Lisa and I recently decided to remove some additional expenses from our life such as cable tv (we use the Dish Network); between the various receivers, the HD package, and the DVR capabilities it has been costing us close to $90/month. However, we still like to watch a little TV and we like having family movie nights. Furthermore, we have fallen in love with the capabilities of a DVR. Pausing, rewinding, and recording TV shows is just awesome. It makes the entire TV viewing experience infinitely more enjoyable. Therefore, once we decided to cut back our monthly expenses we decided to investigate how we could still meet our small list of aforementioned tv entertainment requirements. The answer we settled on was a Home Theater PC - or an HTPC.
At it's simplest an HTPC is a computer with a tv capture card and, optionally, a dvd player built into it. Ideally you also need it to have an HDMI video/audio output so you can connect it to your modern TV and it should have some good software installed on it for managing your media and providing DVR capabilities.
In order for us to have an HTPC I actually had to buy a new computer. I haven't bought myself a computer since I was in University, so maybe 1999. I decided to build one from the ground up with the best parts I could afford. Here is my parts list:
- Gigabyte Motherboard : GA-880GMA-UD2H R - this thing is pretty awesome. It has a nice video card built in that can do HD decoding and it has a nice audio card that provides dolby digital surround sound.
- HAUPPAUGE TV Tuner : 1229 HVR-2250 - Has a dual tuner capability that hooks right up to our over the air HD antennae (we already owned) which lets us watch a show while recording something else.
- LG DVD Burner : GH23NS50 - It's cheap, only $20, and it works. Plus it has a black face so it fits into the overall aesthetic.
- Seasonic Power Supply : S12II 530 Bronze RT - Super quiet and has all the cables I could ask for. I can't stress how important super quiet is - don't skimp on your power supply
- AMD Athalon II CPU : ATH II x2 230E 2.8G AM3 RT - A nice dual core cpu that supports 64 bit operating systems. However, the best part of this bad boy is the paltry 45W power consumption. Since this computer will be on all the time it needs to be a miser with energy and this CPU fits the bill.
- 4 Gigs of RAM : Kingston ValueRAM 2x 2 GB (2x1GB) DDR 3 SDRAM - I bought 2 of this package to fill all of my memory slots. I could have gone for more RAM but considering this computer will have a sole task of managing our media I think 4G will be enough. I had actually seen some people recommend only 2 GB but I am a big believer in more RAM is better.
- Western Digital Green HardDrive - 1 TB WD10EARS 64M - The Western Digital Green harddrives are lower power consumption, super quiet drives made specifically for this purpose. This was a no brainer.
- LianLi Case : PC-V351B RT - I picked a case I thought would look good in the "home theater" decor. It is fairly cubicle in shape so it looks a bit like a subwoofer. I could have gotten something shorter and wider, like a stereo receiver shape, but I liked the space in this one while working in it - plus it still looks nice. This case is all aluminum which, supposedly, will help keep the whole system cooler as well. Plus it has some nice, but silent, fans inside the front to help keep everything cool as well.
The final price on this was $625 and I have, what I believe, will be a kick ass machine for our purposes. I realize, $625 is a bunch of money but, in the course of a year we pay close to $1080 for the dish network (90x12). Thus this outlay will save us, in the first year, about $400.
My initial plan was to use Linux and MythTV in conjunction with Boxee to provide us with DVR capabilities (Myth) and access to Hulu and Netflix (Boxee). However, the video drivers for my graphics card on Linux aren't very good (pretty typical experience for me) and I couldn't get the HD decoding to work (tough I was able to watch some standard definition TV and pause/record it). However, since I was not happy with the overall quality I decided to go to Windows 7 professional, 64 bit (another $150) which has a pretty feature rich media center built in. After using it for just one evening,without internet access yet, I'm pretty happy with my choice. It picked up all, but one, of our local channels and is pushing them out to our TV in full High Definition. Once I get the internet setup on it I'll try out Boxee and Hulu Desktop to see what I want to settle on for internet TV. Plus, we will be resubscribing to Netflix for $10 month ($120 year) which we can use to stream movies and we can get DVDs of various past seasons of TV shows and other movies. We'll also be able to stream netflix to our other TV via the Wii which is a nice bonus.
After the Windows 7 purchase and Netflix our savings in the first year will be reduced to about $150. However, each following year will result in a net savings of closer to $950 and we will still have all of the TV entertainment we like; plus we will have the flexibility to amend to the feature set as we go. Overall I'm pretty happy with the decision.
Before going this route we had to make a couple other changes that aren't directly related to our TV. First, and foremost, we had to change internet service providers. When Verizon left WV and gave over control to Frontier our quality of service dipped substantially. We ended up only realizing about a 200Kb/s data rate instead of the 3M/b (3,000Kb)/s rate we were paying for. So we switched to Comcast and a cable modem with a contracted rate of 11 Mb/s - we have been seeing that and better since we had it installed. I also bought a cable modem (Motorola SB6120) for $83 instead of renting one from comcast for $5/month. That will end up in realized savings in just over a year. Finally, I also opted to buy a new, and much better, wireless router (Buffalo WZR-HP-G300NH) since many parts of our house have had deadspots with the old router. The new router also supported being modified with the highly acclaimed open source router firmware DD-WRT. After installing this new router not only did we no longer have any deadspots but I can, if I choose, walk across the street to the park and stay online. While we won't realize any savings with the new router we will definitely avoid a lot of our past frustration so it was worth the $70.