Home Theater PC

[highbarger]

I'm thinking about building a new computer to use as an all in one work station/home entertainment unit. The thought is that instead of buying an HDTV, I could get a 24" monitor and put an HD tuner card in the new pc. Do any of you use this kind of setup, have any thoughts on what you would have done different, or just general advice on minimum hardware requirements to build this kind of machine?

Craig

[mort]

I tried this using a 3ghz dell box with 2gb of ram and Win XP media centre. Worked okay but the playback on recorded programs was not consistant. This may have been partly due to the HD speeds. I installed a fresh copy of vista primium and it worked a lot better. Plus the vista media centre interface reponse is more to my liking. I have not however installed anything else on this computer as it is a dedicated media centre.

i have tried some of the open source TV apps on a Ubuntu computer but found them to be not as good as the MS media centre.

[Douglas]

What type of cable were you using? Just curious if it was an HDMI cable.

IVe considered the same thing. Dump my 2 ton 32"sony and just use my pc for movies and such. Just move the hdmi cable from the vid card/dvd player to the cable box.

[highbarger]

Thanks for the input, Mort. It helps to hear what experience other people have had. It seems I never hear any positive comments on Vista... maybe I'm only listening to the negatives, though.

Douglas, I'd like to hear how your project works if you decide to try it. I'm still kicking it around, but I'll post my results if I move with it.

Any other input is welcome as it may be a couple of months before I build/buy a machine.

[Douglas]

I know from trying to use my computer as a dvd player, that the system lagged hard. But its only an amd 2.4ghz processor single core. During a movie, the sound and video kept getting out of sync but it would correct itself when it got too extreme. Kind of annoying, so I put it on hold for now.

[mort]

The PC I set up has a USB freeview tuner for the TV feed. Freeview is the UK DVT service, digital channels transmitted on the same frequancy range as analogue.

I think the reason vista works better than XP for this is because it has the drivers and media centre builtin from the beginning. the media centre version of XP was nade of bits pulled together to make a system and it does not work as seamesly