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HTPC Guide
Introduction:
With the ever increasing popularity of digital music and streaming video, it was only a matter of time before consumers demanded these technologies in their living rooms. The Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) has had its place in some homes over much of the last decade, but only recently have they gained popularity among the mainstream market. WebTV could arguably be considered the first production HTPC, and many companies bundled Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) along with their computers in an attempt to push consumers in this direction. It never really caught on back then as few people owned more than one computer and were still learning the ropes.
Nowadays, everything has turned digital – music and movies especially. You’d be hard pressed to find yourself in a position without internet access. The new breed of HTPC brings entertainment to your fingertips with the ease of pushing a button on a remote. You don’t even need to leave your seat, unless of course nature takes its course. Then again you could always set up your home theatre system in your bathroom! An HTPC gives you the ability to call up a moive instantly, set recordings for future broadcasts, and hold your entire music collection in one medium sized box. These conveniences, along with other full-fledged features of a complete PC, has pushed the HTPC so far into everyday life that the market for them will only get bigger. Companies around the world have begun making HTPC’s, and one day soon you may find yourself joining the bandwagon.
Pre-built HTPC’s tend to be extraordinarly expensive, for no apparent reason. An HTPC is basically a cheap computer with a few features added. So why pay the big bucks for a machine you could easily build yourself for half the cost? Just about every member here has the knowledge to build a computer. In this guide I’ll be helping you decide which parts you’ll need for an HTPC.
At this point I want to make explicitly clear that this guide is just that, a guide in helping you decide what you need. The products that I suggest only represent a small fraction of those available. Depending on the brand, model, and any sales going on you’ll probably be able to find better equipment for the same (if not lower) price. It all depends on what you need and how much patience you have. Now then, let’s begin!
Read.
How To: Build An HTPC (With Windows 7) : One Small Hawaiian Island At A Time…
I’ve been trying to build great HTPCs for several years, and several generations of PR folks at AMD (formerly ATI) have tried helping me piece together the right components to make my theater room shine. Incidentally, this is one niche where Nvidia has historically had little impact. Of course, those efforts have forever centered on All-in-Wonder graphics cards, which integrated 3D, OTA television reception, time-shifting, and video playback.
Not that anything was wrong with the AiW lineup—the cards demonstrated tremendous engineering prowess, as ATI managed to fit all of its multi-media strengths onto boards that didn’t compromise 3D viability. The AiW boards simply didn’t break down all of the barriers to getting PC technology into the living room, as attractive as they were.
Ironically, now that the All-in-Wonder family is all but deceased (with one lonely model representing), the age of the HTPC is arguably upon us.
You see, previously, incorporating an HTPC into a home entertainment rack almost felt like showing off, since much of its functionality would be redundant. Yeah, you could get a PC wedged in between the stereo receiver and the standalone DVD player. But so much of the concept’s functionality still depended on other components in the rack.
You’d run video from the graphics card out to a DVI input, ideally, or a component input if your TV didn’t have the digital connection. You’d run optical or coaxial audio to a stereo receiver, which would be responsible for taking that sound signal, decoding it, and outputting to the non-powered speakers typical in a theater.
Adding an HTPC just seemed superfluous. And with a Playstation 3 in the loop, sporting its almost instant-on and rich audio/video playback (plus wireless network connectivity), there’s almost no reason to power-on a PC and wait for it to boot up into a Media Center environment—until now.
Via Tomshardware.com
