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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)!
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
So has anyone figured out how to build a TiVo equivelent for $200, untill then I'm sticking with my TiVo.
There's no need for you to complain.
Rob simply took out the link to your personal site instead of Slashdotting it into obliteration which probably would give you an extra $50 or $100 to pay your webhost this month assuming you don't have unlimited bandwidth.
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.
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)!
what about doing it yourself? build your own system, mini-ITX http://www.mini-itx.com/, use your own custom enclosures http://www.protocase.com/, what else, ...
for silence http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/mega-itx/, plus the harware from ebay http://ebay.com/ will do fine.
Okay, I fail to see the big deal. This thing doesn't offer much more than my TiVo. To be the ultimate it needs to be able to record more than one show at once.
Put that in a "component" case and I'll be happy.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
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.
Does anybody know if current CVS of MythTV is usable, and if so, does it still thoroughly suck for ATSC?
I spent days getting 0.18.1 working with my PCHDTV card only to find that the mpeg demuxer is right next door to non-functional and it had a tendency to crash if it accidentally caught wind of an encrypted stream, which are ubiquitous on my local airwaves.
It was a total PITA to use and i was actually more comfortable tuning manually and using mplayer. At least mplayer's demuxer isn't all choppy on an Athlon64-3500.
So i asked around on the irc channel and found out, yeah that's basically the state of things.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
FWIW before the PC haterz form voltron...Mac Mini PVR
There's also a mythTV client/frontend for OSX, somebody has compiled the mythtv backend on to Tiger, but i believe now the issue is drivers for tuner cards *shrug* (or that's the last I heard)
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
So I guess the PIII 450 with a Radeon TV out card that I plugged into the RF Modulator so I can watch torrents of movies and shows on my 29" Sanyo TV doesn't count? Did I mention it's hooked up to a fancy-schmancy 10-year-old-$200 surround sound system?
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.
I have a good MythTV setup now, utilizing an old 900 MHz Athlon, a PVR-250MCE, a NVidia GeForce 4MX. It works just fine (requisite note about time versus money here... I have more time than money). The thing I'd really like is to get rid of the tower case. I spraypainted my ugly beige case a nice black, but what I really want is one of these:
http://www.silverstonetek.com/product-case.htm (Scroll to Lascala Series).
These look sooooo nice! Unfortunately, nice == $$ in this case (no pun!). I'd really prefer the LC-11M, as it has the display with the IR receiver built in. A little bit of checking shows that these displays and IR components have LIRC and LCDProc support, so Linux should 'just' work.
Anyone care to buy me one... for testing?
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
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.
Buy the local 20-plex and live in the manager's office.
:)
/.'er is reading this from a theater manager's office.
Don't tell me you weren't thinking it
You just know some
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...
The HD thing is what kills mythtv for me. There aren't any cable/satellite capable HD=capture cards that I'm aware of. There's just the one OTA (over-the-air) card that may (will?) die when the FCC gets its broadcast flag. ... if anyone knows differently I'm all ears...
There are couple of cable (QAM256) capable cards with recent support in Linux and Myth.
Here's a thread on the topic.
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
ultimate swiss bank account.
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Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
A DVD does not contain more information content than the number of pixels on an SVGA screen. An HD-TV broadcast contians less 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.
.... thus to comapre a cheap SVGA to one of the higher end machines is not an even handed comparison that will allow you compare the effects of resolution alone. 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. Thus the optimal projector for 16x9 movies is WGA and the optimal projector for 4x3 is SVGA.
Now there are two important exceptions to the above statements. First, generally all else is not equal. When you pay buttwads more for a high end high pixel projector you almost always get upgraded components everywhere else. Better color control, better contract control, better uniformity, better interpolation,
My guess is that most people are best off buying a WGA projector for two reasons, first it's optimal for wide screen movies and adequate for full frame movies. 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.
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). And for them a WXGA or XGA projector is the right choice. For everyone else WGA or SVGA.
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 throw range for most people's rooms also reuires a sharp offest angle (see keystone correction above) 9) some zoom 10) ability to work upsidedown
If you want to disagree with me just fine but make sure you dont claim there is actually more information on a DVD than an SVGA/WGA can support
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Wendy seem to have no problems
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.