A PC in your entertainment center

TiVo and its brethren get credit for introducing the average consumer to the concept of the digital video recorder (DVR) and opening the door to bigger and better things. The Home Theater PC (HTPC) is the computer enthusiast's take on all the things a DVR generally does, with the potential to do everything a full-fledged computer does. The concept had a bit of a slow start until Microsoft's release of Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005, which gave the very familiar Windows a living room interface and the hardware support that HTPCs needed.

No matter what operating system you use for your HTPC, the same general concepts exist: recording and time-shifting TV is the most basic role. Playback and recording of DVD and Blu-ray is probably secondary, followed by distribution of audio content and, in more ambitious setups, serving as the whole home network's media storage center. And don't forget the ability to do mundane things such as browsing the web from ten feet away on a shiny new 1080p HDTV.

It's been three years since the HTPC has gone mainstream. Today, the HTPC front-end is fairly well established, with a slick interface and a compact, living room-friendly form factor, and it's reliable enough that you rarely notice it's there.

Going beyond the DVR

The HTPC, fundamentally, is a geek endeavor. An off-the-shelf DVR is almost certainly going to be cheaper, take less power, and be easier to setup than an HTPC. Using an Xbox 360, PS3, AppleTV, or something else as a Media Center Extender to get content to your TV is also going to be cheaper (and probably easier). As Mythtv.org points out, lots of solutions exist, almost all of them cheaper than building your own HTPC.

When it come to an off-the-shelf DVR, the most valuable thing for many will be the fact that you can call technical support when it breaks; or, more appropriately, when your family's DVR breaks and they live 300 miles away, they can call tech support so you can continue watching Battlestar Galactica uninterrupted.

Setting aside the geek appeal of the HTPC and other potential issues like cost and power consumption, the HTPC's additional capabilities are the biggest reason to build one rather than going with a prebuilt DVR. Sheer space is an easy argument to identify: there's nothing but your budget stopping you from building a HTPC with 4TB of storage. You won't find multiple terabytes of space in the average DVR, nor will you find the upgradablity.

Have a standard definition DVR already and want to go high-definition (HD)? Sure, it would be cheaper to buy an HD-capable DVR, but what if you want Blu-ray, too? A Sony PlayStation 3 might be able to do the Blu-ray part, but with only 80GB max, it's severely lacking in space. Hence, for those with needs desires beyond the average DVR user, the HTPC starts to make sense.

You can do it all in one box in your HTPC. If you need HD, design it for that. Processors are cheap and powerful today, a sub-$200 Core 2 Duo from Intel or Athlon X2 from AMD can handle 1080p content; if you're doing SD or 720p HD, requirements are even lower (and cheaper!). Storage space is cheap. Gaming? We don't generally discuss gaming on the HTPC, but it can be done too.

We haven't forgotten that the PS3 and Xbox 360 are superb consoles for gaming. They just don't do everything a capable HTPC can do—but then they weren't intended to. A key appeal of the PS3 or Xbox 360 is that you may already have one in your living room, ready to go, complete with Blu-ray if it's a PS3... and that may make a lot more sense than another couple hundred dollars on an HTPC.

Three approaches to the HTPC



Compared to past HTPC guides on Ars, this one is more simple in some ways, and more complex in others.

It's simplified compared to the previous HTPC guide in that hardware has gotten cheaper and powerful enough to handle HD without blowing too many budgets, so we won't be worried about a low-end and a high-end setup. Instead, we'll focus on 1080p HD content as our baseline to help differentiate the guide from cheaper, less-capable setups. To remind people, building a HTPC generally is not an inexpensive endeavor: we deliberately choose to go for a fairly powerful setup to emphasize the differences that might otherwise be blurred with an off-the-shelf HD DVR. A mid-range Athlon X2 and just about any off-the-shelf hard drive can handle a few HD streams in Linux without breaking a sweat, which is a significant improvement from where things were just three years ago.

Many people now have a Home Media Server (aka, the back-end) sitting in a study or closet somewhere with far more storage than most would want to stick in a little box in their A/V stack, and instead put out a very lightweight front-end HTPC. There's no longer a single box sitting next to the TV in the most ambitious HTPC setups, and this means quite a few more areas of expansion that we can address.

This gives us three systems in the HTPC System Guide:

All-in-one HTPC: this is what most people traditionally think of as the classic HTPC: a single box that you can set next to your TV, plug it in to your TV, your network (wired or wireless), and your antenna, cable, or both, power it up, set it up, and then let it do its thing. This normally has at least two tuners in it, so you can watch and time-shift content at the same time as you record something else in the background. It's got enough space for most of your TV, and probably your pictures, music, DVD ripping, and whatever else you need to do.

The other two come in the form of a one-two punch: