The Home Theater PC

Building a great gaming PC is easy. You can argue about what graphics card, CPU or motherboards are better/faster/cheaper, but the fundamental goal remains the same--building in the best performance you can afford to create a smoother gaming experience.

The Home Theater PC (HTPC) is a different animal. It can have multiple goals, some of which are orthogonal to others. Here's what a good home theater PC can do:

• Be a repository for your CD collection
• Act as a digital scaler and de-interlacing platform for DVD playback
• Create a TIVO or Replay-TV type of unit that allows for time-shifted viewing of your favorite TV shows
• Be an HDTV tuner, including time-shifting HDTV viewing

Note that any one of these goals can exist independently of the other--or you could try to create a single platform for all three.

CPU performance is not necessarily at the top of the list of priorities. Even HDTV is more of a bandwidth problem than a sheer computational problem (though graphics card capabilities come into play if you plan on doing HDTV). HDTV, however, has had relatively little penetration, and with copy protection standards evolving on a nearly daily basis, we decided to put it on the back burner and focus on the first three bullet points, above. DVD playback, TV time shifting, and CD library applications will at least be stable for the foreseeable future (which, in the tech world, is maybe six months). Let's take a look at each application type in more detail.

CD Library

Of course, managing that volume of music can be a challenge. Media Player 8 doesn't really cut the mustard as a good manager for large volumes of music. I've tended to use MusicMatch for most of my digital music management, and it does a good job of tracking titles, connecting to online CD databases and easily letting me build playlists. But I hope to check out other music management packages as this system evolves.

DVD Playback

So if progressive scan is becoming popular, why use a PC?

Well, what if you want to your VCR or cable TV input to be progressive scan? As we've seen above, TVs have somewhat mixed capability for this. Modern PC graphics hardware, coupled with a good CPU, can do a great job of de-interlacing video.

Perhaps more important is the issue of scaling. NTSC video generally maxes out at around 480 lines of resolution; some content can be viewed (if you have the hardware) at 525 lines, but most content has 480-486 lines of vertical resolution. A good digital television, plasma display or front projector can display at least 800x600 (i.e., 600 lines of vertical resolution). XGA projectors support 1024x768 resolution, and TI now has a DLP chip capable of 1280x720 (true HDTV resolution). Wouldn't it be great if you could view your DVD movies at these higher resolutions?

You can. There are two ways to do this. One is to add dedicated video hardware to your home theater setup. A variety of dedicated scalers/de-interlacers are available on the market now, ranging in cost from $2,000 up to $30,000. It's probably true that a $1500 PC can't beat a dedicated scaler that costs $30K--but it can probably do as well or better than most of the ones under $10K, and offer additional flexibility.

The cool thing about video cards is that you can set them up to run at any arbitrary resolution. For example, one native resolution of the Plus Piano DLP front projector is 848x480. Using a tool like PowerStrip (http://www.entechtaiwan.com/), you can force your video card into this, or any other resolution. More and more video cards are now supporting video-friendly resolutions, such as 1280x720, which gives you maximum flexibility in finding the perfect resolution for your viewing hardware.

• Add dedicated TV tuner hardware. This usually takes the form of a PCI card, though several companies sell products that connect via the USB port.
• Buy an "all-in-one" video card that has the TV tuner and software needed to drive it.

Be warned, though: having any form of PVR can be quite addictive. After all, you'll be able to catch up on all those episodes of Farscape, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Prisoner and any other shows you may deem worthy of your attention. Just remember, there are only 24 hours in one day....

Or, Have It All
You can probably get most of a Home Theater PC's functionality in off-the-shelf consumer electronics gear. But if you want to build it into a single box, it will likely cost less than all the dedicated hardware, and be more flexible. For example, once you have it set up, you also have an instant game console (limited to PC games, of course). All you have to do is see Morrowind on a 100 inch front projection screen, and you're hooked!

The real issue is not the potential functionality, but making it work. Building an HTPC is no more difficult than building any other PC. The real challenge comes when you integrate it into your home theater system. The world of the PC and consumer electronics are still somewhat orthogonal to each other, and getting all the various pieces of the puzzle to come together is a much bigger challenge than building a mere PC.

First, though, we need to build the thing. Let's take a look at component choices.

Choosing the CPU and Motherboard

Curiously, the base components are more straightforward than those for a gaming PC. On a gaming PC, you need every last iota of memory bandwidth, every last CPU cycle and the highest possible frames per second, within your budget.

However, for home theater PCs, the CPU is probably the least important part of the equation. Any reasonably decent CPU will work, and it doesn't much matter whether it's AMD or Intel. For our rig here, we'll be using Intel gear--but please bear in mind that was more a factor of what we had available. A good Athlon system based on Nforce or later VIA hardware would fare just as well.

At a minimum, you'll need the equivalent of about a 1GHz Pentium III. You can get by with less performance, but you probably won't be able to run at better than DVD resolution, and HDTV may be out of the question. So we recommend, at a minimum, an Athlon XP 1600+ or an Intel Pentium 4 1.6A. We built our system using an Intel Pentium 4 2.0A GHz processor based on Intel's Northwood core, but again, an Athlon XP would have worked just as well.

The motherboard is also less important. All the fancy BIOSes created for overclocking are pointless, though they might enable you to underclock. The advantage to underclocking is to generate less heat, and hence, require less cooling.

You also don't need a raft of PCI slots. Since some of the compact cases you'd want to consider for an HTPC don't even accept full-size motherboards, you'll probably have to search for a microATX motherboard. You'll find quite a few to choose from, including boards from Intel, Asus, and others.

Quiet, but Beautiful--Cases and Power Supplies

The last thing you want next to your big home theater rack is a beige tower PC. Looks count when you're trying to blend in with elegantly designed consumer electronics gear. We found a number of good desktop cases, including this one from Digital Connection or this one from Directron.

Another key piece of the puzzle is a good remote control. If you truly want to integrate the PC into your home theater rack, you need to be able to control it from a distance. There are several remote controls available for PCs. Most are product-specific, though. For example, the Creative Labs Audigy Platinum line ships with a slim remote that controls all of the functionality of the Audigy, but doesn't do much if you want to run third party applications.

What you really want is a "universal PC remote". When most people think of universal remotes, they're thinking of devices that will control multiple consumer electronics components (DVD players, receivers, TVs, etc.). In this case, though, you want a remote that controls any PC application. As a plus, it would be great to have the remote act as a mouse, though that's not essential. One such remote is the Streamzap. This new company is attempting to tap into users who use MP3 and PC DVD players. The Streamzap comes with an IR detector that connects to a USB port. It's still a bit rough around the edges, but works well with the applications that it specifically supports. It doesn't, however, support mouse functionality.

On the surface, it may seem that you need less demanding graphics hardware than for 3D gaming. However, video playback is a different problem than 3D graphics, and is pretty demanding in its own right. Most modern graphics card now have fairly sophisticated video engines built into the core of the GPU. Most of the major manufacturers include some hardware acceleration for video decoding, though you do have to choose carefully. For example, you'd think that Nvidia's high-end, GeForce4 Ti line would include the company's video processing engine--but it doesn't. Probably due to transistor count restraints, the company's more sophisticated VPE is actually built into the GeForce4 MX line.

Another strong contender is ATI's Radeon line of graphics boards. Both the Radeon 7500 and 8500 products have strong video playback capabilities. ATI has been enhancing video playback since the original Rage 128 line of graphics chips. In addition, ATI bundles software DVD players with their board-level products.

One potentially interesting product--though it's not quite shipping yet--is the recently announced Matrox Parhelia. The Parhelia has a solid video playback engine, and also offers 10-bit color precision throughout the graphics engine (that's 10-bits per color component, so 30-bits total). Matrox's product literature promises DVD playback second to none, but we want to have some hands-on time before agreeing to that assessment.

Display Issues
One of the reasons to use a PC to drive your home theater is the advent of digital projectors. A PC is a natural match to a high-resolution DLP or LCD projector. An HTPC would also do a great job with more sophisticated large screen TVs that have DVI or VGA inputs. However, you really wouldn't want to use it to play back DVDs on that old 27" Sony in your spare bedroom. At a minimum, you want a display capable of handling 800x600 resolution. We'll discuss display integration issues in more detail in part II.

Audio Hardware

At the entry level, a sound card such as the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or a Creative Labs Audigy MP3 works quite well. Both have clean digital audio output. If you want to move up to something a bit better, consider the M-Audio line of professional sound cards. The Delta DiO 2496 offers both RCA and Toslink digital outputs and inputs, and 24-bit, 96 KHz audio rendering. Stepping up a bit, you might also consider the Delta 410, which only supports coax digital inputs and outputs, two analog inputs and eight analog output jacks.

On the other hand, if you plan on storing your CD collection on the hard drive, then bigger is definitely better. If you stick with IDE (which we recommend), then you can get capacities as high as 160GB in a single drive, though those drives are limited to 5400RPM. Although you don't really need higher spindle speeds for most HTPC applications, if you want a faster IDE drive, you can find 7200RPM drives in capacities up to 120GB.

This brings up the issue of storage interfaces. If you do choose the Maxtor D540X for its capacity, you'll need to also get an ATA133 PCI card, since most motherboards don't support the 48-bit addressing needed to make full use of the Maxtor drive's capacity. Also, if you want flexibility, having firewire and USB 2.0 in the system--whether on the motherboard or as PCI cards--is a definite plus. These allow you to add extra hard drive capacity, in the form of external drives, at will.

Choosing the right optical storage medium is also important. Here are several different approaches:

• A DVD-ROM drive for DVD playback only
• A DVD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive for burning CDs of music stored on the hard drive
• A DVD+RW or DVD-RW drive for creating DVDs of home movies. You can also use these to create DVDs of TV shows for personal viewing, much like you'd use a VCR. A recordable DVD drive can also burn audio CDs.

Operating Systems

Remember, all that's needed for HTPC is support for digital audio output. Although a player like PowerDVD XP supports DTS audio, Dolby Digital and even Dolby Prologic II decoding, it's unlikely that you'll use it. The exception to this is if you get an M-Audio Delta 410 sound card, and want to use the PC to handle the decode. This could be useful if the receiver you're using offers less-than-robust surround decoding.

Choices Made

In part I of this two-part series, we examined why you might want to integrate a PC into your home theater setup, and took a look at each of the different functions. We made a few hardware suggestions along the way.

In this part, we put a stake in the ground, make some hardware choices and build a Home Theater PC. We designed our HTPC to be multipurpose, capable of acting as a music library, a DVD playback machine and a time-shifted TV viewer. We decided to avoid the whole issue of HDTV for the time being, but we'll revisit that topic another time.

As we noted in part I, the choice of components isn't quite as performance-focused as it might be for a gaming PC, and the available choices are actually wider. Part II isn't so much about specific hardware choices (though we make some as we build the PC), but about integrating the resulting system into your home theater. Keep that in mind as we discuss our system--and please jump into the forum and offer your solutions, suggestions and opinions.

Case and Power Supply
Curiously, choosing the best case and power supply are almost more important than the motherboard and CPU. A good case for your HTPC should look like it would meld with the system well. As for the power supply, while you'd want one that offers solid current delivery, you'll also want it to be quiet.

We chose the Coolermaster ATC-600 for our particular home theater rig. Now, the ATC-600 cannot be described as "small"--but it's no larger than the Denon AVR-5700 receiver in our home theater system. We chose the ATC-600 for two reasons: it looks better than most cases, and it has two 5.25" front panel slots.

Now that we've taken a look at our choices for case and power supply, let's run through the laundry list of components we used for this iteration of ExtremeTech's HTPC:

Choosing the graphics card was fairly difficult. In the end, we chose the All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500. The card has an onboard Philips TV tuner module and 128MB of video memory. It also has some nifty software for time-shifting your TV viewing, but this is proving less useful than it used to be--more on that in a bit.

The Radeon has great 2D image quality and an excellent video playback engine. The Nvidia GeForce4 MX 460 also sports a sophisticated video playback engine, but the Radeon's TV tuner and time shifting software is better than current implementations of Nvidia's similar product. Also, the Radeon is probably a better 3D card, due to its full support of DirectX 8 pixel and vertex shaders--but if you're not going to play 3D games, it won't matter to you.

The Timeshifting Hassle
Let's get to the bit about timeshifting your TV viewing. In theory, this is a great idea and, in theory, an HTPC should be an ideal platform. Since ATI has a Gemstar license, their timeshifting software is elegantly integrated with the on-screen TV schedule. It works great if you're tied into a TV antenna or through basic cable--and there lies the rub.

If you have digital cable, or subscribe to a satellite dish service such as Echostar's Dish Network or DirecTV's satellite TV service, timeshifting with the HTPC becomes a chore. It can still be done, but it's a two-step process. On top of that, the Gemstar service and the satellite services often have channels and schedules that are out of sync. There are currently no officially sanctioned (i.e., legal) satellite TV or digital cable decoders for the PC. It's a big hole in the HTPC space, and we'd certainly love to see ATI, Hauppauge, or one of the satellite service providers step into this space. It's unlikely, though, as the broadcasters are so paranoid when even a slight potential for copying content becomes possible.

Audio Hardware

All you really need for HTPC is a good, clean digital audio output. So of course, we threw caution to the winds and dropped in an M-Audio Delta 410 card (http://www.m-audio.com/). This card has very low latencies, superb driver support and is very clean in both the analog and digital domains.

The Maxtor D540X is a 160GB, four platter drive. The 40GB per platter makes the drive performance-competitive with some lower-density, 7200RPM drives. Unfortunately, we had to use a Maxtor ATA133 PCI card because the built-in IDE controller and BIOS wouldn't allow us to create a single, 160GB partition.

This created a problem that seemed like a throwback to an earlier era. When installing Windows XP into a system with the ATA133 controller, you need to let Windows load a custom storage driver--that is, the driver for the ATA133 PCI card. The only way Windows XP would install the driver was from a floppy disk. It didn't matter if we had a CD with the driver, the setup program insisted on a floppy. Since the ATC600 case doesn't have an open bay for a floppy drive, we had to temporarily hang a floppy outside the case to install the driver.

So much for "legacy free".

Another possibility brought up by John Paulsen of Seagate is to use a pair of Seagate Barracuda ATA 80GB drives attached to an IDE RAID controller. He maintained that the resulting configuration would be less noisy than the single Maxtor drive. Certainly the Barracuda ATA's fluid bearings make for a quiet drive, and it bears consideration.

Once the little chore of installing the ATA133 driver was done, we ended up with Windows installed on a single, 160GB, NTFS-formatted drive. Next came applications software installation.

Applications and Utility Software

Although ATI ships a nifty DVD player inside the box, we like PowerDVD XP (4.0) better. When you're using PowerDVD on a desktop PC, it can actually decode DTS, Dolby Digital and Dolby Prologic II. On an HTPC, those are superfluous. The Denon AVR 5700 offers a superb platform for decoding the digital surround sound stream.

One piece of software we looked at briefly was dScaler, a highly regarded, open source de-interlacing and scaling application for video (http://www.dscaler.com/). Its capabilities are particularly interesting if you're feeding it an NTSC video source, such as a VCR. But the downside to dScaler is that it requires a Connexant video encoder chip--and the ATI All-in-Wonder doesn't have one. If you do have a video capture card with a Conexant encoder, then you owe it to yourself to check out dScaler.

One other utility that's very handy, particularly if you need to run at oddball resolutions, is PowerStrip. The latest version understands almost all current generation video cards. For example, we were able to use PowerStrip to set the resolution to 848x480 when connected to the digital input of a Plus Piano DLP projector.

For ripping CD audio to the hard drive, we stuck with the tried-and-true MusicMatch. MusicMatch has a slick interface, it's very easy to create playlists, and you even have the option of burning CDs of your mixes.

DVD Playback and Recording

The Pioneer DVD drive we used does an excellent job of both playing DVD movies and ripping CD music onto the hard drive. The acid test for any DVD drive is to put in one of Superbit DVDs from Columbia/Tristar. We used the Superbit version of The Fifth Element to prove that our system could handle the highest bit rates possible with today's DVD. The verdict: no problem.

The Recorder
Those of you who read our review of DVD+RW drives are probably scratching your heads about our use of the Philips drive. After all, didn't we give it a 6/10 in our April 23 review?

Yes. We're using the Philips drive as a placeholder, while we wait for a second-generation DVD+RW drive, which is on its way. The Philips drive works pretty well, even if the support is poor, and it's reasonably speedy when burning CD-R and CD-RW disks.

Getting the Output, er, Out
Of course, if you're playing video on the HTPC, whether its from the DVD drive or the TV tuner, you need a way to display the output. We experimented with several projectors and obtained good results. This also allowed us to experiment with several output options.

The most obvious option from the PC point of view is a direct connection to the VGA input--when it exists. The Plus Piano doesn't have a VGA input, but does support DVI. So the DVI output from the ATI card worked great. The only issue here is the cable length; the longest DVI cable we could locate was 10 feet, which limits both HTPC and projector placement.

If the projector does have a VGA input (as the iPaq M4800 does), then you can find high quality, shielded VGA cables up to 30 feet long. The ATI card, with attached DVI-I dongle, seemed to drive a 25 foot cable with no obvious image degradation.

The only problem with directly driving the projector is that you're bypassing the receivers nifty video switching capability. Newer high-end receivers have enough video bandwidth in their video switching circuitry to handle HDTV signals, but older receivers can handle S-video bandwidth (around 800x600 for you computer geeks) at best.

But how do you get the RGB signal from the HTPC to the receiver? The Denon AVR-5700 we used could switch composite video, S-video and component video. None of these resemble an RGB input. The solution is to use a VGA-to-component video converter. We used the Audio Authority model 9A60 to handle this chore (http://www.audioauthority.com/), but several other makers now make similar devices.

Now that we've gone through this immense exercise, the obvious question is: was it worth it?

We compared the output of the HTPC to the output from a Pioneer Elite DV-47a and an older Toshiba DVD player that lacked progressive scan capability. Unfortunately, we weren't able to route the output simultaneously, so direct comparisons are hard to make. But the image quality in both cases was very good. But even with the resolutions scaled up, it wasn't noticeably better than the DV-47a . Now, the DV-47a is a $1200 (list) DVD player, with excellent de-interlacing hardware built in. The HTPC did look better than the Toshiba player.

But the HTPC gave us a lot additional capability, such as 160GB of storage for our CD music collection, PVR capability through the All-in-Wonder card and a DVD/CD recorder. If we ignore the cost of the video converter hardware, we're looking at about $1500 in PC gear--and this is a high-end rig. If we cut a few corners--used an ATI All-in-Wonder 7500, a more compact case and just a single DVD+RW drive, we could drop the cost to under $1200. Also, if you just wanted DVD playback, you could put together a very straightforward rig for under $800--that's a lot less than a Faroudja scaler.