Building The Ultimate Home Theater PC

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"

Cheap?

[MindStalker]

So has anyone figured out how to build a TiVo equivelent for $200, untill then I'm sticking with my TiVo.

They did you a favor buddy

[Work Account]

There's no need for you to complain.

Rob simply took out the link to your personal site instead of Slashdotting it into obliteration which probably would give you an extra $50 or $100 to pay your webhost this month assuming you don't have unlimited bandwidth.

Re:Pointless

[barcodez]

I have to agree; maybe I'm getting old, or get paid too much (ha ha, I wish), but I'm inclined just to buy something that just works.

Re:Cheap?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK - But can you use your Tivo to run your word processor or spreadsheet program?

How is it the "ultimate" when it only has 1 tuner?

[VitrosChemistryAnaly]

Okay, I fail to see the big deal. This thing doesn't offer much more than my TiVo. To be the ultimate it needs to be able to record more than one show at once.

Put that in a "component" case and I'll be happy.

Re:Pointless

[Anonymous Coward]

Insightful, yet depressing.

Re:Pointless

[Golias]

You're not getting old. The conditioning to be a consumer instead of a producer is working on you is all.

More accurately, he is producing enough in his specialization that he doesn't need to do everything for himself. I'm sure he doesn't always bake his own bread from scratch, or get milk from a cow every morning, or perhaps doesn't even change his own oil.

It's what happens when you reach a certain age: Your time becomes worth more than the money you would save by giving it up on such tasks.

My HDTV home theater build was not as simple as his, but still much simpler than the linked article:

Step 1: Set up a Mac with EyeTV 500 and the Keyspan Remote Control sensor
Step 2: Hook it up to a projection system via DVI-HDMI connector
Step 3: There's no step three

Did I spend more than a '1337 hax0r spent on a comparable Linux-based system? Yeah, probably.

Do I give a shit? No, not really.

Re:Never considers videophiles

[Moofie]

Every night, I go to sleep thanking my lucky stars that I am neither an audiophile nor a videophile.

Good enough is good enough for me. You go ahead with your $2000/foot virgin silver de-oxy-ozonated hand rolled +2 vs. lousy sound speaker cables.

I'll use some nice heavy gauge lamp cord and be just fine.

Re:Pointless

[Oliver Defacszio]

Oh, that's so stupid. There is absolutely no necessary correlation between a desire for something that does not require endless screwing around and mental dullness. In fact, now that I think about it, I tend to view people with a desire for simplicity in a better default light than those who can't have enough complexity swirling about their head and neck, because the simplicity-seekers tend to be the ones who think about their needs instead of immediately grabbing the newest shiniest whatever.

It sounds to me like YOU've been conditioned by Linux's "everything endlessly complicated must be better" mentality.

What they dont' tell you

[goombah99]

A DVD does not contain more information content than the number of pixels on an SVGA screen. An HD-TV broadcast contians less 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.

Now there are two important exceptions to the above statements. First, generally all else is not equal. When you pay buttwads more for a high end high pixel projector you almost always get upgraded components everywhere else. Better color control, better contract control, better uniformity, better interpolation, .... thus to comapre a cheap SVGA to one of the higher end machines is not an even handed comparison that will allow you compare the effects of resolution alone. 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. Thus the optimal projector for 16x9 movies is WGA and the optimal projector for 4x3 is SVGA.

My guess is that most people are best off buying a WGA projector for two reasons, first it's optimal for wide screen movies and adequate for full frame movies. 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.

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). And for them a WXGA or XGA projector is the right choice. For everyone else WGA or SVGA.

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 throw range for most people's rooms also reuires a sharp offest angle (see keystone correction above) 9) some zoom 10) ability to work upsidedown

If you want to disagree with me just fine but make sure you dont claim there is actually more information on a DVD than an SVGA/WGA can support

Re:Never considers videophiles

[TheFlyingGoat]

I can't figure out if you're trolling or just uninformed. If you select the right components and software you can get far better quality with a HTPC than AV equipment for a given price.

Any of the video cards that use the HDMI connection or have component out (most of the Radeon cards) will produce excellent results. I'm using a GF6200 with component out running at 1776x1000 resolution (to compensate for overscan) and when I play uncompressed HD video it actually looks better than the component output of my HDTV decoder box.

As for your audio statement, that's just plain stupid. Use the coaxial or optical SPDIF output right off the motherboard and you bypass all of the crappy audio in a computer system. By running digital directly to your receiver, you get the best quality sound your receiver can handle. Far better and cheaper than running shielded audio cables from your high-end DVD player to your receiver.

Unmatched results (unless you own a scaler) by using ffdshow to scale your DVD's to HD quality in realtime. It sounds like you just need to do more research on the subject.

Re:TiVo isn't a TiVo equivalent for $200

[ninti]

MythTV has been my Linux trial by fire. I have used Unix for years as a user, and set up a Linux box 5 or 6 times over the last ten years. Each time it has ended in heartbreak. Every time Linux has imploded and become unusable, or I couldn't figure out how to do something that should be trivial and gave up.

I installed Knoppmyth this time around, and admit the initial installation was cake. But then I had to spend countless hours researching and configuring the myraid of little things; playing all my video file formats, get other capture cards working, combine my hard drive space, get the remote control working, setting up streaming audio, getting tv out, get Firefox working and in Myth, securing the web page...the list goes on. For a Linux newbie like me it was extremely tough and time consuming. For a non computer geek or someone with no Unix experience at all, I expect it is nearly impossible.

And with all that, a month later, I turned on the TV to discover Myth crashed and, long story short, took out my entire root partition with it in an apparently unrecoverable manner. Well, that has never happened to me in Windows, at least without an actual major hardware problem. And I thought Linux was more stable (and before anyone can say it, I hadn't changed anything in more than a week when it happened, it was not anything I did.) If I hadn't plowed so much money into this project already, this would have likely been another case of Linux failing me and me giving up. But alas, I'm back up again, if not fully. Now I have to figure out how to make a backup on DVD...add it to the list.

When it works, it works very well. It does crash occasionally. Fine. It's not often enough to be really annoying, and it's just the frontend, it still records in the backend so I don't miss shows just because of it. But it can do stuff Tivo can't. I don't have to fight Tivo to get shows off and onto DVD or another computer, or add more hard drive space. I can play mp3s and videos off the network and do streaming Inet radio. I can put a web browser on it, and plug in just about an Linux application right into the Myth menus. I can access it from the Internet and program it to record from my office. The featureset is excellent; the program guide and recording options put Tivo to shame. The picture quality is very good and only occasionally stutters, mostly just after you change the channel.

This experience has taught me one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt, Linux is not ready for the general public, and I suspect never will be. I want to love Linux, I really do. Free as in freedom and all that, and Myth is good example of why that freedom is valuable. But until every developer on every project treats config files as evil, makes settings easily accessible, writes programs where no one ever goes to the command line, and has some kind of standards czar keeping things consistant between applications, the general public will never be converted, and of course that will never happen.