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Build a Home Theater PC

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Once, I was a strong proponent of home theater PCs. As DVRs have become more commonplace, I've become complacent, starting to believe the HTPC had become obsolete. But as over-the-air digital television has become a reality and with video delivery over the Internet becoming more viable almost by the day, the HTPC has had a new lease on life.

A home theater PC is a personal computer you hook up to your HDTV or home theater, and serves as a multipurpose repository for your digital media content. It's a great place to store and view photographs, video, and house your music library. It can also act as a DVR, but can't really help with encrypted premium content, such as commercial satellite services (Dish Network and DirecTV) or digital cable—though with the latter, you can pull unencrypted content from the cable feed, provided you have a tuner card capable of capturing clear QAM signals.

Note that you can capture premium TV content from satellite and cable services, but it requires cumbersome add-ons, like the Hauppauge HD DVR. But that requires stringing IR blasters and working with third party guide applications, which aren't always reliable. So while you can use an HTPC as a DVR, it's not terribly efficient, unless you're one of the lucky few with a CableCard enabled HTPC.

In my mind these days, though, capturing video from traditional sources has become secondary. Instead, the HTPC now has two purposes. The first, serving as a repository for your personal digital media, is still relevant. The second is to serve as a single source for capturing or viewing Web-based video from a variety of sources. We haven't completely given up on the idea of an HTPC as DVR—we do include an ATSC tuner—but that's no longer its primary purpose.

This time around, I've also avoided trying to build a PC that's all things to all people. In other words, it's not really a rig for serious gaming. Certainly you can add a beefy graphics card if you want to game on the big screen, but again, the focus is on media content.

Finally, we also dropped in a combo Blu-ray / HD DVD drive. Sure, HD DVD is dead—which is why you can find fabulous deals on HD DVD content—under $5 a disc for major movies—at some locations. And, of course, it plays DVDs and Blu-ray movies just fine.

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With these thoughts in mind, let's look at our home theater PC. We'll first look at the individual components, then at the system software. We'll peek at the final assembly and then see how it all hangs together. Continued…