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The Year of the HTPC
An anonymous reader writes "While home theater PC hardware was once limited to a few specialized companies, those days are long gone and home theater computing is now big business. At this year's CES every hardware company, no matter their size or area of interest, brought a some cool new products too and no one forgot about the burgeoning home theater market. This fervor for home theater PCs was evident all over the show, but it mainly manifested itself in computer cases. This article goes over an extensive list of the products seen there."
Microsoft sure missed the boat on this one - a chipped xbox with Xbox Media Center blows away any HTPC setup I've ever seen. Plays every format, runs happily on your network, simple to use, great interface....
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
unlike the Media PC from Microsoft that keeps you from doing just about anything with your recorded shows.
Except watch them.
I've run MCE from day 1. I have a great HT-LAN at my homes, and it never fails. I'm very happy, so is the wife.
I've tried Myth on 7 platforms over the past 2 years or so. Ugh. Frustration on top of anger. No thanks.
I hear they've come a long way, so I'll try again soon. I'm a geek, and the problems I've had were commonly found on forums -- without solutions.
MS' MCE tech support has fixed all my glitches over the phone in a day or less.
You must not have actually tried MythTV, and only thought you did. I generally only have junk equipment around, bad tuner cards, and other weird crap. Every single time I install MythTV, from KnopMyth, it works like a charm -- no compiling of kernels, no wacky config changes. MythTV recommends the PVR-250, which I haven't bought yet. Still, it works using one of those El Cheapo ATI tuner cards, even if it is a little slow. And you had trouble?
You can always talk to Microsoft technical support!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I don't go for all this integrated malarky. I bought an overhead projector, added an LCD panel with video input, connected up my DVD player, and used a white bed sheet (oh yes) stretched out on a wooden frame (knocked together in minutes). There you go, a 6-foot wide screen, with REAL theater feel. And it only cost me £170 in total ($US 260?). Integrated my arse, I like to have hulking great machines for each and every task! I could hook up a games console but being attacked life-size creatures in shoot-em-ups would probably scare the crap out of me!
Watch my YouTube atheist video blog (user NickGisburne2000) for arguments against religion
MediaPortal is written by the same guy(s) that did XBMC for the xbox. No suprise that its shaping up to be another great app.
Myth works great with HD. Two cards that I have used are the air2pc and pcHDTV.
I've had a PVR-500 (dual NTSC) and air2pc (single ATSC) server running for quite a long time now.
I actually found HD (digital) to be much easier to setup than regular analog.
I just went through this and am still trying to figure this out. I just got an HDTV. See my earlier post, here.
In my previous post, I mentioned that my HTPC was the best looking device attached to my HDTV. I am now amending that to "2nd best" (hard to compete with a 1080i feed of DiscoveryHD).
Nonetheless, I have noticed one major problem that needs to be resolved with HTPC's. The sound card. I've used many many different kinds of sound cards and without exception, ALL of them output stereo ONLY through the SPDIF/Coax. I just bought a Turtle Beach Montego and finally, I have found a card that can produce true 5.1 Dolby Digital on the fly. The rest advertise 5.1 and the like -- but what they mean is 5.1 when you pump the analog signal to their speakers. NOT 5.1 out of the digital-out.
This is not a big deal for DVDs because most soundcards have Dolby digital pass through -- so they pass the 5.1 signal to your A/V receiver and it decodes the signal. However, for MP3's, downloaded movies, or anything else you are play on your HTPC, there is no real 5.1 solution --- unless you go with a Turtle Beach unit (or M-Audio, which I haven't tried). Yes, you can "simulate" but at the core, it's only a stereo feed with most sound cards.
The second thing I have noticed, with respect to HTPC's is this: Why the hell don't the frontend software makers realize that MANY of us store our media (movies, tv, music) on network shares. Why is this a big deal? Because I fire up Windows MCE and I find out that, in order to play a movie from the network, it has to copy the movie to my local library first. You can't just play it over the network. It must first be copied to the local machines. WTF? I see this design a lot and I suspect its because many ppl are trying to run HTPC's over 802.11. Here's some advice: don't. Just suck it up and run the cable. Your life will be much better for it. Trust me. I tried every setup imaginable.
These are just a few annoyances that I've encountered while setting up my HTPC. I don't yet have a capture card/TV card so I haven't gotten to setting up the TV part of this.
The good news is that my setup (finally) works pretty damn well, all things considered. I agree this is the year of the HTPC because I've just been through it.
With my Meedio system, I can do the following:
a) Play XViD, DiVX, SVCD, or any other format directly from a network share
b) Get weather, complete with radar images
c) Play my mp3's -- like a music library w/ jukebox
d) View photos as slideshow over a network share
e) View and play streaming music (Shoutcast)
f) Control the whole system with a remote control -- VERY IMPORTANT!!!
My only issues are that it doesn't like divx playback (no FF/RW), the music playlist selection is crap, and the OEM remote is total crap. I'll occasionally have to pull the batteries to short the terminals because it stops working and the volume/channel buttons are way harder to press than they should be.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Seriously, I just got a Harmony 520. I have programmed Pronto remotes before, and if you are really hard core there are some shortcomings to the Harmonies, but for most people they work very well and are pretty painless to set up.
A few advantages:
1. My entire family can use it. Most of those people are very non-technical
2. Activity based with smart state: Have a stupid cable box that doesn't have discreet on and off commands? The remote remembers what it has turned on and off so that when it goes from one activity to another it can switch between multiple inputs and turn on/off only what is necessary. Have 4 inputs that need to be toggled through, it will do it.
3. Supports both Mac and PC out of the box. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Linux people with solutions to get it to work (the programming is done on the web site, the client side is a Java app that takes the file from the website and flashes the remote)
4. A set up activity will control everything in the system necessary for that activity. For example, when watching DVDs most buttons control the DVD player, but you can have the volume buttons control the AV Receiver, and other buttons controlling features on the TV like aspect control, etc.
5. Costs not much more than much less capable "universal" remotes.
I was not a believer in these things for years, but after using one (and the cheapest one available mind you) I'm pretty impressed.
Shawn's Tech Articles
"Pardon my ignorance, but what is the difference between MediaPortal and Myth TV? And Freevo?"
MediaPortal is on windows. The other two are linux based.
All are OSS.
The main difference between mythtv and freevo is approach/architecture. Mythtv has a larger feature set (which some would call bloat) than Freevo. But I think it depends on what features and approach is important to you.
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Maybe I should look into this HTPC thing and search the shopping channel for one?
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
There is a wonderful and beautiful thing made by Logitech, called a Harmony Remote Control. They seem very expensive (I think they start at about $75) at first, but unlike all the crappy "all in one" remotes you might've seen before, Harmony remotes really DO let you go from 7 remotes down to just one.
They attach to a PC with a USB cable, and rather than screwing around with a book of device codes, the Harmony software does an interview with you to find out what hardware you have and how you have it hooked up. When you get done, it saves that information on a user account at the harmony web site, in case your zapper gets broken or needs to be reprogrammed.
My mother couldn't do anything more than turn on TV or stick an tape in a VCR. She was scared of the collection of remotes that accumulated around my parents' TV. I got her a Harmony, which has a button that says "Watch TV". It turns on the TV, the receiver, and the satellite box, then sets the correct inputs for her and tunes the TV to "Animal Planet" for her.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Unless you want to do something useful. Like watch more than OTA or non-digital programming. In which case you'll have to set up an IR blaster. That's going to quadruple the 1 hour estimate at least. Then if you want to add a second tuner which you also want to do something useful add another couple hours.
Don't get me wrong. If you want a single tuner MythTV box which only needs to capture non-digital cable or OTA broadcast you can have it inside an hour. But the learning curve is steep after that. I have 2x pvr-150 each using it's own blaster to drive a cable box so I can watch more than 12 of my 200 channels. I have well over 40 hours invested in the setup and it's still not perfect.
To be fair, none of the windows solutions (beyondtv, sagetv) I looked at could accomplish this at all, so I guess I can't complain too much.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
It would be nice to get 5.1 out for movies...
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I'm actually researching this now. The Apple DVD Player is 5.1 compatible. I don't know if the signal out of the Mac is surround sound compatible though. However, there are a few devices you can get to help with this:
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Transit-mai
http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/SonicaTheat
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/firewav
The FireWave (the last one) looks like the best bet to me. I might be buying one soon.
Bradley Holt