.mythtv.org/) that turns any PC into a PVR, TiVo's backs are against the wall and recently they have been breaking things and limited what you can do with the shows you record.
They also recently added more commercials/advertisements that show up when you FF/RW.
Just a heads up. I know my one friend is wary he paid so much for a lifetime subscription, and other friends are sick of paying $13+ a month for a crippled PVR.
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
Remind me in a few years, when the cost of your Tivo + subscription is more than you would pay for a linux + myth box. Also, I'd rather not be at the whim of some company who can reintroduce (their own!) commercials into the programming with the flick of a switch, and will also likely have intense pressure to support things like the broadcast flag.
Anyways, don't just blow off the other solutions because yours has better short term gain.
(P.S. I added Myth to my Gentoo box, and all it took was a few hours and a $70 tuner card, but YMMV...)
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
The one that's IDEAL for YOU.
I know the arguements about MythTV and MCE and blah blah blah. The simple fact of the matter is that you have to use what you are comfortable with. If you are comfortable paying $13 a month (or whatever Tivo charges now) in addition to $100-$200 for the set top box with no control over what happens to its software, then that's the option you take.
If you are comfortable using Linux and feel confident in setting up MythTV to work properly, then you get yourself a cheap system and build a MythTV HTPC.
And if you are comfortable with Windows (as I am), want something simple to use for your family and friends, then you go with Media Center Edition.
I'll even voice my praise for Media Center because while it may not be the most powerful, most bug free, fastest, or even prettiest (compared to some skins from Meedio), it works pretty simply and has a nice remote.
I know the arguements about them all, and I've tried them all. MythTV, SageTV, BeyondTV, Meedio, and finally MCE (it took a long time to get to this point). Before that, I used ReplayTV and then Tivo (both of which I modded with hard drives and sold for a profit on eBay). MCE for me, is the best solution there is. It gets the TV times, changes the channels on my cable box, records easily, and has a GREAT remote. And in the end the fact I can surf the web on my TV or some other stuff on my television (in my bedroom) makes MCE a winner.
If you want a SILENT solution, it's pretty simple. Get yourself a Shuttle box, get a nice mobile processor (Sempron should do just fine), replace the bearing fan in the Shuttle with a Silen-X fan, and your PC is deadly silent. Then just learn how to use the STANDBY feature of your PC, and it's completely silent. A good hard drive is also key, as the crappier ones will make more noise. Then buy a $15 sound card with an optical out so you can pass sound to a proper reciever. Get a passively cooled video card with TV out (unless you are doing hardcore gaming, in which case you aren't really building an HTPC), and a copy of Windows MCE (or MythTV or whatever you want).
The total cost for my box, with the OS was around $350 -- and it runs perfectly though with Windows on it, I have it set on a schedule to reboot once a week. I know the Tivo users will always say how cheap it is in comparison to have their box and just make it easy for themselves but in the end.. I can browse the web, check my email, play some games, check the weather, set an alarm, AND watch and record television for my $350 budget. You paid say, $300 with the lifetime subscription for for $50 more, I have oodles more features and STILL have a snazzy remote.
So go enjoy Tivo... I'm happy with my solution.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Unless I missed something, which is possible, you don't get free listings with TiVo. The last time I looked, the lifetime package was about another $200.
TiVo does have an advantage in ease of use, and it can win on cost, especially if your content provider includes it with your service,.
It loses on DRM, expandability, and configurability.
You can build a solid HTPC for around the same cost though, with some homework. If you have a computer to scavange, so much the better.
$120 gets you a PVR500 with two tuners, that does encoding on board.
~$100 Large Hard Drive - Hard drive size, like in TiVo, is directly related to how much you want to record and how you want the quality. Unlike with TiVo, on a PC you can use network shares to distribute this as much as you want, and add more if you want conveniently.
The rest is just a mini computer to run the software and do the display. $50 mobo with onboard S/PDIF out, $50 AMD CPU, $50 bucks of RAM, case and PSU depends on whether you want to go with cheap or pretty and quiet, call it another $100, remote control about $20. DVD burner $30.
Average HTPC that holds more, higher quality video than TiVo, about $500, and you end up with complete control of your content (at least, for now).
Never confuse volume with power.
The DVR capabilities of a HTPC are great, but you get a lot more features without any added cost:
I'm helping a friend build his right now, and it'll run about $1100 with 600GB of hard drive space. With that he gets a HDTV DVR and everything above. Compare that to the cost of a DVD player and a DVR and it's comparable, but you get far more functionality and flexibility from a HTPC.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Having said that, once you get a taste of watching your favorite Friday Night Sci-Fi epic on the day and time of your choosing... and commercial free ... now how much would you pay.
I'd sooner watch my PVR on a 13inch tube than suffer through 20 minutes of commercials, and countless household interruptions of my favorite 40 minute program viewed on your big-projector.
Not that I'd have to do that, mind you, since i did get a cheap DLP and already had a good stereo. Trust me, live with a PVR for a week, you'll never go back.
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Heya, I was a bit let down with this and the hardware and software selection that Tom's went after on this. I've had much better results avoiding Windows MCE by using SageTV, or GB-PVR or BeyondTV, or for those real diehards, MythTV. Some of the complaints that Tom's had are very easily solved by going with hardware that's slightly larger and more standard than the micro or mini ATX stuff. Anyway check out byopvr.com, they've got some really great how to's on building your own HTPC on the cheap or all out. Enjoy, RedR
Wow, you really have no clue. No, I take that back.. you know enough to be dangerous and give bad advice. (For starters, there's no such thing as "WGA".. perhaps you mean WVGA (854x480)?) Allow me to elaborate:
An HD-TV broadcast contians less information than an XGA screen.
HDTV is considered either 720p or 1080i (and in the future, higher resolutions such as 1080p, etc). 720p is WXGA, which is more pixels than XGA. So both variants of HD resolution contain more information than an XGA screen.
Thus going to higher resolution screens not only does not increase performance. Actaully the reverse is true it degrades it. When you go to higher resolution projectors you either have to use a subset of their pixels, which proportioanlly throws away the majority of the lumens, or you have put up with the ugly and noticable artifacts of interpolation (jagged edges on fast moving high contrast edges, and the poor rendering of fog and smoke). Additionally, all else being equal, denser pixel projectors waste more of the surface area to the dead zones around the pixels and also tend to have more variation and lower contrast.
WTF?! Denser resolution projectors are better assuming you have a decent deinterlacer and scaler. Sure, if you feed it through a crappy processor you're going to get crap. But I can say from experience that the exact same DVDs through my 720p projector look quite a bit better than my old 480p projector. The real area that it shines is HD, but I'll get to that later...
A good deinterlacer practically eliminates any "jaggies", and a good scaler will blend the pixels together and interpolate the information to the point that the resulting image looks much better than the original. Upconverting DVD players exist for a reason, and it's not just marketing hype.. it works (better picture), even on WVGA displays.
How does higher resolution imply "more variation" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and lower contrast? They have very little to do with each other. Many CRT projectors are 1080p+ and have amazing contrast (not even comparable with most 480p digital PJs).
Second, while the information content of a DVD is indeed equal to the number of pixels on a 800x600 projector, the aspect ratio is not... But more importantly, manufacturers are not treating WGA as a low-end product like they do SVGA. They may be putting in the higher wuality components into their WGA and WXGA projectors. And it's those components, not the useless improved resolution that you want to buy.
Again, DVD is equal to WVGA (480p), not SVGA. I can assure you that 480p projectors are considered "low end", and that higher-quality components are not in them. About the best 480p DLP projector you can buy right now is around $1500. The cheapest 720p DLP is about $2500 - I'll let everyone guess which has the better internal components. Secondly, increased resolution is not useless, and is, in fact, the most important factor (assuming everything else is generally equal, as you stated that caveat as well, and it's important to note).
Fo me all I'm interested in are DVDs but many folks are keen on HD (By the time HD becomes mainstream your current pojector will have bunred out anyhow so need to look ahead in your current purchase)
Perhaps we need a newsflash, but HD is most certainly mainstream right now. I live in an average-sized metropolitan area and can get every OTA channel in HD, and another dozen or so cable channels in HD. At least half of the TVs in the Big Box stores are HD capable. You're missing out immensely without HDTV (though of course, if you don't know what you're missing, carry on.. just don't say there's not much of a difference or it's not commonplace because it is).
Things to look for in the following order of importance are 0) DLP 1) quiet 2) RGB or digital inputs 3) contrast 4) lumens 5) darkness control 6) color fidelity 7) optical, not digital keystone correction 8) a short
"Truth is not decided by majority vote" consensus gentium -- Norman Geisler