Home Theatre PC Guide

Greg Ridder writes "For those of you who are interested in possibly putting together a Home Theatre or Media PC, I stumbled upon an excellent guide. It discusses basic hardware requirements, four software choices (BeyondTV, SageTV, MCE2005 and MythTV), controlling your cable or satellite set-top box and much more. Based on the research that I've done in the past, this is the most comprehensive guide that I've seen to date."

Re:Howto build Media PC

[crypto55]

That's ridiculous. You need an analog capture device compatible with NTSC video sources, generally via Coaxial. The mini lacks this component. In addition, it also lacks sufficient hard drive capacity, which is extremely necessary for video recording. I built my own PVR with SageTV, a hauppauge PVR-USB2 box and a 200 GB HDD, and it barely suffices.

HDTV solution

[Tiger4]

The article is well written and conversational for the layman. Great. But he doesn't really go into the one great unknown area oput there - HDTV.

What are the best HDTV capture cards, for Over the Air or for backside-of-the-cable/satelite-box? The article only touches on this, but it will be of greater concern for the home enthusiast/hacker in the next two years.

And by the way, what packages support this? MythTV, Freevo, etc.

Re:Buy of the shelf

[Anita Coney]

There is nothing hard about building your own PC. Like a brilliant person once wrote, it only takes two tools to build a computer. The ability to RTFM and a phillips screwdriver.

I've got four home built PVRs in my house. I like the freedom of not being tied to a corporation. E.g., not being screwed by Tivo's recent pop-up ads.

I like the ability to have the PVR do what I want, and not what some corporation wants. E.g., Microsoft's Media Center's inability to record shows to DVD.

But most of all I like the price. A PVR built by Sony would cost a couple thousand more than what you could build one yourself for. The ones I have at my house are merely built from left-over parts from my own system. But even if you built one completely from scratch, you could probably do it for less than $800.

Re:melrose place?

[Bobman1235]

I think that IS the punchline.

Re:Hard drive setup

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Since speed isn't an issue for recording 20Mbps video (ATSC max), you don't even need the speed afforded by a 4200 RPM drive to record it.

My HTPC has a surprisingly quiet 15k RPM drive for booting. I don't use it for PVR yet though, but I do have a separate, slower drive for storing audio and video.

I think an argument can be made for keeping the hard drive storage system in a closet somewhere and a super quiet system with only one drive in the living room, as a RAID system uses a lot of drives that do generate noise.