What are you doing with your HTPC? (1 Viewer)

[Bob Hill]

I'm pretty new to the forum and was wondering what most folks are actually doing with their HTPCs. I plan to integrate a PC into my hometheater for control purposes and was wondering what and how people are using their HTPCs?

BTW the PC that I have for this is one I just retired from normal computer use, it is a 1.2 GHz AMD, 1.5GB PC133 SDRAM, Geoforce2 32MB video card, with a couple of 40Gig ATA100 hard drives and a Creative Labs Live sound card. What other hardware might I need for the HTPC application?

 

[Hugh M]

you'll probably want to get a capture card, so that you can feed the computer svideo sources and have it scale them to any resolution and then output to a progressive display like a monitor. Io magic PC PVR card is nice one for that, comaptible with dscaler software which is the best as well.

If you don't have a HiDef capable display, or a big monitor, then you may not want to pursue using the video from an HTPC on your standard TV.

But aside from that using the HTPC as a music jukebox is great. If you do have a HiDef display then you can get the best DVD playback from your HTPC, as well as scaling svideo from other sources like cable boxes, vcrs, etc.

don't forget gaming as well.

 

[JohanK]

You may wish to upgrade your video card to a Radeon. I have an older one with video-in/video-out so I don't use a video capture card. A video capture card and dScaler would be better but the ATI card does a reasonably good job at scaling.

A lot of people run a wireless keyboard w/ built-in mouse for easier use. As long as your sound card outputs a DD and/or DTS digital signal, you're set there. And don't forget software; WinDVD, PowerDVD or the ATI player are needed for DVD playback.

 

[Bob Hill]

Thanks for the input. I plan on picking up an LCD projector, either a Sony or Sanyo unit so I absolutely want to use the video from my PC.