My Home Theatre Project - Part 1
I moved into a new house in 1999 and decided I wanted to have digital “entertainment” available wherever I was.
The key part of the project was to build a Home Theatre PC (HTPC). The first version was based on a Shuttle ST61G4 but that was not considered good enough :(. It failed on several fronts. Firstly I could not find a TV card for it that could handle digital TV well enough. I tried various Hauppauge variants, both analogue and digital as well as a Pinnacle Media Center card but none did the trick. As an interface I tried Showshifter which worked quite well but the poor TV card and reception meant I would not leave the PC installed.
I eventually stumbled upon the Black Gold Digital TV card and this card was a revelation. Even though I don’t get the greatest of digital signals from the Sudbury transmitter, this card gave an almost flawless performance.
Buoyed by this breakthrough I decided to have another go at HTPC. One of the reasons the Shuttle was not good enough to stay in the living room was the amount of noise it made. Even though I had replaced and slowed the fans, it was still possible to discern the steady hum of the machine. This attempt therefore had to be based on something silent. I had always had an eye on the completely silent machines from Hush Technologies. The machine is fanless and cools itself via the Aluminium heatsink which is the case of the machine itself!!
When coupled with the Black Gold TV card this set up was awesome….I purchased the newly avialable Windows Media Centre 2005 Edition and installed it on the Hush box. This was starting to look exactly like what I wanted….a really good looking, quiet (no …. silent) PC able to be played through the TV screen and serve as the hub for all my digital entertainment.
Hooked up to my Sony sound system and combined with the NVidia DVD decoder it made a great TV and DVD player.
My biggest problem was how to make these great facilities available elsewhere in the house…..and that will be the subject of a later blog.
