Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater HTPC Build In Progress

Groovy.

Wow, going all out. More pics once its all in place. A short review of the process would be cool to. Always curious how other people percieve the entire process of building and using a HTPC.

Will post my thoughts once its up and running, but the HT box is just one peice of a major change, the new rack system is going to involve some major re-wiring of all speakers, components, and adding cables for the projector and power for the screen....so may be a time before all is completed. LOL

I love the idea of a HTPC, but I'm a little confused as to their purpose.

Loading my entire MP3 collection to a HTPC sounds like a good idea, but what about movies? Do you guys play your DVD's in the HTPC or do use your dvd players? It seems odd to me to replace a DVD-2900 with a $50 dvd drive in a PC.

I'm all for a HTPC, like I said it seems like a great idea, but what's the PQ like for playing movies?

How about recording TV? Would a HTPC really replace my beloved Tivo?

The point is you can combine all the things you mentioned plus more, on one attractive AV HTPC case. For dvd watching, you can scale the image to match exactly that of your tv/projector because of the high end video cards available. The picture can blow away most stand alone players in my opinion. For constant height screen setups, you can set the dvd player software to automatically stretch/adjust the image of 2.35 material as a prerequesite for an anamorphic lens and make use of all the pixels of your HD projector.

Lets see what else; Internet/Radio/HDTV/Recording/Streaming trailers/archiving movies and music for instant access/wireless control from your couch of everything.....

I don't know there are so many things....come on Dan/Dennis and others...

What he said.
You can also play games (though if you want to have a videocard powerful enough for it you will have to deal with more noise).
The fact that you can store all your DVDs on it is a great thing! Think about it, all your movies at the reach of a button. Also the advantage of a HTPC is that you can upgrade parts as you need. You have total control on how the system looks on the screen (skins), as well as how it behaves. For tweakers and fidgeters this is a dream machine!

Randy hit the nail on the head. A modern PC with a medium to high end shader-based graphics card has an immense amount of video processing capability, far more than a typical DVD player. Every time the processing power goes up, there are more things we can do to improve video quality.

Historically the video I/O capabilities of PCs were below the best consumer equipment, particularly in terms of controlling noise, but (a) there has been a big push in raising the video quality bar over the last few years, and (b) moving to a digital video output (DVI or HDMI) takes away a lot of the noise issues anyways.

Exactly what sirquack said. To take the movies thing a step furture... you can encode the DVD's into mpeg4 (divx, xvid, etc) to shrink them to ~1.5gig size and store them for 'online' access. I've done this and its really cool to simply open My Movies in MCE (its a plugin), browse all your movies by title, search by actors, directors, if you've watched it recently, etc. If you don't want to shrink your movies you can still use that plugin as a database but tell it the movie is offline, so if you click on it, it will pop up saying you need to find disk X (if you choose to label your DVDs).

Computers rule. Basically the only limitation to a HTPC is what you choose to not figure out how to do. If that makes any sense.

Inane, what is your opinion on the quality when compressed to the smaller file formats? I usually just burn the movie only, so they average around 4gb a piece.

I've been testing Media Portal, which is very very close to MCE, in fact they have an MCE skin that you'd swear your using MCE. Their application ties in with the IMDB and pulls down movie description/actors/etc... It is so cool AND free. I've also looked at XLobby, which is also free....

Just in from the garage, spent the day building cabinets for the racks and seems a few have had time to post.

Along with the reasons for HTPC that others have posted, I'll add a couple more of ours, Matt and his PC gaming on the big screen and sound system, also the C2 and a couple of other components need a computer for updates and programing the readout panels with text.

Wiith computer geeks here, it's another toy to play with. lol

Progress for today.



Tomorrow the plan is to wrap the cabinets with the oak skins and prep for staining.