Building hometheater computer
 

With all the sales going on I'm thinking of makeing a Hometheater Computer. Its going to hooked up to a 46" HDTV and my surround sound system. What stuff would I need? also are there any good programs to orginize dvds? I was thinking of ripping them into ISO files and hopefully have a cool menu interface, anything like that exist?

I think the only non-standard requirement will be an HDMI port on the video card. A DVI port can be used as well.

I find ISO files a pain to use. You will need to mount the ISO file to view them. You won't save any HD space by saving them as ISO.

i forgot about mounting the image file and also the size of the file. what other options are there?

You don't need to ISO them, just copy the VOB's. Any decent DVD playback software will let you play the DVD from your hard drive.

A sound card with optical or coax digital output is a good idea too.

you can always rip the DVD and convert it to something like h.264 or xvid at higher bit rate to save some space. I used to use the Media Center interface, cuz its nicer and can be accessed with remote, but i ended up being lazy to set stuff up and just use a wireless kb and mouse and play videos using kmplayer.

For me, I always buy a nice looking HTPC case, silent ATI video card with HDMI (2400 or higher) CPU, depending on which one u are using, most of mine aren't very fast, so a passive heatsink will do the job. IF you are really concern about noise, the ideal thing to do is use a SSD for the windows install and network stream the movies from a NAS.

i think a wireless keyboard and mouse would be the best, the Media Center remote isnt the best for searching thru ur folders. i find a mouse much better to use.

I rip everything to video files at the highest quality I can, then when Im on my laptop I like using media center if it's hooked up to my TV. navigating with the remote isn't bad if you're stuff is well organized, if its just dumped in one big folder it can be a pain.

tho if you have enough room for the full ISO rips (menus and settings are always nice) then I'm sure you can find a program with a nice GUI that mounts the ISO when you select it from a menu. if there isn't someone should make one because that'd be awesome. Like Media Centre but when you pick a movie it mounts the ISO and runs it. hmm...

i think ripping movies is a better idea, then you don't have to go thru all those warnings and shit. not to mention much faster to open up.

I was watching "Cribs" and someone had a crazy hometheater room with an menu screen to pick movies. It looked so clean. I know I wont be at that level but something that would work like that would be sweet.

^ that wouldn't really be too hard/expensive to do. just get an extra 15" LCD or whatever, find a program with a nice GUI to run on it that lets you select your movie, and have the video playback program set on the TV screen in fullscreen mode.

There's lots of frontends out there. Obviously Vista Media Centre is something to look at, there's a plugin called MyMovies or something like that indexes movies very nicely. However, my personal favourite is Mediaportal which is a free open source media frontend. I'm using the StreamedMP skin that was ported from XBMC. A somewhat older how-to can be found here: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1092168

As for ISO, MP can use daemon-tools to mount your ISO files. But if you're doing the ripping your self, I'd save the hassle and rip into x264/mkv for space savings or copy the vobs into subdirs.

What do you guys think about using a PS3? Like the original poster, I really want to build a HTPC as well to power the new HDTV that we got.

PS3 can work. It's just tricky playing downloaded HD stuff. For HTPC vs PS3, it depends on what features you're looking to implement.

PS3 can be pretty strict as to what it will play. I don't believe it supports mkv's for one thing, and you have to encode x264 with specific parameters for PS3. Problem is alot of the stuff from the net are half assed encodes. There's an app called Tversity that will transcode media on the fly for PS3/X360, but I don't have any experience with it except for early revisions with the X360. If you don't want to tinker but want the mkv and support beyond what the PS3 has, then look into the Popcorn Hour. If you want control over every aspect of what you can do etc, then HTPC is the only way, but it can take hours and hours of tinkering to get an HTPC just right.

PS3 + Tversity is great but as mentioned the PS3 doesn't support .mkv. What I do instead is convert the .mkv into a .vob and play it that way and a 1080p vob file runs perfectly fine.

You should take a look at this.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=572

The WD TV is $130usd....interesting device.

I'm wondering if the Apple TV is a good choice too. Lots of hacks for that.

I'm tempted to buy one from WD. The only thing it's missing is network support. If it had wifi I would be all over it.