[sf-lug] HTPC How-Tos advice?

[Blake Haggerty]

I have built a few HTPCs Some with Ubuntu others with Windows.

 

I know what I look for in a HTPC but everyones different:     My advice would be don't use a "old pc" 

 

Things I want in a HTPC:

 

Whisper Quiet

HDCP Video Card

HDMI outputs

Blu-Ray/HD-DVD Support

Lots of Storage

Relatively a fast processor and a Good Amount of Ram, for Video Encoding and De-Coding Quickly

A separate sound card (not on board) that handles at least 5.1 surround sound and has Digital output

 

Although I use Ubuntu on all my Home PCs I do not use it on my HTPC because of its lack of ability to play Blu-Ray. You can play Blu-Ray discs but you have to dump all the disc info (60 gigs) onto your harddrive and then encode the video properly to play it and then it MIGHT work. This process takes a long time unless your computer is blazing fast. So it would really hold up the use of my Netflix. Too much of a pain in the ass for me.

 

But if your going to just be using it to record/watch TV - Ubuntu should work just fine with MythTv.


Best Regards,


Blake Haggerty

 

 



 

-----Original Message-----
From:Taylor gray.race at gmail.com 
To: "sf-lug at linuxmafia.com" ;
Sent: Oct 29, 2009 09:30:40 AM
Subject: [sf-lug] HTPC How-Tos advice?

Hi Folks,

First time poster here. Working for the state I now have a few forced vacations. A project that I've been meaning to get started on is setting up an old PC as a HTPC device. I already have an external NAS to hook into it for storage. What I'm looking to do is set it up as a streaming server for UPnP devices in my home and possibly also access it from off-site. Any Advice? Good how-to articles?  Software that works good in the ubuntu realm?  I've used tversity(http://tversity.com/) in the past to accomplish this on my local desktop but I'd like to go full open source for this project. 

In the future I might also look into cable capture. I know very little in this area other than theoretically there are cable cards that enable this? I use comcast so anyone who has advice here I'd be curious about as well.

Cheers,

Taylor

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