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Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yes-please-give-that-please-yes dept.

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"

9 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Pointless by Work+Account · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You can get a great digital projector, receiver, speakers, and DVD player off of eBay, all reliable Japanese products, for about $1,000.

    Why enforce unreasonable requirements upon the system such as "it must be a PC."?

    --

    If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
    1. Re:Pointless by StarvingSE · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Because none of those can provide DVR-like capabilities, which is the point of connecting a PC to your home theater.

      --
      I got nothin'
    2. Re:Pointless by decipher_saint · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Until the receiver can stream video over the network or allow custom web-enabled apps to run on my TV the HTPC still has relevance.

      --
      crazy dynamite monkey
    3. Re:Pointless by norton_I · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It isn't always about the money. Some people just love to do this kind of thing, and don't really understand that others would rather not. Also, some of us are so good at this that it is just as easy to do it yourself and get something you are happier with. That is costs less is just a bonus.

    4. Re:Pointless by Fulcrum+of+Evil · · Score: 2, Interesting

      none of those media centoer boxes will stream VOB files. This means that if you want to watch DVD movies from a central server, you will have to convert them all to mpeg2 files.

      And they won't either. The DVD consortium won't license such a device, so anything that does something like that will have to be homebrew or slightly grey market. Someone tried doing it before - they built a $20k DVD jukebox that basically stored DVD images on a disk array and streamed it over the network. They couldn't get licensing unless they made the user insert the dvd while playing it, which defeated the whole point.

      --
      "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
  2. Why PC? by Mr+Guy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It depends on what your goal is really. The PC requirement is there for content delivery. The PC is a media repository. With a proper network connection and a good client server architecture, the PC adds an amazing degree of flexibility.

    --
    Never confuse volume with power.
  3. Pure Digital Path by bloosqr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been looking into going this route actually not for the sake of having a PC as a TVset-top box but because I think it offers more options than standard receivers, besides the obvious (Universal DVD-ROM drive can play all and new codecs unlike standard dvd players, simple instant digital access to any music libraries, cheap route to HDTV, cheap upgrade to new technologies as they come out).

    The main issue I have been having is that currently all receivers except for the really high end ones (meridian, tata) offer only analogue out for the surround channels. That is the dvd is decoded either in the player or in the receiver and you get analogue out from their DAC. If you want to do anything to this signal you end up having to do another A->D->A swap. An obvious example of this is using pro-audio equipment for home theatre use to equalize out room anomalies. People spend tons of money on speakers and , but one of the largest factors in sound is simply the dynamics of the room which can cause peaks and dips depending on what and how your room is arranged. You can purchase an 8 channel 1/3 octave 31 band digital equalizers for pretty cheap (in the grand scheme of things for home theatre) from alesis which would be brilliant to fix these anomalies. Furthermore, you are no longer dependent on the DAC that you happen to get w/ your receiver, but you use whatever DAC you want (and these things aren't really that expensive but pro-audio dacs that are cheap are actually the same DACS that only come in >$3k receivers for instance). I haven't done this yet, but the idea is to use something like VLS (or maybe a hardware decoder solution but that would take a bit of coding) and output it to an ADAT card (basically a digital format that looks like toslink but w/ 8 channels) which then goes into a cheap Alesis equalizer which then goes into the amps. All in all a swanky upgradable preamp glued into a DVD player w/ HD upscaling and pure digital outs and room equalization on a level that simply doesn't exist in any level (even those $10k TATA preamps) all for hopefully about $800 or so. And you get for free everything else you expect for having a PC as your main home theatre box aka universal codec player, upgradable, music center, networkable etc etc.

    I haven't actually done this yet I admit but its something I've been toying recently.

  4. Never considers videophiles by cexshun · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I see these all the time and the hype is amazing. Yet, the more I try to consider building one, the less reasonable it is for myself. Frankly, I have not found a video card capable of producing high enough quality video for videophiles or a/v heads. And 6 channel on board sound? Hardly tolerable.

    The big and bad units are expensive for a reason. A DIY PVR just will not compare to a decent mid-range unit.

    I can't remember the link, but there was a site that had screenshot comparisons of all the main tuner cards with pros-cons. Frankly, they all looked like crap. I would never put the output stream through my HD projector.

    So, to answer the question quite bluntly:
    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?
    No, not even close. While the software for it is there, PC hardware is hardly capable of producing anything remotely comparable to high end . Comparable to a budget model or upper end of the low quality units? Sure! The joy of DIY? Yep! High end? Hardly...

  5. Re:TiVo isn't a TiVo equivalent for $200 by jonfelder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hear a lot of people talking about this, but I've never seen an implementation that works as well as Tivo. Take MythTV for example. This is a group that has tried to make an easy to install linux distro based on knoppix and MythTV.

    http://mysettopbox.tv/

    They even are working on producing a reference system to make it super easy.

    http://mythic.tv/product_info.php?products_id=44

    On this page they also detail a whole list of problems with their "reference" system. Some of these issues are minor...others like not being able to watch live tv are in my opinion major.

    My point here is that despite what people say, the home brew PVR is not easy to do. I know I've tried. I've also had friends who have tried. Furthermore, many people who claim it's easy to do typically do so by making serious sacrifices. I've seen and experienced a wide array of issues. Some of these issues are related to playback...both audio and video. For example there can be crap on the screen, sometimes the playback stutters, sometimes the audio is out of sync, etc. In the case of my friends who said they got it working, I went over there to watch TV and they had all sorts of issues getting stuff to play (similar to things I experienced).

    In the case of the system detailed above (with more people working on it for more time than I'd care to spend) they still lack the basic function of watching live tv.

    Contrast with Tivo where you plug it in and it just works. Granted a homebrew HTPC has potential, but as of yet I've not seen that potential realized.