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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."
Any discussion of home theater PCs needs to start with the open source solution Myth TV It works with open standards - unlike the Media PC from Microsoft that keeps you from doing just about anything with your recorded shows.
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.
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.
I already count 7 remotes. TV, VCR, DVD, AC, Stereo, and a couple others that I don't even know what they're for. I know - I'm not supposed to know what they're for - its a "guy thing" ... right :-(.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
Hey, don't get me wrong ... it's looking good. However, what about the inside? I mean, when do we get software that actually works as advertised?
Thank goodness for open hardware standards. Now, if only the software industry had some integrity. After all, if cars crashed as much as software, people would walk.
Words to men, as air to birds.
"This fervor for home theater PCs was evident all over the show, but it mainly manifested itself in computer cases."
You're kidding me, right? That's like people buying cars based on how cool looks like, or people buying gaming rigs based upon how their l33t ca53 pwns... oh wait. Never mind.
Seriously, though, I want my home theater PC to be invisible. A remote control and an IR receiver on the wall next to the screen. My wife heartily agrees (I think she's the one who convinced me) -- any electronics need to be in the cabinet or in the wall.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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
There's a number of options for frontend and OS. There's obviously MythTV on Linux, Windows Media Center on Windows XP, etc. I'm personally running Meedio on Windows XP.
Before people start talking about how a Tivo and DVD player will do all the same stuff, keep in mind that there's far more applications for a HTPC. There's plugins to check weather, play games (emulation), look at traffic reports, get sports scores and highlights, and much more.
I built my HTPC for around $400 plus hard drives (I'm around 1.5TB, which holds all the TV shows I want and the movies that I own). I just built one for a friend for $1000 which included 600GB of hard drive space and 2 wireless controllers (Logitech Rumblepad 2's work great for controlling the system and playing most emulator games). The really cool part is you can upscale movies if you want. I'd like to see someone get a Tivo (+ lifetime subscription) and DVD player capable of upscaling for $1000, completely ignoring the fact that it can do so many other things.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
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.
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.
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!!!
Most importantly, they want to lock you into their format so that they can also lock you into their DRM, and eventually force you to watch everything pay-per-view.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Better start donating to the EFF, then, because the media industry and Microsoft aren't going to let a CableCard get anywhere near a system that doesn't support Treacherous Computing without a fight!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
... the time when the mark of a real computer was that you couldn't hook it up to your TV, unlike your Commodore 64?