The HTPC and your living room
08.03.06 - 06:33pm
Lately computers have been infiltrating every activity within our lives. People use computers at the office to perform work, at home to have fun, in the kitchen to find recipes, and lately in the living room to watch TV and movies. In the new digital age that we live in having a computer in the living room opens up tons of content through our broadband connections. Throw in a slick LCD or Plasma TV and you have transformed your living room from a boring TV and couch to a portal to the world.
First there were VCR’s with their bulky tapes, terrible quality, and generally slow performance. But for all their problems VCRs managed to hang on for many years as there wasn’t any viable replacement for video recording. With the new digital age, recording TV has jumped from tape drives to computer hard drives and sleek Tivo set-top boxes. Tivo is great in that it lets you record your favorite TV shows and easily and quickly play them back but it is seriously lacking in some features. The most critical feature that is missing is the ability to record DVDs and easily play them back. Call me lazy but the process of fishing for a DVD, taking it out of the box and putting it into my DVD player just seems too clunky. I’d rather be able to select a movie from a list and have it immediately up on my screen within seconds. Enter the HTPC in all its digital glory.
HTPC?
HTPCs are Home Theater Personal Computers which is a fancy name for a computer with the ability to record and display TV shows. You can take any standard PC and stick a TV tuner in it and call it a HTPC but some computers are better in this field than others. Just think of when you are at the Movie Theater and in the movie there is a very quiet scene and you hear the WHIRRRR from the projector, isn’t that so distracting? Would you want that while you are also watching TV at home? HTPCs require very stringent acoustic properties otherwise they can seriously detract from the movie watching experience. However a properly designed and constructed HTPC can be a great addition to your living room.
Can I be an HTPC?
Since noise is the primary factor in regards to case design and construction, you will want to first start by finding yourself a nice and quiet case. In general if the case features 120mm fans and a solid construction it’ll be quiet enough. Just remember smaller fans mean more noise, contrary to what you would normally think. You should also look for a quiet powersupply as the fans in powersupplies can be a bit noisy. The rest of the components are very standard, you’ll need a motherboard, processor, ram, maybe a video card, and then a TV tuner. TV tuners basically take in a coaxial cable connection and convert it into a digital feed for your computer. One thing to know about TV tuners, if you are watching TV on one channel and you want to simultaneously record TV on another channel, you are going to need two TV tuners. Most TV tuners can only handle a single feed at a time so remember this limitation. Now that you have the computer to do all the recording and stuff you need a place to store all your lovely TV shows. I personally suggest going with some Seagate hard drives as they tend to be pretty quiet but lately there has been hype about using 2.5″ laptop hard drives for HTPCs. The idea behind this move is that laptop drives are naturally quieter (and slower) than desktop drives but they also can handle higher temperatures. An alternative to using lots of desktop drives in the HTPC would be to create a NAS (Networked Attached Storage) server in another room that will be capable of storing all your data while not contributing any sound to the room. This might be a bit extreme though but if you want the best, you ust pay for it.
Once you have your HTPC set up you’ll need a way to interface with it. My personal favorite is the Microsoft Media Center wireless keyboard. When combined with a copy of Windows XP Media Center Edition you essentially get a complete Tivo with the ability to record DVDs, store massive amounts of TV shows, read email, and surf the net. I personally think HTPCs are great additions to the living room as it gives you so many more options to the standard TV schedules for your city and the limited options of Tivo. In a few weeks I will be going through the process of building a silent HTPC along with a guide for Windows XP MCE so check back for that.
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