The home theater personal computer or HTPC is the most
interesting and powerful piece of gear in our home cinema. This one
piece of equipment serves many roles including a
high end progressive scan DVD Player, Music Library Player, Video Processor, Digital Scaler,
HDTV and SDTV tuner, dual tuner PVR, and HDTV PVR.
The image quality from the HTPC is
outstanding. The key advantage of the HTPC is that the output of the HTPC can be set to match the native
resolution of your display device pixel for pixel. This give you the
very best possible performance from your projector, LCD or plasma display.
The trick to building a great HTPC is to
make it easy to use and as quiet as possible since it will be in your home
theater. Here is a list of the hardware and software we chose for the HTPC.
hardware - htpc -
theater equipment rack
Intel Pentium D 940 3.2 GHz Dual Core
ECS P4M800PRO-M v2.0 Motherboard
2 GB DDR2 533 RAM
Pioneer DVD-106s Slot Load DVD Drive
Sapphire Radeon 9600 128 MB AGP Video Card w/ Passive Cooler
ATI HDTV Wonder OTA HD Tuner Card
2 x
Hauppauge Win-TV PVR-150MCE TV Tuner Cards
Maxtor Maxline Plus II SATA 250 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
Windows OEM IR Receiver
Zalman CPU Cooler CNPS7000A-AlCu
Antec Sonata Case
Airboard Wireless IR Keyboard SK7100
Microsoft Remote Keyboard for Media Center
software - htpc
Windows Vista Ultimate
Nvidia DVD Decoder
TheaterTek DVD Player
Dscaler
ffdshow Filters
DVD Lobby
DVD Profiler
Daemon Tools
Video LAN Client
The media server is our central storage
for all media that is served up in the theater and the rest of the house.
The media server houses DVD disc images, digital pictures, and digital music.
This machine also serves as a SD and HD PVR using Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and a
video editing and burning machine for extracted content from the DVRs and home
videos.
hardware - media server
Intel Pentium D 820 2.8 GHz Dual Core
ECS P4M800PRO-M v2.0 Motherboard
2 GB DDR2 533 RAM
10 Terabytes (10,000 GB) of Hard Drive Space Total on IDE and SATA Drives
Internal, USB 2.0 Drives External, and 2 USB 2.0 External IDE Drive Enclosures
Netgear GA311 Gigabit NIC
Pioneer DVR-106 DVD+/-R/RW Recorder
Diamond ATI Radeon HD2600 PRO 512MB AGP Card
Hauppauge Win-TV PVR-250 TV Tuner Card and MPEG Decoder
Antec Sonata Quiet PC Case w/ 380 Watt Power Supply
Microsoft Elite Optical Keyboard and Mouse
17" Samsung LCD Monitor
software - media server
Windows Vista Ultimate
Daemon Tools
DVD Decrypter
DVD Shrink
TyStudio for Tivo Content Extraction
Video LAN Client
To learn more about how to do both
of these things, check out the resources section and forums to learn more about HTPCs
and Media Servers.
