Monday, April 10, 2006
Confessions of a Serial HTPC Builder - Part 2
Posted by Jeremy Charette in "ARTICLE" @ 10:00 AM
"...I was also rapidly becoming an HTPC addict. My HTPC became less of a novelty and more of a necessity. I had stopped watching live television completely because it was annoying. I would always become impatient and wanted to fast forward through the ads. I'd actually grab the remote multiple times during a live program and jab at the fast forward button before realizing it was live. After a while, I never watched anything without making sure first that I had enough recorded content in the buffer to be able to time-shift through the advertisements. Mostly though, I found that I was so busy catching up to watch pre-recorded programs that I didn't have time to bother with live content."
Home theater PCs are becoming more and more popular with do-it-yourselfers, but they still lack the mainstream appeal they need to find a home in most home entertainment centers. Most of the off the shelf boxes available now from big companies like Dell and HP are either too big or too expensive for the average consumer. If you do decide to go the home-built route, and want a HTPC that will fit into your existing home theather setup, be aware of the thermal management issues that Michael Baggaley talks about in this article. It needs to be fast enough to record and decode video on the fly, but small and quiet enough to not be obnoxious. It's not easy to find a solution to both problems at the same time. My recommendation would be to skip the HTPC route altogether, and purchase a Windows Media Center Edition PC. Keep it in the office, out of the way, and connect an Xbox 360 to your home theater setup. You'll get nearly all of the functionality you find in Windows Media Center Edition, but for a mere $400. And the wife won't complain about how ugly it looks. :wink:
Home theater PCs are becoming more and more popular with do-it-yourselfers, but they still lack the mainstream appeal they need to find a home in most home entertainment centers. Most of the off the shelf boxes available now from big companies like Dell and HP are either too big or too expensive for the average consumer. If you do decide to go the home-built route, and want a HTPC that will fit into your existing home theather setup, be aware of the thermal management issues that Michael Baggaley talks about in this article. It needs to be fast enough to record and decode video on the fly, but small and quiet enough to not be obnoxious. It's not easy to find a solution to both problems at the same time. My recommendation would be to skip the HTPC route altogether, and purchase a Windows Media Center Edition PC. Keep it in the office, out of the way, and connect an Xbox 360 to your home theater setup. You'll get nearly all of the functionality you find in Windows Media Center Edition, but for a mere $400. And the wife won't complain about how ugly it looks. :wink:
