The Next Window

Simply, it’s standard PC, including an AMD Athlon XP 2500+, an Abit AN-7 motherboard, a cheap video card with S-Video Out, hard drives, DVD drive and three Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 TV encoding cards and one PVR-150..

My HTPC case case is a standard Antec tower case. This is not designed for the HTPC service.

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For extra air flow (I have 4 TV tuner cards plus a heat-sinked video card), I added an Antec Cyclone slot fan, but that’s a pretty noisy solution — not motor or bearing noise, but the noise of moving the air. Also, the Antec Cyclone fan only lasted about 4 months before the bearing went out. Not satisfactory. I replaced it with a brand-X similar slot fan which has performed quietly and well. Imagine that…

The motherboard decision was made in concert with the processor decision. I’m a fan of the AMD Athlon XP processor because of its price compared to comparable Intel processors. The processor decision alone saved me a couple hundred dollars. I’ve used Abit motherboards for both AMD and Intel processors. Abit has a history of releasing new BIOS flashes for their motherboards, so I would be able to do some upgrading later.

Read more in Home Theater PC, part 2

After running multiple video cassette recorders for years, drooling over the TiVo® advertisements, and hearing the praise heaped on TiVo by relatives, I decided to build my own version — a Home Theater PC (HTPC). Why, you might ask?

Well, it goes like this: The Fun of building an HTPC. The Challenge. Flexibility. Storage space. No monthly service fee. Video streaming across my network. Higher (and lower) video quality options. My hard drives. System maintenance. Easy software upgrades. Let’s just say, I build my own PCs and it fit my needs.

So, I started reading. First, the biggest question was “what type of HTPC software do I need?” After that, came the issues of the HTPC case and the other HTPC hardware, such as the TV-encoding cards. The TV card comes third because, while there are few manufacturers of TV cards suitable for Home Theater PC’s and personal video recorders, the selection of software may (and does) narrow the choices dramatically.

The two big alternatives were Sage Technologies’ SageTV® and Snapstream’s BeyondTV®. Snapstream’s product was the older of the two and had gone through several generations (they recently released version 3.5). SageTV was a relative newcomer with some significant unique capabilities. Both had large followings, but I liked the SageTV forums and the support and camaraderie exhibited there. Both products had free, time-limited trial versions available.

For my Home Theater PC, I chose SageTV for my HTPC softare because SageTV would support multiple video capture cards. That was the deciding factor for me. (Beyond TV v3.5 added this ability for cards with hardware-encoders). Although I would start with only one card, I expected to expand my system. My HTPC now has three!