Home Theatre

Unfortunately, everything that I found didn't do what I wanted.. For shame. And when it did, certain outputs weren't active for playback! Like I couldn't play a DVD through a DB15 (rgb) connection. Or have a HDTV tuner and a region-free DVD player. Or upscale anything I throw at it and put it out to a decent resolution without crappy upscaling algorithms. I've been using a Viewsonic N6 in the meantime to watch my DVDs on the big screen, but it sucks. The device does a terrible job of upscaling progressive scan DVDs. The output is very blurry. I wasn't even going to buy an HDTV tuner and put it through the N6, since I don't trust the output of that thing one bit.

So I have started another project. After selling most of the leftovers from the other projects I had finished on eBay, I had enough money set aside to create this HTPC. Most of the parts are in the mail, so I'll take a picture of the completed box. You don't need very much technical skill to create one, as long as you're competent enough to build your own PC, this should be a breeze. Hopefully it will for me, but I have yet to get all the parts! I'm building it on the cheap, so most of the internals are used, save for the HDTV tuner and media case.

The specifics for the internals are still being decided, but it will have the capability to do the following, in addition to everything a regular PC can do.

Watch and record HDTV
Watch and record NTSC TV
Play DVDs (and decode virtually any surround encoding)
Play music (mp3s, CDs, etc)

And best of all, it will still connect to my projection system (and any future system), and is silent! The only fan that will be active will be the retail Intel CPU fan. The only moving components will be the DVD drive and the HD. I'll write an entry once all the pieces are in and I successfully put it together!