Anyone here running a HTPC?

Just wanted to see who uses a Home Theater PC.

I am currently using a Gigabyte H55N-USB3 Mini-ITX with an i3, OCZ Vertex SSD, 4GB Ram, ATSC/QAM TV Tuner for local HD, and BD burner running Windows 7 connected to my 61" HDTV and 7.1 Onkyo 805 with Paradigm speakers and 2 15" subs in 24 cubes. Oh, a bunch of HDD's also for Blu-Ray backup's.

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Forsaken_GA

I was thinking about building one for awhile, but opted to go with an Xbox 360 instead. using twonky media server from one of my linux boxes to stream my video archive to it, along with netflix, ended up covering my needs perfectly. And I could play Street Fighter 4!

gunbunnysoulja

Never heard of Twonky before but it seems interesting. I'm gonna have to check into it! 360 is on my christmas list as it's an awesome Media Extender and gaming machine.

Ahh Street Fighter. I remember back when I was a game collector owning Fighting Street for the Turbo Grafx 16 CD. It was a terrible game, but a great conversation piece.

Thxlbx

How many hard drives do you have? I work with a guy who built a HTPC, he uses a hot swappable rack and switches out his drives as needed...but he has a lot of content too. Was thinking about maybe building something similiar if I get a good tax refund next year.

gunbunnysoulja

Thxlbx wrote: »

How many hard drives do you have? I work with a guy who built a HTPC, he uses a hot swappable rack and switches out his drives as needed...but he has a lot of content too. Was thinking about maybe building something similiar if I get a good tax refund next year.

I have 3x 2TB and 3x 1TB external drives. Most of my backed up library is DVD's which don't take up too much space, but my BD's take up a ton so I have only been backing up the blockbuster type movies that I frequently watch because I'm too lazy to put the disc in

My next step will likely be a DAS 8 bay sata enclosure with RAID using 3TB drives.

Forsaken_GA

gunbunnysoulja wrote: »

Never heard of Twonky before but it seems interesting. I'm gonna have to check into it! 360 is on my christmas list as it's an awesome Media Extender and gaming machine.

Ahh Street Fighter. I remember back when I was a game collector owning Fighting Street for the Turbo Grafx 16 CD. It was a terrible game, but a great conversation piece.

Yeah, I was surprised at how well Twonky worked. The Xbox does pretty much what I need it to do, my only real limitation is no 1080p, but since my TV won't do that anyway, I'm not missing much! Eventually I'll get around to building myself a kickass home theatre with a nice HTPC, but before I go spending money on that kind of stuff, I'd like to buy a house to put it all in hehe

gunbunnysoulja

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Yeah, I was surprised at how well Twonky worked. The Xbox does pretty much what I need it to do, my only real limitation is no 1080p, but since my TV won't do that anyway, I'm not missing much! Eventually I'll get around to building myself a kickass home theatre with a nice HTPC, but before I go spending money on that kind of stuff, I'd like to buy a house to put it all in hehe

Oh I definitely understand getting the house! That's next on the list, hopefully next year. Now that the fiance is in charge of the finances, it will probably finally happen.

MentholMoose

I've been into HTPCs for about 8 years now, for various reasons. I got started with capturing TV shows in HD, and working on optimizing the mix of filters/codecs for the perfect DVD upscaling. For a while I was actually using a hardware DVD decoder (remember those?!

) connected digitally to a modded capture card and upscaled in DScaler.

I lost interest in capturing (and maintaining/storing it on a file server) HD shows a while ago and deleted it all. I regret deleting some of the really old stuff such as The Practice in it's 720p glory (AFAIK still no Blu-ray release of that series

), but oh well. Nowadays I mostly watch Blu-ray on the HTPC instead of DVDs, and play PC and emulated console games on it.

My HTPC is quite homely, no gorgeous Silverstone case or anything, just an old Chenbro mid-tower next to an Ikea TV stand. It's due for an upgrade, I want an SSD in it, and Windows 7 instead of XP.