Home Theater PCs... whos got one?
 

Finally going to pull the trigger on building/buying a home theater PC. Mainly, I'd like to be able to stream content and movies from one location.

My BluRay player that I had in the master bedroom died this week and I'm not to fork out another $200+ on one. Rather, Id like to put that money to making a PC and keep all the blurays (in image format) on the PC.

A big seller for me is also to pull content from sites like Hulu as there are a ton of great shows I'd like to watch.

Anyone have one or built one? If you have, let me know or hit me up and I'll toss you some $$ for your time... as I fear building a computer blind will only burn down my house :1orglaugh

boxee

8char

Antec case/fans/PS, typical dual core processor, 4 gigs of ram, 1GB Radeon HD 5770, dual 1TB drives mirrored as a basic backup, BR-ROM drive for watching discs, and I have a SATA2 hot-swap dock for spare drives with media on them.

Don't cheap out on the case or the drives. nothing worse than the whining of fans and drives while you're trying to watch a movie.

Mac mini and problem solved. I have 3 hooked up to Tv's.

Plex? Boxee? Front Row?

inability to understand the concept FAIL :1orglaugh :winkwink:

you can't burn content to a boxee, plus it does not allow you to put in cable cards

Its going into a AV rack in my basement, so there is already a pretty large amount of fans running to keep my equipment, especially receiver cool. I'm thinking probably 4TB or more of HDD space, and 500GB to backup core files... if I loose a drive full of movies, then i just have to sit there for a few hours and reburn them to the drive.

My main thing is being able to display content from the PC to other TVs in the house. The main output (hdmi) will go into my receiver which will go into my main tv in the family room. The rest will be streamed via cat6 cables ran through the house into a media box.

Any idea on the cost?

I have one. Mine is the Dell Zino HD and it's the best $300 or so I've ever spent for a computer.

Picked one up off Cragslist prebuilt (and loaded with 80 chinese movies) for $200 three years ago. Lian Li case, good little AMD system inside. Works brilliiantly for Netflix and browsing in the living room. Also serves audio to the amp beautifully through winamp or iTunes or whichever. We love that little thing.

Just read your next post: we don't have a cable capture card in ours. It's just for audio and movies and the interweb. Sorry can't help you more. THere are some really good forums out there on just this topic, tho.

if by "cable card" you mean a tv tuner card go with the hauppauge hd pvr. It has component input/usb output to computer, allowing you to record up to 1080i.

I absolutely love mine

I built one about 3 years ago. Still runs solid.

I don't watch much TV so no cable here. We get everything from the networks directly, Netflix, or Hulu.

I don't have one. They are expensive.

i have just a random dell pc in my living room that i use to stream media
nothing fancy

Tried out a few options and going to have to go the route of building a HTPC, but really have no clue how :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I bought 2 media centers, one from WD that was ok and another from Dlink that could stream 1080p without loss... bullshit, it sounded like crap and was always having problems. This was recommended by someone at BestBuy over the WD.

Dont get me wrong, they are great if you are not concerned about losing audio and some video quality, but I spent a ton on my AV equipment and don't want to go from uncompressed HD sound to 5.1 compressed.

Anyway, the biggest thing I will need is a video card that outputs both sound and video via HDMI, and does not compress or anything other than transmit raw data into my receiver; my receiver will take care of the rest. Otherwise, I'd like a way to be able to plug in a media player (like the WD one) to my other TVs in bedrooms and pull movies from there, which I don't care about losing some quality.

My main point of building this is to be able to stream web content as well store my movie (BluRay and DVD) content. Its a pain in the ass to be running all over the house looking for where I placed movies at.

Anyone build one or bought one for a recommendation?

Thats one main thing I'm trying to do with it. I thought I could stream things like ABC player and Hulu from my iPad but nope... There are a lot of good shows on there I want to watch.

Passing HD-Audio through the HDMI is going to be the biggest challenge. Definitely not typical best-buy off the shelf stuff

You'll have to pass it through analogue outputs and play with the bluray decoder settings

not me :(

I have a theatre room. Hi-def projector, bluray player and high definition satellite receiver for sports and tv shows. These pics are when I first set it up before fully decorating the walls.

http://www.adultpicworld.com/theatre1.jpg

http://www.adultpicworld.com/theatre2.jpg

http://www.adultpicworld.com/theatre4.jpg

Super Bowl Party last year:
http://www.adultpicworld.com/threatregame.jpg

We have SPDIF optical out for the audio, pass the video through HDMI. Is that what you're referring to?