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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"

5 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."?

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    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.

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      I got nothin'
    2. 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.

  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.

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    Never confuse volume with power.
  3. 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.