Replacing my media center PC
A while back I decided to take the plunge and build my own media center PC. I had tried a lot of other ways to get my digital media into the living room — very long speaker wire, laptops hooked up to the stereo receiver, even a Gateway connected DVD player — but none of them seemed very satisfying solutions, so building a homebrew HTPC seemed like the logical next move.
At the time it seemed pretty cool and worked for what I needed but now I’m thinking that my first go at a homebuilt media PC came up somewhat short, so I may need to go back to the drawing board and give this project another attempt.
The Current Setup
My current media center PC is built around a Gigabyte GA-8I915G-MF motherboard with a Celeron D 2.53GHz CPU. At the time, the Gigabyte board was one of the few I could find with onboard optical S/PDIF audio connections, which would save me adding a special soundcard. Connecting the PC to the TV I decided to use an ATI-x300 video card. (I never got around to getting a planned TV tuner card.) The rig also has two hard drives installed, a 180GB SATA model and a 120GB drive, as well as a DVD-ROM. To house all this hardware I decided on the SilverStone Lascala LC11 in silver with a 300W power supply I had to buy separately. The HTPC is running Windows XP Media Center Edition, which came with the standard remote control and IR receiver.
Performance & problems
Initially and for a few months after assembling the PC I was pretty happy with the whole rig. It worked as advertised, played all my music and video files, played DVDs (most of them anyway) and played some videos and such through the MCE online spotlight applications and some third party apps I found.
Everything seemed to be going well until the honeymoon ended and I started to notice the increasing amount of noise my PC was making. With the socket 775 CPU and standard fan, especially in the summer, my little media center PC sounded like an F-4 Phantom throttling up for takeoff. (One night some friends were over for drinks and one of them asked, “Who’s running the vacuum cleaner?”)
I was also starting to become increasingly frustrated with XP MCE and its lack of support for online media. Sure, I found a way to get some Internet radio station URLs into a playlist, I even managed to get NASA TV to play, but it seemed like I should have been able to just hit a button on the remote and at least surf some video and music from MSN.
And then there was the DVD drive. I had cannibalized the DVD-ROM from another PC to save a couple bucks, so maybe it was getting old, or maybe it just decided to become temperamental, but after a while it refused to play about half the DVDs we put into it, which was certainly not part of my original design idea.
The next generation
Living room PCs and HTPCs are starting to gain a little more traction, especially with all the excitement recently surrounding the launch of AppleTV this year, so I’m thinking I may have a few more options at my disposal to construct my next generation media center PC.
First and foremost this new PC needs to be quiet. I can’t believe how much I underestimated how noisy my current media center would be, but seriously it sounds like someone is using a chainsaw in the living room, which is definitely not good for the WAF. So I’m looking at various alternatives from fanless CPUs power supplies to heat pipes and such to minimize the noise factor.
Second, I would like something with a smaller form factor. The SiverStone LC11 is a very pretty case and is smaller than your average cube PC or desktop system. But while it fits into the AV rack, at 96mm tall it just barely fits and looks positively huge next to the AV receiver and set-top box.
Third, I would like a system with better integration of Internet radio and online video. While not a must have, more and more of the media I like to watch is being streamed on the Internet, so it makes sense to have a front end that makes playing that media as easy as possible.
And finally it needs to still do all the stuff that my current rig does do well — playing and organizing MP3s and video files from the hard drive — while offering better DVD playback with the option for adding PVR functionality. Oh, and did I mention all of the needs to come in on a reasonable budget?
Maybe all that is a pretty tall order, but I’m not in a huge rush to do all this. I plan to take some time to look at a lot of options, from building a system from scratch to modifying and combining existing components to possibly investing in a pre-built device. It should be an interesting adventure ahead.
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