Larry Templeton
(REVISED Jan 2010)
At the April 2009 SPAUG meeting, member Larry Templeton described how he built his own Home Theater PC.
Bill Young really laid the groundwork for tonight's talk a couple of month's ago when he made a presentation to the group about how to build a standard desktop for the PC so I'm not going to go into the nuts and bolts of it, but I do want to talk how they work, how they fit into a home entertainment system and the parts that you might want to procure if you are going to build one.
What can an HTPC provide?
- Record /store/ replay off-air/cable TV shows, DVDs, CDs, ipod, MP3s, etc.
- From the internet, download /store /play YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, TV shows, movies (amazing amount of content now available)
- Edit video, burn DVDs, CDs, load iPod, etc.
- Any other PC function such as surf the internet, play games, etc.
- Watch off-air, cable & satellite TV
- Get rid of all your old CDs, DVDs, etc.
Why bother with it? It does all of the functions that people ordinarily expect from a DVR or Tivo Basically the thing that most will do with it is record, perhaps from off-air, perhaps from cable, perhaps from satellite; record programs, store them and then replay them on the big screen display. There are lots of other things you can do, too. For example, the internet is really coming on strong as a source of program content. In fact, it's really amazing. There are the independent outfits, like YouTube, Hulu, Netflix. Well not Netflix. They're really not independent. The big TV networks. And they provide an amazing amount of content. For example, all of ComputerHistoryMuseum speakers have videos made of the event and they are now available to you on YouTube. It's endless, really. So you can download things from the internet, you can manipulate them. You can edit video. You can take the commercials out of the programs. You can assemble a bunch of different shows onto a single DVD. It's endless.
But it's all the things you can do with a normal PC as well as all the things you can do with a DVR like Tivo. Another thing that it provides, another PC function, especially if you have grandkids, is games. There are so many games available from the internet and on the big screen that it's a real expense for them. Finally, the bottom line here is get rid of all your old CDs and DVDs. Hard drives are so cheap now that you can use this computer as a server and put all of your old CDs and DVDs on it. Take them all out of the drawer and toss them away or put them in the attic, or something like that.
Now how does it fit in? What are we talking about here? The big red box down at the bottom is the HTPC. Next box up is the audio/video receiver. We used to think about that as the center piece of our stereo systems because it had the audio amplifiers and so forth. But modern A/V receivers not only handle the audio portion, but they actually have become switching centers and they will select from many sources, video and audio, and they will switch your video on through to the display. So the A/V receiver really is the switching center of a home theater setup, but the PC is the content center because there is so much you can do in the way of bringing content in, storing it, manipulating it, playing it, etc.
Let's look at one signal path here. Let's say we want to record Charlie Rose off KQED at 8:30 in the evening. Let's examine that example for the whole thing. We pick up the signal from KQED on the antenna, bring it down on the coax, split it into two and put it into the tuners; special tuner cards we put in the PC. And these tuner cards demodulate the signal, decode it and then put it on the PCI bus so that it can be recorded onto your hard drives. Then at some later time when you are ready to watch it, you can activate the special software that controls all of this and plays it back and the video, and the audio in some cases, comes out of the graphics card and up to the A/V receiver and the audio goes to the speakers and the video goes up to your big screen display.
I've been doing this for three years with the same setup and it's been reliable and my wife doesn't have a problem operating it and it's, to me, anyway, it's an all-around satisfactory solution.
