Posts Tagged ‘media center’

HTPC Project Completed

// December 18th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // toys

After posting a few days ago about how to put together the perfect HTPC, I did some more investigating and chatted with a few of you to come up with the perfect solution, for the time being. First, I needed to get a new video card for my eMachines tower that’s currently storing all my movies and media. To do this, I looked up the system online and chatted with eMachines help to discover that I had 2 free PCI slots and 1 free PCI-Express slots. Then, I headed up to Best Buy to find the best card.

After the Geek Squad dude that greeted me pretty much didn’t know a thing, I talked to a helpful regular employee who pointed me in the direction of the GeForce 210 video card, which works perfectly. It took almost no time at all to install, and makes video smooth as butter.

I also went ahead and purchased 2 remote controls for my new HTPC, a regular hand-held remote and a wireless keyboard.

The Microsoft Windows Media Center remote is great when I’m in the Windows Media Center app, for navigation and quick access to the necessary functions. It’s backlit and looks almost identical to the remote control that came with my AT&T Uverse box, so my wife has no trouble using it. The remote also came with the IrDA receiver that I needed.

The Microsoft Windows Media Center wireless keyboard was only $30, a far cry from the $130 that it launched at. This keyboard has an integrated nub to function as a mouse and left/right buttons, so I can use it to get around the normal Windows interface when necessary. It’s taken a while to get used to, but it’s much more convenient than using LogMeIn on my other computer to access my MediaCenter.

I was also recently introduced to browser by a friend, and this application is simply brilliant. Browser searches the tmdb.org database to get metadata for your movies and tv shows, making it *much* more convenient to browse through them on the Windows Media Center interface.

With this setup, I’m really enjoying my HTPC. Total out of pocket costs thus far, not including the eMachines tower that I already had, has been $185. Not too shabby.

The Quest For The Perfect Affordable HTPC

// November 29th, 2009 // 6 Comments » // toys

I’m on the quest for an affordable home theatre PC (HTPC) solution to go with my recently-purchased 46″ Samsung HDTV. I already have one, almost. I have an old eMachines box with an AMD Athlon 3000+ 64-bit processor at 1.8GHz and 2GB of RAM that’s connected to my router. Basically, it’s somewhat of a glorified NAS, holding all my movies/tv shows/music/photos and making them accessible from any computer on my network. Unfortunately, this machine does not have either a Blu-Ray drive or an HDMI output, which means its usefulness as an HTPC is rather limited.

However, I have basically two options to remedy this:

Option A: Given that the eMachines has an acceptable processor and RAM for playing back video content, all I really need is a Blu-Ray drive and a video card with an HDMI output on there – seems simple enough, and added in an afternoon for roughly $200, give or take. The benefit here is the low cost – I’m still stuck with a mid-size tower in my livingroom.

Option B: Build a new HTPC. I can salvage the processor, HDDs (I’ve got two drives in there, 160GB and 500GB), and perhaps a stick of RAM. The benefit here is that I could also opt for a smaller, slimmer case and a quieter cooling system, so that it would be really ideally suited for the livingroom. The problem here is the cost and the hassle involved.

I’m tempted to go with Option A, mainly because right now, there are a ton of things we need to spend $5-600 on, aside from a whole new computer. My two questions, for my computer-geeky readers, are:

1. Will the AMD Athlon 3000+ 1.8GHz 64-bit processor and 2GB of RAM be enough to basically run Windows Media Center all the time, stream internet video, and play Blu-Ray discs back? Ideally this computer will boot into Windows Media Center, so that’s really all I need.

2. What video card would you recommend for these tasks? There will not be any gaming done – this is purely video content I’m worried about here. HDMI output is a requirement, for sure.