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The Year of the HTPC

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the still-waitin-for-mine dept.

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."

9 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Mini by mysqlrocks · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most of those are pretty big. I think I'll stick with my Mac Mini as the controller for my home theater system. It does the job quite well and is quite small even with an external 250 GB HD.

    --
    Bradley Holt
  2. MediaPortal by charnov · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Build your own. MediaPortal is great and coming along fast. OpenSource MCE.

    http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

    --
    [RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
  3. mythtv by pulse2600 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone know what is going on with MythTV and Digital Cable or HDTV support? If I go myth I would like to know that I can get full res HDTV or to be able to get a "digital cable card" (does one even exist?) No sense in setting up a mythtv box if I don't know if I will be able to transition to these other technologies but companies like Microsoft can or eventually will.

  4. The year of the big clunky HTPC? by tji · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wow, all of those cases were huge. My preference has always been to put the minimal possible system connected to my display device, and put all the storage and other backend hardware in a cheap beige-box somewhere else.

    With MythTV, this works great. The backend houses the disks & receiver cards, the frontend just does display output, and they talk over the network.

    Some people have set up cool mini-itx type systems for the frontend, using either flash storage or network boot, to get the MythTV front end in a small quiet form. A really cool project is MythRoku, which runs the MythTV frontend on the Roku HD Media Player (Linux based, embedded MIPS platform with hardware HD decoder). It's small and silent, and fits in well with home entertainment devices.

    My Mac Mini would also make an excellent MythTV frontend.. If Apple would get a fucking clue and enable an API to the MPEG2 acceleration hardware on the GPU. Without that, it doesn't have the horsepower to do HD display/decoding.

  5. Re:Cases? That's the innovation this year? by TheFlyingGoat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So build your HTPC in a normal case and put it in another room. Get a RF remote and run the wires to your TV and receiver through the wall. Since most HTPC software has really good OSD messaging, you really don't need it in the room for any reason.

    I'm remodeling my basement right now and will be building a second HTPC to be located in the laundry room behind my home theater. It makes sense since the projector will be back there too. Since I'll insulate that wall, I won't ever hear the HTPC and I won't ever see it.

    My current HTPC is in a Coolermaster case. It looks really nice with the rest of my home theater equipment, and I've actually gotten a few compliments just on the case. It was only $100, so it's around the cost of any other well made case.

    --
    You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
  6. Re:Oh, no! by geekoid · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Find a better man.
    I listen to my wife, and have 1 remote that control me dvd/vcr/tv.

    I am not the only guy like that.

    So, get someone who respects you.

    Not to be confused with "obeys your every thought and wants to listen to an endless amount of trivial yammering".

    And as far as a remote to turn you on, well there is the science of teledildonics to hold you over until you get a good man.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  7. Re:Myth TV is the way to go for HTPC by batkiwi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's all it took to get it working for me with a DVB-T card in australia:

    1. install ubuntu (default preferences, all it asked me was for a username and password)
    2. add (via gui, easy to do) the "universe" and "multiverse" repositories (a click list is already there)
    3. go to software installer, tell it to grab "mythtv"
    4. run mythtv-setup, give it the names of my channels and so on
    5. enjoy

  8. Those things are huge by Animats · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Those cases are huge! They look like a PC/AT, circa 1984. This stuff needs some serious downsizing.

  9. Linux and Upscaling? by fyrie · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I have my win HTPC hooked up to LCD projection HDTV. Under windows I can use either nVidia's PureVideo technology or FFDSHOW to do the whole upscaling routine of resize, denoise, yadda yadda yadda. Anyone who has used either of the above can attest to how much better the video quality is compared to straight upscaling.

    Are there any alternative in Linux that produce an image of FFDSHOW quality?