Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC 252
planetjay writes "Tom's Hardware takes a closer look at Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC." The article considers noise, aesthetics, and remote control. See also recent Ask SlashDot on MythTV extras and my favorite DIY PVR Resource"
if you want just a cheap player (Score:3, Informative)
If you want just a cheap player without recording or TV the Philips DVP-642 DVD player can play regular DVDs, MP3, MPEG4, divx and xvid. Dirt cheap at places like Best Buy. Or get an Xbox with mod chip and Xbox Media Center.
THE UNEDITED VERSION (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be wary if I were a TiVo subscriber (Score:3, Informative)
Also, considering that there's free and open source software out there (http://www.mythtv.org/ [mythtv.org]) that turns any PC into a PVR, TiVo's backs are against the wall and recently they have been breaking things and limited what you can do with the shows you record.
They also recently added more commercials/advertisements that show up when you FF/RW.
Just a heads up. I know my one friend is wary he paid so much for a lifetime subscription, and other friends are sick of paying $13+ a month for a crippled PVR.
get sth more (Score:2, Informative)
Re:if you want just a cheap player (Score:3, Informative)
All region DVDs, NTSC, PAL , all combinations of home burnt CD/DVD +/- R/RW , all types of picture CDs, mp3 cds, VCD, SVCD, everything, even corrupt DVDs which a 300 $ DVD player wouldn't play.
Only thing missing are DivX , Xvid etc and lack of DVI output. but for 20$ I am not complaining.
Re:Cheap? (Score:3, Informative)
Remind me in a few years, when the cost of your Tivo + subscription is more than you would pay for a linux + myth box. Also, I'd rather not be at the whim of some company who can reintroduce (their own!) commercials into the programming with the flick of a switch, and will also likely have intense pressure to support things like the broadcast flag.
Anyways, don't just blow off the other solutions because yours has better short term gain.
(P.S. I added Myth to my Gentoo box, and all it took was a few hours and a $70 tuner card, but YMMV...)
The IDEAL HTPC is .... (Score:5, Informative)
I know the arguements about MythTV and MCE and blah blah blah. The simple fact of the matter is that you have to use what you are comfortable with. If you are comfortable paying $13 a month (or whatever Tivo charges now) in addition to $100-$200 for the set top box with no control over what happens to its software, then that's the option you take.
If you are comfortable using Linux and feel confident in setting up MythTV to work properly, then you get yourself a cheap system and build a MythTV HTPC.
And if you are comfortable with Windows (as I am), want something simple to use for your family and friends, then you go with Media Center Edition.
I'll even voice my praise for Media Center because while it may not be the most powerful, most bug free, fastest, or even prettiest (compared to some skins from Meedio), it works pretty simply and has a nice remote.
I know the arguements about them all, and I've tried them all. MythTV, SageTV, BeyondTV, Meedio, and finally MCE (it took a long time to get to this point). Before that, I used ReplayTV and then Tivo (both of which I modded with hard drives and sold for a profit on eBay). MCE for me, is the best solution there is. It gets the TV times, changes the channels on my cable box, records easily, and has a GREAT remote. And in the end the fact I can surf the web on my TV or some other stuff on my television (in my bedroom) makes MCE a winner.
If you want a SILENT solution, it's pretty simple. Get yourself a Shuttle box, get a nice mobile processor (Sempron should do just fine), replace the bearing fan in the Shuttle with a Silen-X fan, and your PC is deadly silent. Then just learn how to use the STANDBY feature of your PC, and it's completely silent. A good hard drive is also key, as the crappier ones will make more noise. Then buy a $15 sound card with an optical out so you can pass sound to a proper reciever. Get a passively cooled video card with TV out (unless you are doing hardcore gaming, in which case you aren't really building an HTPC), and a copy of Windows MCE (or MythTV or whatever you want).
The total cost for my box, with the OS was around $350 -- and it runs perfectly though with Windows on it, I have it set on a schedule to reboot once a week. I know the Tivo users will always say how cheap it is in comparison to have their box and just make it easy for themselves but in the end.. I can browse the web, check my email, play some games, check the weather, set an alarm, AND watch and record television for my $350 budget. You paid say, $300 with the lifetime subscription for for $50 more, I have oodles more features and STILL have a snazzy remote.
So go enjoy Tivo... I'm happy with my solution.
While we're on the subject . . . (Score:3, Informative)
I spent days getting 0.18.1 working with my PCHDTV card only to find that the mpeg demuxer is right next door to non-functional and it had a tendency to crash if it accidentally caught wind of an encrypted stream, which are ubiquitous on my local airwaves.
It was a total PITA to use and i was actually more comfortable tuning manually and using mplayer. At least mplayer's demuxer isn't all choppy on an Athlon64-3500.
So i asked around on the irc channel and found out, yeah that's basically the state of things.
Re:Why PC? Also see Mac Mini PVR (Score:2, Informative)
There's also a mythTV client/frontend for OSX, somebody has compiled the mythtv backend on to Tiger, but i believe now the issue is drivers for tuner cards *shrug* (or that's the last I heard)
e.
TiVo isn't a TiVo equivalent for $200 (Score:4, Informative)
TiVo does have an advantage in ease of use, and it can win on cost, especially if your content provider includes it with your service,.
It loses on DRM, expandability, and configurability.
You can build a solid HTPC for around the same cost though, with some homework. If you have a computer to scavange, so much the better.
$120 gets you a PVR500 with two tuners, that does encoding on board.
~$100 Large Hard Drive - Hard drive size, like in TiVo, is directly related to how much you want to record and how you want the quality. Unlike with TiVo, on a PC you can use network shares to distribute this as much as you want, and add more if you want conveniently.
The rest is just a mini computer to run the software and do the display. $50 mobo with onboard S/PDIF out, $50 AMD CPU, $50 bucks of RAM, case and PSU depends on whether you want to go with cheap or pretty and quiet, call it another $100, remote control about $20. DVD burner $30.
Average HTPC that holds more, higher quality video than TiVo, about $500, and you end up with complete control of your content (at least, for now).
Silverstone Cases Rock! (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.silverstonetek.com/product-case.htm [silverstonetek.com] (Scroll to Lascala Series).
These look sooooo nice! Unfortunately, nice == $$ in this case (no pun!). I'd really prefer the LC-11M, as it has the display with the IR receiver built in. A little bit of checking shows that these displays and IR components have LIRC and LCDProc support, so Linux should 'just' work.
Anyone care to buy me one... for testing?
More Than Just DVR (Score:5, Informative)
The DVR capabilities of a HTPC are great, but you get a lot more features without any added cost:
I'm helping a friend build his right now, and it'll run about $1100 with 600GB of hard drive space. With that he gets a HDTV DVR and everything above. Compare that to the cost of a DVD player and a DVR and it's comparable, but you get far more functionality and flexibility from a HTPC.
Re:Pointless (Score:4, Informative)
Having said that, once you get a taste of watching your favorite Friday Night Sci-Fi epic on the day and time of your choosing... and commercial free ... now how much would you pay.
I'd sooner watch my PVR on a 13inch tube than suffer through 20 minutes of commercials, and countless household interruptions of my favorite 40 minute program viewed on your big-projector.
Not that I'd have to do that, mind you, since i did get a cheap DLP and already had a good stereo. Trust me, live with a PVR for a week, you'll never go back.
Re:How is it the "ultimate" when it only has 1 tun (Score:3, Informative)
There are couple of cable (QAM256) capable cards with recent support in Linux and Myth.
Here's a thread on the topic. [avsforum.com]
www.byopvr.com can do it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never considers videophiles (Score:2, Informative)
-skin effect losses (real but completely irrelevant for audio frequencies, i.e. 20 kHz)
-directionality (The microscopic crystal structure of the copper has some effect on currents running through it. Audible? No freaking way. Unless you are an idiot and put a diode inline between your components, there is no such thing as cable directionality.)
-memory effect in dielectrics (Real and inportant for electrolytic capacitors, but again completely irrelevant for audio speaker cables)
Though I'm an electrical engineer, it is my opinion that the mechanical aspects of the speakers you use have the greatest effect of the sound rather than the electronics. You get diminishing returns from better and better electronic components, while the design of the speakers and enclosures can color the sound significantly.
Re:What they dont' tell you (Score:4, Informative)
An HD-TV broadcast contians less information than an XGA screen.
HDTV is considered either 720p or 1080i (and in the future, higher resolutions such as 1080p, etc). 720p is WXGA, which is more pixels than XGA. So both variants of HD resolution contain more information than an XGA screen.
Thus going to higher resolution screens not only does not increase performance. Actaully the reverse is true it degrades it. When you go to higher resolution projectors you either have to use a subset of their pixels, which proportioanlly throws away the majority of the lumens, or you have put up with the ugly and noticable artifacts of interpolation (jagged edges on fast moving high contrast edges, and the poor rendering of fog and smoke). Additionally, all else being equal, denser pixel projectors waste more of the surface area to the dead zones around the pixels and also tend to have more variation and lower contrast.
WTF?! Denser resolution projectors are better assuming you have a decent deinterlacer and scaler. Sure, if you feed it through a crappy processor you're going to get crap. But I can say from experience that the exact same DVDs through my 720p projector look quite a bit better than my old 480p projector. The real area that it shines is HD, but I'll get to that later...
A good deinterlacer practically eliminates any "jaggies", and a good scaler will blend the pixels together and interpolate the information to the point that the resulting image looks much better than the original. Upconverting DVD players exist for a reason, and it's not just marketing hype.. it works (better picture), even on WVGA displays.
How does higher resolution imply "more variation" (whatever that's supposed to mean), and lower contrast? They have very little to do with each other. Many CRT projectors are 1080p+ and have amazing contrast (not even comparable with most 480p digital PJs).
Second, while the information content of a DVD is indeed equal to the number of pixels on a 800x600 projector, the aspect ratio is not... But more importantly, manufacturers are not treating WGA as a low-end product like they do SVGA. They may be putting in the higher wuality components into their WGA and WXGA projectors. And it's those components, not the useless improved resolution that you want to buy.
Again, DVD is equal to WVGA (480p), not SVGA. I can assure you that 480p projectors are considered "low end", and that higher-quality components are not in them. About the best 480p DLP projector you can buy right now is around $1500. The cheapest 720p DLP is about $2500 - I'll let everyone guess which has the better internal components. Secondly, increased resolution is not useless, and is, in fact, the most important factor (assuming everything else is generally equal, as you stated that caveat as well, and it's important to note).
Fo me all I'm interested in are DVDs but many folks are keen on HD (By the time HD becomes mainstream your current pojector will have bunred out anyhow so need to look ahead in your current purchase)
Perhaps we need a newsflash, but HD is most certainly mainstream right now. I live in an average-sized metropolitan area and can get every OTA channel in HD, and another dozen or so cable channels in HD. At least half of the TVs in the Big Box stores are HD capable. You're missing out immensely without HDTV (though of course, if you don't know what you're missing, carry on.. just don't say there's not much of a difference or it's not commonplace because it is).
Things to look for in the following order of importance are 0) DLP 1) quiet 2) RGB or digital inputs 3) contrast 4) lumens 5) darkness control 6) color fidelity 7) optical, not digital keystone correction 8) a short
Here is a gal that can show you how to do it. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What they dont' tell you (Score:3, Informative)
Ok fine, I'll claim there is less. You also said:
"Second, while the information content of a DVD is indeed equal to the number of pixels on a 800x600 projector"
How does a DVD with a resolution of 720x482 equal the number of pixels on an 800x600 screen?
Other than that good info, thanks.
Re:Pointless (Score:3, Informative)