The Birth Of The HTPC

Last night I began what-is-sure-to-be-known-as "The February Project", since it's bound to take me the entire month of 02/2005 to get this where it needs to be. I'm building an HTPC, or Home Theater PC to the dirt-dwellers. Basically, just a PC that'll sit near my TV and will wirelessly connect to my home network for playing MP3s, movies (Divx), web surfing, photos, MAME plug-ins, and can timeshift live TV (yeah, just like Tivo).

Since I'm short on cash and time, I have decided the following:
- Keep it under $300 (not including "after rebate" cash -- because you'll get that back)
- Will be built over the course of several weeks
- Parts will be bought a little at a time, as required
- Use as many "spare" parts from the shed as possible
- Freeware / Open Source (if possible)

Additional Requirements:
- Can't look like ass (fit in with the rest of the home-theater-type stuff)
- Has to pass the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor)

In order to keep the budget down, I have gotten permission from my lovely wife to plunder the PC she is currently using for the bones of the system. It's a sad little 1Ghz processor with 512MB RAM bought from Enron before they left Portland. She is getting a fancy new laptop to replace her system.

I hear some of you saying, "Can't you just go out and spend like, $250 on a brand new piece of hardware that'll do most of that stuff out-of-the-box?" Yeah, I COULD. It's my project, so shut up.

Well, my journey began last night when I unpacked a few goodies from Comp USA, including a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 card and a Netgear Wireless 802.11g USB Adapter. I hauled the PC to a place near the cable connection and began stabbing it with a screwdriver. Fairly easy so far. I installed both the PVR card and an Nvidia 64MB GeForce 440MX AGP graphics card with S-Video out that I had lying around collecting dust since I replaced it over a year ago with my Nvidia 128MB GeForce FX 5700 Ultra card.

Next, I installed the drivers for the wireless USB device. In under 3 minutes I was up and running wirelessly, connected to my home network. Thanks, Netgear. Next came the installation of the software and drivers for the graphics cards. Some of the software required I install the newest DirectX drivers, the latest Java Runtime Environment, and update several other drivers on the system.

After I became software driver update lackey boy for nearly an hour (had to reboot after nearly every update), then I got to try out some of the functionality. I plan on spending some time testing various software apps out on the system to find the one that fits my budget and needs the best. I started with the built-in WinTV2000 software that came with the PVR card. As I figured, it sucked big time. The interface looked like it was created 5 years ago -- hmmm... the year 2000... WinTV2000.... coincidence? No..

I decided the first real test of software would be SageTV. They have a 15 day trial version available, so I gave it a shot. So far, I have installed it and configured it, but I haven't played with SageTV for more than 20 minutes. So far it looks great, but I will save a full review until after a few more hours of fiddling. Mmmmm... fiddle.

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."
- Mitch Radcliffe