DIY Home Theatre PC - Update

I've done some looking around, and found that there are quite a few varying opinions on building a Digital Home Theatre System.

On a side note, I should probably come up with something simpler to call it. "Digital Home Theatre System" is too cumbersome, and DHTS sounds wrong somehow. Well, it's a PC, and it's a home theatre... how about Home Theatre PC, or HTPC for short?

This article over at PCStats.com outlines their approach to building a system (which, I might add, they call their HTPC. I confess; I stole the acronym). It's quite good, right up until the point where they elect to install Windows as their operating system. There's nothing wrong with Windox XP (even the media center edition is fine for most people). I just don't want to (a) pay for it; (b) steal it; or (c) keep it patched and up to date. This is a TV system I'm building. I don't particularly want to have to reboot my television.

The information provided, though, is quite helpful.

I'll keep researching.

Freevo - the MythTV Alternative?

So I've been doing some more reading into my Digital home theatre project (it seems I've been doing a lot of reading lately). I came across an alternative to MythTV: Freevo. As the name suggests, this is intended to be a free (as in you put hours of work into something and place no actual monetary value on your time) alternative to TiVo.

It looks interesting. I'm not sure if there is any general consensus as to which is better, but it is probably worth some additional investigation.

I did find a bunch of comments on someone's digg post that argue both sides of the fence, which wasn't very helpful. I wanted to post a screenshot, but the ones on Freevo's site don't seem to work (which isn't very encouraging).

Why MythTV?

I've been doing some more reading, and it seems that MythTV is a logical choice for the Home Theatre PC I want to put together. Here are some of the features offered by MythTV:

• Basic 'live-tv' functionality. Pause/Fast Forward/Rewind "live" TV.
• Support for multiple tuner cards and multiple simultaneous recordings.
• Distributed architecture allowing multiple recording machines and multiple playback machines on the same network, completely transparent to the user.
• Compresses video in software using rtjpeg (from Nuppelvideo) or mpeg4 (from libavcodec). Full support for Hardware MPEG-2 encoder cards (Hauppauge PVR-250 / PVR-350). Preliminary support for DVB cards and the new pcHDTV tuner card.
• Support for the (very nice looking) hardware MPEG-2 decoder and TV out present on the Hauppauge PVR-350.
• Completely automatic commercial detection/skipping
• Grabs program information using xmltv.
• A fully themeable menu to tie it all together.

Here's what it looks like (the above info and the below screenshot are taken from the MythTV website):


All in all, this looks like a pretty good system. Of course, my wife will insist that it's aesthetically pleasing as well, and that could be more of a challenge...

DIY Home Theater

Last night I realized that I am using a VCR that is older than my oldest child, and she hits the double digits next year.

I'm getting old.

Rather than wallow in self pity, though, I decided to focus my energy into something productive. It's time to do away with the elderly analog VCR and try building a Home Theater PC. I've been thinking about this for quite some time, and believe it's time to give it a go.

Although I don't have the specifics worked out, I am certain that MythTV will be a component of the final mix. This is a free, Tivo-like package that does not require a subscription.

Besides, I think that getting my Asterisk system working is going to take awhile. I need to have a success of some sort in the meantime.