Looking back at all my postings, I am surprised that I never posted about my HTPC setup before. So let me start from the very beginning.
HTPC stands for Home Theater Personal Computer. With the introduction of Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) OS, I don't have to explain as much as I used to on why it's cool to have a PC in the living room. The most obvious advantages are that you can watch and listen to your entire divx and mp3 collection in the living room, rather than on the monitor and tiny speakers in your office/bed room (or wherever u have the PC, a la the Kitchen or the bathroom).
My first attempt at an HTPC was probably not long after I got my first credit card. I discover the power of e-commerce. Before eBay took over the world (not quite, but close), I used to go to a place call Ubid.com and bid on nearly everything they had there. They mostly have tech stuff, like MP3 players, DVD-ROM drives w/ MPEG 2 decoders, and PC barebone units where it only needs the RAM, HD and CD/DVD-ROM to work. I was a little crazy back then, I bid on all this stuff that I probably don't need. I never thought I would win the auction on any of this stuff. But when I did, I was kinda shocked and worried at the same time. Shocked that I won the auction, worried since I am gonna get bitched at by mom for ordering stuff (my mom was paying for my credit card bill back then since she wouldn't let me get a part time job).
Anyway, one of the auctions that I really wanted to win, although I probably didn't have much need for, was a Celeron barebone system. It was a celeron 500 mhz processor. Pretty fast for the time, but not a great processor like the 300a where u can overclock to 450mhz. I really didn't have a need for it because I already built a P3 700mhz system to replace my aging AMD K6 266mhz system. But I wanted a 2nd computer so I can hook it up to the TV. I don't think I had a DVD player in my living room at that point and they were quite expensive ($200 - $300, not $50 like today). So the HTPC setup was cheaper than a DVD player.
I remember setting up the HTPC for the first time, reading from online other's experience with it. It is relatively easy to setup, with no specific software required other than a dvd software player if you wanted to watch DVDs. Since I also won a DVD-ROM w/ a hardware mpeg2 decoder, it was a perfect fit the celeron PC. But here is where the problem came in. The video quality sucked. The screen size was a inch smaller than the actual size of the TV. The resolution was stuck at 640x480, but in reality, it was probably closer to 640x240 because of the interlacing of a TV screen. Since a TV is a interlaced monitor, it was every hard to see anything text on the screen. After a lot of squinting, you can probably decipher what a font 10 characters actually looks like. But it was a lot of pain and hassle. Not to mention back then, on Win 98se, not the most stable operating system, things would crash a lot. Overall, it wasn't a good experience. I ended up taking out the mpeg2 hardware decoder card because it was causing more problems (more crashing) than its usefulness. I eventually got DVDs to play w/o it because the celeron 500 is just fast enough to play DVDs using a soft deoder player (PowerDVD).
I don't know why I never gave up even after the first miserable experience. Maybe I saw hope in a HTPC. When I built my 3rd PC (AMD T-Bird 1.4Ghz, AKA piece of junk), I moved my old P3 700mhz to be the new HTPC. It was running Win ME at that point. Win ME, through as crash prone as Win 98se, wasn't so bad when it was running the same apps and you don't use it for gaming. I was able to have it run pretty stable for most of the stuff that I was doing on it. Playing dvds was a cinch. I even played divx fine. Up until divx 4 came out anyways. Once the higher bit rate kicked in (I remember watching animes like Gundam Seed and Ray-Xephon), the PC would choke on the high action sequences. It was like watching a slide show during the action sequences. I was pissed, but also know that the PC was just too old to handle codecs like divx and xvid. So I finally gave up on HTPC at that point, especially since Tivo was all the rage at the time.
So what got me back to HTPC? Windows MCE. I heard about it since MS started releasing them back in 2002. But back then, it was terrible. I was reading reviews about how it was the clunkiest inteface on earth. Well, MS kept on improving (like they do w/ most of their software and OS, which is always a WIP) it and Windows MCE 2005 actually looks like something that is quite usuable (and quite readable too, with a much larger font). I have been playing with it for a bit and after my whole long story about HTPC, here is what I really like I about it:
DVD JUKEBOX
I have, for the past couple of years, been trying to think of a way to put all my dvd collections into a instantly retreivable system so that I can watch any movie, any time I want w/o having to search through them. I am at the point where I have to look thru my collection in CD/DVD binders to find out what to watch. Sometimes, the process of looking for what to watch is tiring and pisses me off. Well, this finally solves that problem. I am so surprised that I have never posted about this before. Anyway, with MCE 2005, the DVD jukebox is as simple as creating a directory for each movie, and then keeping the DVD structure in that folder. If there is even one file in there that doesn't belong (like the thumbnail file that Windows love to add into folders), then it screws things up. But other than that, things work beautifully. I can switch from one movie to another, with all the menus intact, so I can watch all the bonus features whenever I want to. It's still a little hard to turn on/off subtitles (not like on a dvd player, which has a subtitle button), but that's more of fault of the MCE and the remote, where neither has a quick way to access language controls. My only other problem is storage size. I can fit about 14 DVD-5s (single layer DVDs) in about 60GBs of space. But that's not a lot. To store about 100 DVDs, I need close to 500GBs of storage space. That's gonna cost quite a bit more money...
I still gotta play around more w/ the MCE. I have WinXP client/server filesharing setup (w/ ACL and NTFS permissions settings, follow the guide from here to learn how to do that). It's a lot nicer than simple file sharing because IMO, the connection is a lot stabler than simple file sharing. I used to have simple file sharing set up for sharing between XP and 98/ME, but it would take forever sometimes for the computers to see each other, and then I would get latency problems where I wouldn't see the data on the other computer for quite sometime. Finally, there were also problems with file transfers stoppng abruptly due to various reasons. So far, I had none of that with XP filesharing. I was able to send over 12 GBs of data w/o any problem to my MCE PC, not to mention I was watching a DVD on the MCE PC while I was doing that. That was really neat. I was also streaming pictures and mp3s across the network, everything went thru very smoothly.
With new successes means new goals. Now I am really interested in buying the Linksys Network Attached Storage NSLU2, so that I can have access to a bulk of my contents from either computer w/o having to have the other one on just to access the files. I'm also looking into making my iTunes sorted MP3 collection compatible w/ MCE music library. That might be a hard one. Finally, I just gotta add more new features to my MCE computer, some of which are from this site. The only thing that sucks about this is I will probably be end up stuck at home playing with this stuff, unless.... I get this setup for my laptop w/ the NSLU2 piping the content over the web. Well, I'm pipe dreaming there. But it would be nice.
