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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"
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)!
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.
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.
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.