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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."
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.
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.