LeeMobile

So I bought a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) on a whim last week. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly a whim as I bought components to build one… online… which is definitely an indicator of premeditation. But who’s counting? It’s not my fault I was surfing my favorite online PC parts vendor, adding all sorts of parts onto my virtual shopping cart, punching in my credit card and address, and hitting “OK”.

It’s also a really silly buy considering I already sort of have a HTPC in the form of the XBOX 360 sitting in my living room, which connects to my PC to stream movies and music. But I demand performance, damnit, in ways that the 360 can’t give me.

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Why the Xbox 360 is shitty as a Media Center:

Namely, the 360 is a very frustrating media center to use. It will only act as a streaming media center if it connects to a computer running Windows Media Center Edition. You can’t actually store video files on the 360 on the hard drive, and you can only stream them. The 360 does indeed come with a hard drive that stores movies, but only videos that come in through Xbox Live are stored on there, you can’t just dump anything you wish.

My TV is a fair ways away from my computer, so a wireless connection is my only option here. To get smooth, stutter-free video requires that the wireless network is performing well… and in peak hours it doesn’t. Around me I can pick up 7 or 8 different wi-fi connections, which all interfere with my signal. This means that sometimes I can’t even watch video until the interference calms down since I don’t have a hardwire ethernet cable hooked up to my xbox.

Moreso, the 360 only can view movies that are in Microsoft’s proprietary WMV format. Almost all pirated movies and TV shows on the internet aren’t encoded in WMV for many reasons (well, it’s simply a shitty format). So to stream a non-wmv video to my living room you have to transcode (re-encode to another format) your video into the wmv format, which results in a lot of definition loss. Think of it as taking a photo-copy of a photo-copy.

Also, the Windows Media Center interface is lacking. Strange, considering that Microsoft has built its software around usability to have a product that lacks in usability. It handles small archives of data “okay”, but when I use it to serve my fairly large mp3 collection (40 gigs or so), the interface is cumbersome. There is a search function to look for artist/album names, but the search seems to miss a lot of valid hits. I have given up on the search feature altogether and I usually end up scrolling through my artist lists to find a particular album. Trying to reach the “R” section to listen to some Radiohead typically involves me holding down the “next” key for a few minutes to scroll to it. Like I said, painful.

In the end, the streaming videos fail to deliver all the features you’d expect from playing back video. Pausing, rewinding, and fast forwarding sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and when it does work it’s very clunky. I seem to only fast forward in 30 second intervals, meaning that if I want to stop watching a movie in the middle, I have to hit fast forward a hundred times to reach my desired location. Hitting rewind, depending on the type of file streamed, sometimes rewinds back 5 seconds, or sometimes it rewinds to the beginning of the video altogether. I’ve had some instances where hitting rewind takes me back to the beginning, but hitting fast forward doesn’t work… so it means sitting through stuff to get back to where I was. Ouch.

Finally, I want the flexibility to NOT run Windows Media Center on my PC. The Media Center component is integrated into the operating system, so I can’t simply install it on top of my XP Pro install as an application or service. Linux support for the 360? Forget it.

So for all these reasons, it’s frustrated me enough to buy my HTPC… even though the Windows Media Center with XBox 360 sorta works.

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Hopefully my HTPC will provide me with a great media center experience that is lacking with the 360.

I went on NCIX.com and picked up as many parts as I could in the “discount bin”. An HTPC doesn’t necessarily have to be powerful relative to today’s modern PC’s. What it does have to be is quiet. This means the cooler the components, the better as you have to avoid adding fans to the machine to keep it running.

I don’t need the fastest CPU out there for it either, as decoding movies onto the screen doesn’t require too much performance or ram. I’m also not looking for a beefy video card, as beefy video cards tend to draw a lot power, thereby increasing heat and noise levels. I bought the Geforce 7200 GS, which set me back about $60. It had exactly what I wanted, an HDTV Out port and passive cooling (no fans!). Apparently I didn’t do my research thoroughly enough (hence the “impulse” buy) as I could’ve bought an ASUS motherboard that had onboard video with an HDTV decoder and port built in. I also should have bought a cheaper single core processor, instead of the dual core one I got instead, as the single core draws less power. Oh well.

Shipping was free, and since the company was based in BC I didn’t have to pay Ontario PST. My grand total after taxes was about $540. Not a bad deal considering I got an entirely brand new PC out of it, which in all accounts runs faster than most machines out there. I did try to hunt around for a used PC before buying it, but buying a decent used machine for a good price is hard.

A machine that’s roughly 2 or 3 years old would’ve worked for me easily, but computer prices back then were much higher. Also, people don’t realize how fast computers depreciate in value. So most used PC’s out on Craigslist, Facebook, and classified boards cost WAY more than what’s justified. People buy a machine for $1000 three years ago thinking they can sell it used for half the price… unfortunately for them, $500 goes pretty far these days in terms of hardware. If anything you might get 20 to 25% of what you paid for, and the general public doesn’t seem to realize this.

Anyways, I’m thinking of slapping on Ubuntu Linux on it as the operating system, and running a media center program called MythTV. I also bought a remote control to work with it. Running Windows Media Center on it would defeat the purpose of getting it, and being locked into Windows for a media center box is very limiting since I can’t interact with the machine without a keyboard and mouse.  Having a keyboard and mouse lying around in the living room is a big turn-off.  At least with Linux I can control my media center box remotely through the command line terminal on my PC.

In the end, I’m hoping to have gotten a nice HTPC for only about $500.  Not only will it allow me to watch movies and tv shows that I pirate from the internet (I don’t have cable TV anymore, as I download everything anyways), but it will also act as a PVR, music box, and basic gaming machine (I have all the SNES and Nintendo games as Roms).

Now all I need to do is wait for my parts to come in the mail anytime now!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.