
Revisiting the Home Theater PC - omh
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/03/revisiting-the-home-theater-pc.html
======
iuguy
Having been around the block many times on the HTPC front since 2000 from
Mplayer through XBMC, Freevo, MythTV and countless others.

Of the non-live TV playing type, XBMC on the original Xbox was the best I'd
ever used. It just worked, and some of the scripts were amazing. Sadly, 1080p
HD wasn't quite doable on the little feller, so it was binned.

My best live experience was without a doubt with MythTV. But despite it being
awesome, the loose coupling of the code to the OS to the hardware meant that
I'd routinely get crashes and problems, and an inevitable degradation of the
platform which just wasn't wife friendly.

I thought the original Apple TV was quite good, but it didn't handle flash or
720p mkv's well and was too underpowered for Boxee.

Boxee was great until the 1.0 release.

Currently I'm using a Mac Mini with EyeTV. No 10,000 foot view (as I don't use
front row), just a dock with what I need on it. It's great. For non-live TV I
have VLC, for live TV Eye-TV and anything I want for everything else.
Stellarium and Google Earth are both incredible on a TV screen, I even do the
occasional bit of photo processing in Aperture.

~~~
cdr
I haven't paid much attention to Boxee - what's your complaint with the
current model?

~~~
iuguy
1.0 brought around some significant UI changes that I didn't really like at
the time. Having said that, the thing that stopped me from using Boxee was
that it was quicker to use VLC or Eye-TV to access my media. In the end, my
workflow removed the need for it.

I'm not saying Boxee isn't great (it's pretty good) but it's no longer for me.

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ZoFreX
> "This is just the basic level of hardware to get a functional home theater
> PC"

Really? I use an Atom CPU, half the RAM, and offload decoding to the GPU for
an average draw at the wall of ~15W while decoding 1080p, and a pre-built
device with all that in costs less than his parts.

Slap Ubuntu on, add the NVidia and XBMC PPAs, install VDPAU and XBMC and you
are good to go!

~~~
aphexairlines
What happens if rtorrent is running in the background with a few dozen
torrents and you try to decode 1080p?

~~~
vetinari
Nothing.

rtorrent is starving your network bandwidth and disk i/o; video is decoded by
gpu. The atom cpu is enough to handle both at once. If you get choppy
playback, it will be due disk i/o.

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citizenkeys
HTPC is still the way to go. The problem with simple all-in-one solutions like
Apple TV, Google TV, and others is there's too many codecs for video and
audio. The only way to guarantee support for all of them is using an HTPC with
either VLC or upgrading the codecs in the operating system.

Media Portal is much better than Windows Media Center. Media Portal is also
better than XBMC if you need TV tuner support. <http://www.team-
mediaportal.com/>

~~~
yardie
Apple TV is designed around playing content downloaded from iTMS. Google
TV....they'll figure out something eventually. Neither one is really made for
live TV.

* I've settled on the AppleTV because it's $99, so not much of a loss if it doesn't work out.

* Most of my videos are already in an MP4 compatible format already DVD->Handbrake->Apple Universal preset.

* It's dead quiet, no moving parts, no fans, and 6W of power.

My problem with the HTPC is it was a full Windows stack so it included all the
headaches of antivirus, updates, configuration, and UAC prompts required a
keyboard be nearby.

I can certainly see why some people have the inclination to go with a HTPC but
I don't have the time nor the space to keep PC in the living room. And now,
XBMC has been ported to the AppleTV so you get most of the functionality of
the Windows application on an inexpensive device.

~~~
citizenkeys
Found this demo video of XBMC On Apple TV:
[http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/20/xbmc-comes-to-the-new-
app...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/20/xbmc-comes-to-the-new-apple-tv/)

Apple TV with XBMC for $99 is damn difficult to beat. I might need to visit
the Apple Store soon.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
The reason the original post gave for getting rid of his old machine was that
it couldn't handle 1080p content. The AppleTV can't do more than 720p (with
XBMC it can decode at least some 1080p, but downscales it to 720p for output
to your TV).

~~~
yardie
I'm less concerned about the resolution where absolute bandwidth is your
limiting factor. ATV has an absolute bandwidth of 6MBps. OTA has an absolute
bandwidth of 18MBps in the US. Even if it could use 1080p, outside of still
images, its going to look like crap during complex scenes. Its the balance
between bandwidth and quality. If I want high-quality (like Avatar or any
Pixar movie) I'll get it on bluray, for everything else ATV DVD-quality is
fine.

But as I said before, some people will have the need for a HTPC. I have a
moderately small apartment and don't watch that much TV. I realized, a while
ago, that keeping a dedicated PC, recording shows I'll probably never watch,
running 24 hours a day was futile. If there is something interesting I can
watch it live, download it through iTunes, or pull the occasional torrent.

------
thirdsun
XBMC, which is my HTPC frontend of choice since early XBOX 1 days, recently
released a Apple TV 2 Version, which still has a few flaws but is very
actively developed and improved. This is not XBMC Lite, it is the full package
you know from the desktop. Add a NAS for movies, music and TV Shows and you
have a very good solution. It's impressive that the underpowered Apple TV is
able to play 1080p content flawlessly, however while being able to play 1080p
the Apple TV scales everything down to 720p - this seems to be a hardware
design decision which can't be changed, the XBMC team is looking into it.
Given that I use a 720p beamer it isn't a problem for me though. Apart from
that you get a full featured HTPC software which has been around for years on
a power efficient instant-on box that costs you a hundred bucks.

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ZeroGravitas
I second the comment on there suggesting a 2 year old Acer Revo + Ubuntu +
Boxee/XBMC does all this and more with little fuss.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Same here. My Acer Revo hangs off the back off my monitor in the Vesa mount
with Ubuntu+Boxee. I don't see it, and I don't hear it. It's my only
permanently on machine at home, and because it's a full Linux box, I also use
it for performing nightly rsyncs of my off-site server. It also runs Vuze for
downloading video.

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pragmatic
The HTPC is the caviar solution. I messed around with "dedicated units" such
as an ASUS O!play (highly recommended if you just need to stream media in your
network). Also tried streaming media with the Blu-ray drive that came free
with my TV. Even tried the pre-built Dell Zino HD with it's tiny atom like
intel processor.

In the end, an HTPC is what _I_ needed (wanted). I can stream from netflix,
play a blu-ray, watch youtube without a wonky interface (like the blu-ray
players/tv have), stream media from my WHS (Windows Home Server), etc. It
plays everything I throw at it.

Is it perfect? No way. Too complicated for my wife/family/mere mortals to run
and it has the downsides of a full Winders stack (constant updates, etc).

But, at this point I don't see a true alternative. Codecs are king. I can
download (almost) any software/codec combo and play the media.

I run and i3 and find it to be a perfect combination of speed/power
consumption for an almost silent media pc.

Btw, the little Dell handles everything fine. The major complaint is that the
tiny fan spins up when watching blu-ray/high-def/flash content. That's one of
the major downsides to a prebuilt PC. Usually one area sucks. I love the tiny
Dell form factor but the whine of the fan is a negative.

~~~
pragmatic
With proper sleep/hibernate, the power useage issue would be (mostly) moot.
However, just when I get my sleep/hybrid sleep/hibernate working correctly,
MSFT patches Windows and I'm suddenly back to square one.

I'd love to see a version of Windows where sleep "just works". From my
research though, this appears to be as much a hardware + driver issue as an OS
issue. Apparently that's why Mac's sleep so well. Hardware/OS all under one
company's control.

~~~
barrkel
That's interesting - the only machine I've had which couldn't sleep under
Windows is my Mac Air, whose drivers are supplied by Apple. The Mac Air
Windows drivers also don't provide a way of turning off the wifi on flights,
amongst other things.

------
IgorPartola
I used to have this affliction as well. At one point I had a dual processor
(not dual core) giant tower with turbo-jet-sounding fans running MythTV. I had
a ton of other solutions since, but eventually just settled on Roku. Netflix
and Hulu is plenty for most purposes and I no longer have to spend the time to
transcode video.

For my legacy stuff, I just an NSLU2 (SlugOS) + ushare + XBox 360. Everything
just works.

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fuzor
I went from a HTPC to a WDTV and was pretty happy for awhile but decided to go
back and build a HTPC/NAS box that runs 24/7.

XBMC, Sabnzbd, Sickbeard, Torrents, Hulu, Transcoding/Stream with AirVideo, on
Iphone/IPad.

If your sole purpose is watching video, I think for most people a all in one
device that's $70-150 is better suited.

~~~
eapen
Seeing a comment on Jeff's blog, I was jut looking up the WDTV (
[http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Network-ready-Media-
Pl...](http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Network-ready-Media-
Player/dp/B002KKFP9Y) ) and tempted to try it out. I currently have XBMC on a
classic Xbox and was wondering how this compares to XBMC (video formats,
updates).

~~~
Gormo
I've bought three of Viewsonic's VMP75s ([http://www.amazon.com/Viewsonic-
NexTV-VMP75-Network-Player/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Viewsonic-NexTV-
VMP75-Network-Player/dp/B003JQLI9O)) and couldn't be happier. There are a few
complaints in the reviews, especially regarding the UI, but most of these have
been fixed by the latest firmware. The support for various container formats
and codecs is excellent; the one feature it lacks that the WDTV supports is
Pandora.

~~~
eapen
Interesting, thanks! This box looks so much slicker than the WDTV too. Since I
watch quite a few foreign movies, one of the useful features with XBMC is the
ability to adjust the subtitle display (add delay or speed it up by a couple
of seconds) and also the ability to browse and pick a subtitle. I am curious
if either WD or VMP has any additional options with subtitles. It is not a
game-stopper by any means but I am still trying to decide whether to go with
an XBMC capable box or these options which are also much cheaper.

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ck2
Except a kill-a-watt cannot give accurate readings off a powersupply with PFC
(also kill-a-watt are calibrated poorly, no 2 units will give quite the same
measurement).

I am sure it's very low, my dual-core i3 is significantly more efficient than
my old AMD X2 but the 22watts might not be exactly right.

~~~
yardie
They do have a floor below which the sensors can't get a good reading. I read
that below 100W it's +/-10W. So Jeffs actual wattage could be 32 or 12W
really.

