Posted: 1/25/2009 12:00:17 PM EDT
|
I picked up a cheap Haupauge tuner card for my second PC, to replace the crappy TV in my computer room, and I'm pretty impressed. The bundled software does a good job of recording shows, setup was simple, and the quality is good.
So is anyone running a home theater PC on their 'primary' home theater system? I'd like to expand on what I've done in my computer room, and get a PC to replace my cable-company DVR, but there are some issues I'm still looking into: Digital cable channels. Will probably need a tuner card with a cable card? HDTV. Same as above; looks like I'd need a cable card to get non-ClearQOS HDTV? Audio output to my Onkyo receiver. I haven't looked into this, but I am guessing that sound cards exist that have a fiber output? That would make it easy to route into my receiver. (For video, I'd just do DVI-HDMI; plenty of inputs left on the TV.) So for those of you with home theater PCs, what has your experience been? I'm planning on running something on top of XP, but how about MythOS or one of the similar Linux packages? |
|
I have a MythTV box set up as my HTPC..some of what I'm doing won't directly apply to you, though a bunch will...
I canceled my pay-cable tv subscription; now I recieve the mandated unscrambled local channels/major networks only (it's some law that states the cable company has to leave the major networks unscrambled in their native resolutions; so I still get NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, etc in HD format without a cable box). I am not doing scrambled cable channels; that's beyond my scope. My setup is thus: Suitably beefy PC (I got a dual quadcore from Dell on one of their $520 specials a year or so ago) Plenty of memory (3-4gb) Decent video card (you don't need an uber high-res card; mine is like an Nvidia 8200 series, I think? 128mb ram, DVI -> HDMI into the TV...don't go TOO cheap, but you don't need some dual crossfire SLI thingie) Audio card that does S/PDIF out (cheap $20 card from Best Buy; Dynex, with optical out) Disk (plenty of it :) ) Fedora 8 or 9 or whatever on it (didn't care; I deal with enough pedantic shit at work that I just threw stuff on it until it worked) MythTV via rpm packages (it really is a lot easier than gathering and compiling everything from scratch) Network connection (I cancled cable TV but kept cable data, so I still have internet) Tuner of some kind (I have an HDHomeRun appliance, which I highly recommend...very portable, accessable by anywhere with an ether drop, two tuners so you can watch and record at the same time, and it's stupidly easy to use) My optical S/PDIF out plugs directly into my old Sony AC3/DTS reciever. MythTV is set to pass the signal straight through for audio, letting the reciever do the work. This cuts cpu usage on the box (why process audio when you don't need to). Downside is that my reciever is so old, it only has one digital input, and it's either optical OR coaxical...but not both. Which means I need to unplug the optical if I want to hear something using the coaxical input (as the computer soundcard is always on, even if it's not playing anything...) The card pretty much needs to be an Nvidia. Check the MythTV wiki if you go that route, check the card matrix. MythTV has it's own X modules, and without some of the nvidia-specific things it does, it's difficult to get perfect video without spending an absolute fortune and having to rely on software trickery. The main thing I have left to do before it's perfect-ish is set up the remote control facilities; configue the linux process that handles IR incoming signals and translates them to keyfunctions, so I can use a TV remote instead of a wireless keyboard to control it. But, it works just fine with a keyboard. As a movie box, and as a DVR, so far it's pretty great. Mind you I didn't have a TiVo or anything, so I have no prior DVR experience. You can either play your dvds on it, or rip them to disk and store them that way (possibly illegal, and sometimes the rips fail, which is annoying). It catalogues them for you, lets you look them up in IMDB and stores movie posters and movie information in it's directory. So, you can just virtually thumb through everything, sort it by genre, whatever. It's really nice. TV is pretty easy; it has an OSD just like any cable box these days. The annoying thing is you need to buy a subscription from Schedules Direct for the tv schedule information, or you can manually hack around it, using some other XMLTV source. On the plus, it's cheap, and it's non-intrusive to use. It updates in the background, so once it's running, it's forever updating. This only really applies if you're like me, and ditched pay/scrambled TV entirely; no cable box or card, no nothing. For unencrypted channels: Configuring it all can take a bit; scanning for and adding channels isn't the most intuitive of things. The pain in the butt is that how schedules direct/tv guide/etc have the channels listed, is NOT how the cable company feeds them to you. What you recieve on channel 113, for instance, might actually be channel 5 according to your cable company. This means you probably will need to manually map channels to XMLTV channel ids, network names, etc. This is generally a one-time-only thing though; once it's up and configured, it works. (Unless your cable company decides to randomly remap shit one day, like they did with me...but I digress) MythTV also has built-in facilities for pretty much everything; you could, if you set it up, turn it into a one-stop all-in-one device. It'll update and display local weather, it'll load and play console emulator games like SNES, you can use it as an internet telephone device, you can browse the web, you can check email...anything. I don't know how much better/worse a windows-based one would be. The single biggest PITA was figuring out which channels were which, comparing the scanned/found channels to the TV Guide/Schedules Direct listings. (and then figuring out that you need to specify the XMLTV ID of the channel, which is also non-intuitive, and took forever to find on the schedules direct web site). I don't know how that'd be different on a windows box, but if there's a better way of doing it, try it out. Note that the channels thing is ONLY if you're doing like I did, and cancel pay TV, and ride on only the unencrypted channels. For a while I DID have it connected to my cable box, via USB; it would tune the cable box and record from the USB port. The problem with that was the shitty cable box quality (it always screwed with the picture, not to mention mangled the sound...and, I discovered on my particular box, it slowed down/made the video very very choppy, even on the tv, if any USB device was plugged in), and the fact that my cable box's USB implementation was buggy at best...it'd randomly stop sending video out, or it'd freeze hard requiring a cable box reboot. It was just too unreliable. I know there's some cablecard implementations out there, but everything I read about cablecards was that they were even more unreliable, and more prone to breakage. I never tried or explored that route further. One thing I was finally able to work out, was how to watch online hi-def recorded content. Apparently MythTV likes to assume .mkv files require some kind of audio pre-processing, and consequently I get a great picture but no sound. Once I renamed the file to .vob format (no other change, just a rename)...it played with perfect picture and sound. It's a very nice thing to see. Especially when the DTS light comes on, and 5.1 channels of perfect audio goodness flows forth  That alone made it worth my time. Finally, I can watch Top Gear as it was meant to be seen 
|
|
Awesome writeup! Thanks.
I'm going to keep messing around with my setup to see what works and what doesn't, but it looks like my goal of replacing my HDTV DVR from the cable company might have to be put on hold; they charge me something like $12/mo for that, and I don't know that I'll be able to do things much better for much (if any) less, but we'll see. Maybe I'll drop the HDTV requirement.... Out of curiosity, where are you pulling Top Gear from? BBCA is a digital cable channel around here. |
|
I download it from the net Copy the video file over to the HTPC, and play it as I would a movie or something.
Yeah, if you want/need to get the "premium" (that is, non-major-broadcast-network content such as FoodTV, Discovery, etc)...then you're pretty much SOL unless you want to try the cablecard route. Otherwise you need to pay for a DVR from your cablecompany...but, there's no real non-cablebox way to get them, either way. Unless you spring for satellite
Since the cable companies are required to give you the major broadcast networks in their native format unencrypted though, for me, it's a non-issue. I get NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC, CW, and like 4 different flavors of PBS, all in HD and in surround sound, free, unencrypted. If you bypass your cable box and plug your cable directly into your TV/reciever, you should get the same... |