{"id":46,"date":"2009-09-19T20:41:24","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T20:41:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/?p=46"},"modified":"2009-09-22T22:06:16","modified_gmt":"2009-09-22T22:06:16","slug":"htpc-%e2%80%93-home-theater-personal-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/equipment\/htpc-%e2%80%93-home-theater-personal-computer\/","title":{"rendered":"HTPC \u2013 Home Theater Personal Computer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a <a href=\"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/retired-equipment\/htpc\/\">HTPC<\/a> for a long time now, my original one died and it was getting pretty outdated anyway so I decided it was time to upgrade.  I built myself a new pretty powerful machine, thinking that I would be using my HTPC for Blu-Ray playback, which changed when I bought the <a href=\"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/equipment\/playstation-3-blu-ray-games\/\">Playstation 3<\/a>.  Here is the equipment in my current HTPC:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>ASUS P5E-VM HDMI LGA 775<\/li>\n<li>Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 <\/li>\n<li>Microsoft Windows Vista 32-Bit Home Premium<\/li>\n<li>Western Digital Caviar Blue 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb\/s 3.5&#8243; Internal Hard Drive<\/li>\n<li>Crucial Ballistix Tracer 2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) <\/li>\n<li>Antec earthwatts EA430 Power Supply<\/li>\n<li>ZALMAN CNPS7700-ALCU 120mm 2 Ball CPU Cooling Fan<\/li>\n<li>Toshiba SD-M1712 DVD drive<\/li>\n<li>Liteon Airboard Wireless IR Keyboard<\/li>\n<li>Kanam HT200S (Silver) Case<\/li>\n<li>Radeon HD 4850 video card (added later)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"center\"><a href=\"\/img\/htpc.jpg\" rel=\"lightbox[46]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/img\/htpc_small.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"207\" hspace=\"5\" vspace=\"5\" border=\"0\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p>Some of these parts are carryovers from my <a href=\"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/retired-equipment\/htpc\/\">old HTPC<\/a> but the majority of it is new.  I went with the ASUS P5E-VM HDMI LGA 775 motherboard because it had HDMI out which would cover both my sound and video.  I ended up really regretting this.  I had nothing but trouble using the HDMI out on this motherboard, I was seriously plagued with blue screen errors and nothing I did to try and fix it worked.  I think I was having so many problems because I was running dual monitors and I also blame a lot of the problem on Vista (which I feel has been a major failure for Microsoft).  I finally gave up trying to use the HDMI out on the motherboard and bought myself a Radeon HD 4850 video card which also uses HDMI.  This helped the problem a lot, but it still didn&#8217;t eliminate it.  <\/p>\n<p>I got so fed up with all the headaches that the HTPC was causing me I ended up going in a different direction in my theater.  Instead of using the HTPC to watch movies I bought an <a href=\"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/equipment\/oppo-dv-980h-dvd-player\/\">Oppo DVD player<\/a>, a decision I haven&#8217;t regretted at all.  I no longer use the HTPC as a DVR, my <a href=\"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/equipment\/motorola-dct3416-hdtv-cable-box-and-hdtv-dvr\/\">Comcast cable DVR<\/a> works just fine for me, the only problem being the lack of being able to permanently archive things (I just use torrents for that now).  <\/p>\n<p>Pretty much my HTPC is just used for listening to my vast collection of MP3&#8217;s, watching video files and for gaming.  My system has way more horse power than it needs for listening to music and watching videos but it&#8217;s great for gaming.  I love playing first person shooters on the 106&#8243; screen.<\/p>\n<p>I used to be a much bigger fan of HTPC&#8217;s than I am now.  When they work properly they are great, but when things start to go wrong they can really have you pulling your hair out and screaming at inanimate objects.  I will most likely have one in my system for a very long time coming, I have all of my music in digital format and the HTPC is great for that, I also do a lot of torrenting so the HTPC makes it easy for me to watch that stuff in my theater, and of course gaming is always fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve had a HTPC for a long time now, my original one died and it was getting pretty outdated anyway so I decided it was time to upgrade. I built myself a new pretty powerful machine, thinking that I would be using my HTPC for Blu-Ray playback, which changed when I bought the Playstation 3. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equipment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pE8l7-K","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}