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."

Howto build Media PC

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Buy Mac mini
2. Install CenterStage
2. There is no step three!

Am I the only one?

[kebes]

On the subject of MythTV (or equivalent). I like putting together computers and tweaking linux as much as the next guy, but I was thinking the other day that I might be willing to buy a fully functional MythTV box.

I really want a MythTV, but I don't have the time right now to really play with it and search for the best hardware. I was thinking that I'd be willing to buy a computer, with linux and MythTV all installed and configured properly (to work with my local cable box even?). Having someone else take care of all the hardware and software installation details would be great.

In the end, I may just build it myself, but there are lots of people I know that don't have the time, patience, and/or knowledge to build one from scratch, but are smart enough to take advantage of such a system (and maintain it). Does anyone know of a company offering such a service? Does anyone think that this has merit as a business idea?

Buy of the shelf

[Virtual Karma]

I would rather go to walmart/ best buy and buy off the shelf home theater system. If there aren't any as described in the article, I will wait for Sony to make one. Its too much of hassle to build your own. Especially when you are dealing with different components from different manufacturers. Look at Windows Media Center OS. Any high schooler can put together a super entertainment center. Utility? Not much. Hassle? a lot.

Re:Howto build Media PC

[Fortunato_NC]

I'm a Mac fanboy, and I'll say there is a step three.

3. Wait for a stable release.

While CenterStage looks promising, it's a new project that hasn't even reached its second alpha yet. Let's give the developers some time before we start giving people unrealistic expectations.

(I've got a lot of hope for this project - the fact that ATI has already contacted the developers to add support for their Remote Wonder products is awesome!)

Missing the Point

[jamacdon]

I think some people don't see the bigger picture behind a PC based home theater. It is not like just plugging a tuner card into your PC and using the software that comes with the card to watch it.

With PC Theatre software, the program manages your recordings, schedule of records and ties into other medias such as videos, mp3 and CD collections and even digital cameras.

Also, when you have a PC based home theatre you usually have the output running through a highend sound system and large screen TV or project, not your 17" monitor and $12 speakers.

Beleive me, once you start using a properly configured PC based TV system, your methods of watching TV completely change.

Re:Am I the only one?

[karnal]

Holy heck.

I just priced one the other day. it was about 500$ for all components included.

50$ mobo
50$ case+PS (don't need a high capacity PS for this one)
50$ CPU (don't need a real fast one, see below)
50$ RAM (512MB, generic Mushkin or similar)
60$ DVD-Burner (can go cheaper here; figured may as well have the latest burner tho)
30$ Cheapo video card with reasonable SVID out
60$ Cheapo HDD (have storage space on the net.)
100$ PVR-150 (Comp-USA price, lower elsewhere)

This will get you a basic PVR for under 500$. The only thing I would do is beef up the HDD and you're up to 500 then (if you don't have a central server; I do already!).

I'm actually thinking about throwing a PVR-150 in the server to do the timed recordings there; then I can use a generic tuner that I already have in my MythTV box. Additionally, I already have a 30GB HDD and a Geforce4 to throw in the box, so that cuts my costs down even a little more.

You could even scrape older parts (P3 or Athlon ~1ghz) together if you're using a PVR-150, since it does all the encoding by itself. Decoding is fairly easy; encoding is kind of rough (even MPEG2 - My 2800+ sits at about 50-60% encoding one stream realtime of MPEG2 640x480 + Mpeg Layer3 audio)

You'll want a faster CPU

[bogie]

500MHz is not what you would want to build a a HTPC with. Its possbile, people do it, but since your going to be spending good money on a hardware TV Tuner then please at least buy something like a AMD 1600 >. I use a 1GHz which gets the job done but then I also like to do emulation etc. I need a faster cpu. 500MHz unless your dirt poor and have no money isn't the best cpu to start with.

And second I'll point this part out. "This will depend on whether or not you're an "audiophile". If you don't have a surround sound speaker package setup, than almost anything will do."

At a minimum buy something like the cheap chaintech Via Envy which will give you very good audio quality and more importantly SPDIF out. Are you really going to go through all of the trouble of buying hardware and setting it up only to use some shitty realtek card that causes hiss when you playback music or TV shows? That applies even if right now your not doing surround sound.

I'm not being snobby here either. These are basic things any decent HTPC guide will tell you.

Not the way you're thinking

[Rufosx]

It's not really easy or cost effective to capture component video in (I think the last time I saw it quoted was $30k). Too much processing required and too much data / sec.

Component video out to your TV from an HTPC is easy (well, besides tweaking it to fit just right).

The best ways of getting high def content into the box are :
1. An off the air HD tuner card (HD3000 from pchdtv.com or the Air2PC card)
2. A slim chance of firewire output from a high def digital cable box.
3. Rip your own DVDs. This makes sense if you want to setup up something like every Baby Einstein video on demand (I do).
4. I heard once that someone downloaded high def tv shows from teh Intarweb.

Re:Howto build Media PC

[kmo]

The mac mini includes firewire and USB2 ports. People using it for a media PC will generally use external hard disks and media capture cards. The EyeTV capture cards [elgato.com] seem to be particularly popular -- You can even get HDTV working with a mini.

One of the nice things about a mac is that the non-PVR features of a HTPC, like watching DVDs, playing music, managing your picture library, and burning DVDs are Apple supported best of breed apps.

Re:Buy of the shelf

[RichardX]

For what it's worth, I've at times deliberately attempted to destroy or damage components with my body's static electricity (y'know.. dancing around on nylon carpet while holding a stick of RAM in each hand, that kind of thing), and I've never yet managed it.

I live in hope though.

Don't forget MythTV also does MP3 (and web/news)

[lisnter]

I didn't really need a PVR since Babylon 5 is done and Star Trek is ending. . .but I did *want* to build one. A main requirement was something to play my MP3 catalog (all 100% ripped from my own personal collection, FYI). We have two small children and keeping all the CDs in order and undamaged is a challenge. Anyway, I put together my box in a Shuttle ST62K using Fedora Core in a couple weekends using the the excellent help from www.wilsonet.com. I would only have a few hours/day, if that, after the kids were in bed which broke up my train of thought certainly, but in any case I agree that MythTV is not a plug-and-play task. I knew that going in and, as has been expressed above, was looking forward to the technical challenges. FUN! In the end I'm very happy. It's not 100% perfect nor as seamless as a real Tivo but I wouldn't have been happy with a Tivo anyway. I have all my CDs available through the stereo and can record TV when I want to with picture quality that's actually better than through my cable box!?! If anyone's interested, my problems are (a) an annoying hum from the Shuttle case. This should be alleviated by suspending the hard-disk in the case instead of rigidly mounting it. Check out http://www.silentpcreview.com/article139-page6.htm l for a writeup on this; (b) I need to attach a small/quiet fan in back of the (closed) shelf where the case is sitting due to heat. My wife won't let me leave the PC next to the TV and I don't want to leave the door open because of the 10 little 6 year old fingers and 10 smaller 2 year old fingers running around our house; and (c) the X GUI screen size (and thus MythTV config screens) are too large for the TV and run off the edges. I've fiddled with this a bit but haven't solved it.

Re:You'll want a faster CPU

[renehollan]

The real bugbear is MPEG2 hardware decoding. While you can use a backend server and vlc for MPEG2 encoding (and even that is unnecessary with the Hauppague PVR 250 and 350 cards), decoding has to be done in the theatre "room" (unless you're happy running long cables or PC noise).

A Via M10000 will just about do SD software MPEG2 decoding, but forget about HD. The CLE266 supported by Unichrome and Via's own drivers (and integrated into their Xine fork: VeXP) works well, but follows the model of MPEG2 in, fram data out (dunno if it does YUV->RGB conversion). Most players (mplayer, xine, vlc) use this model: they have a decode phase which can benefit from hardware assist (and, as noted, Via's VeXP and the free Unicrome drivers leverage the CLE266 this way). However, not all hardware works that way.

ATI's X225 Xilleon chip, used in Roku Labs HD10000 "Photobridge" eats MPEG2, demuxes, decodes, and provides digital audio and component (as well as SVideo and composite) video, to HD resulutions.

There are vlc patches to run on this hardware (which is a really slick, fanless, thin client), but it does software MPEG2 decode to drive the graphics overlay buffer (limited to 1024x768, IIRC, so you can't do native 1080i). I'm surprised the X225 has the oomph to do that (It's a MIPS core). It would be nice to use the overlay for decoded SPUs (i.e. DVD menus), and leverage the X225 hardware decoder for the MPEG2 audio and video. Unfortunately, there is no display model in Xine, or VLC, where the display accepts undecoded MPEG2.

The closest one can do is use the streaming function of VLC to feed MPEG2 TS (it will transcode PS to TS just fine) to a TS player leveraging the MPEG2 hardware on the X225, and reserve the graphics overlay for SPUs. Sadly, one can't display SPUs without a video window on which to overlay them, requring MPEG2 video ES decoding.

I wonder them, how hard it would be to modify vlc's MPEG2 decoder to not decode picture, but to display black, for this purpose, overlaying the SPUs, and writing to the graphics overlay page, and splitting the stream into a remuxed (PS to TS) copy to drive the harware MPEG2 decoders. Unfortunately, this would only work for players that can stream: vlc, but not xine, or mplayer. And, it would be a hack at that (the SPUs would be out of time sync with the rest of the program, but that's rarely a big problem for menus).

A decoder/display model where the decoder does nothing, and the display does the decoding would work better here.

Re:Bah!

[Golias]

Since you've got a lot of other PC (and/or Mac) hardware lying around anyway, maybe the way for you to go would be to link it to a system on your "backbone" via Firewire cable. There's a lot of IP-via-Firewire solutions out there, and while Firewire 400 might be a little sluggish compared to Gig Ethernet, it's still quite a bit faster than the 10/100 card, and plenty fast enough for streaming video.

However, if you are sharing video files all over your network, I would not advocate using any living-room computer for the server.

Build a big, fast, noisy beast of a server with a nice RAID for storage, plug it in somewhere like your basement cellar, and leave it there.

Then the mini can play large video files off it by mounting the storage drive and selecting films using something like Matinee.

The only downside to this method is if you want to rip DVD's on occasion. You would either need to rip them over the network or else go down to the cellar, plug in a keyboard, monitor and mouse, and sit down at it to rip them at the server.

Re:Bah!

[Golias]

May I ask what combination of software and hardware add-ons you went with for your home theatre?

Yes you may. Like I said, I'll be posting a detailed review to modmini.com in the very near future, but here's the basics:

Extra hardware:
EyeTV 500 (High-def tuner w/ the usual PVR functions)

M-Audio Sonica (NOT recommended! I will be replacing this with a better USB or Firewire sound very card soon.)

Keyspan IR remote control (I use the sensor only. The remote itself is a flimsy piece of crap. I programmed all the buttons into my amplifier's "universal" keys and moved on.)

250 GB external drive.

Panasonic PT-AE700U 1280x720 wide-screen projector.

Sony amp w/ Dolby 5.1, Dolby 7.1, and DTS decoding.

B&W speakers

Extra software:

VLC (I still use the Apple DVD Player for 99% of actual DVD's, but for most other media files VLC roxors my soxors. Also, free is good. We like free.)

Mac the Ripper (A great tool for archiving DVD's on your HD... while it's at it, the region codes, ads, animated menus, and FBI warnings can all be stripped out, too.)

Matinee (A simple little DVD image kiosk. The author humbly asks for a ten buck shareware fee to encourage development.)

World of Warcraft. Very not free. Be warned, playing WoW on a 119" screen in first person mode could make you motion sick in no time flat. Scroll out to 3rd-person view if you start turning green.

Re:Bah!

[Golias]

However, HD playback is unacceptable with current OS X software and DVD image quality (using Apple's DVD decoder) is not up to par.

Unfortunately, Shimpi overlooked the EyeTV 500, with which I've been enjoying perfect HDTV playback and recording.

The secret is that the file is not compressed or encoded in any way. The pure, unadulterated MPEG stream is simply passed along.

Also, I must disagree with the analysis of the Apple DVD player. Anamorphic DVD's look fan-fucking-tastic on my 119" projection screen via the mini and OS X's "Apple DVD Player." Some cheaply-made disks (such as a few of my anime disks) do experience a little bit of combing during playback, but I can always whip out VLC on those occasions, and run a deinterlace filter on them.