Choose your case - Build a small yet dazzling entertainment PC - Weekend Project. Guide Beginner's Guide to Building a Home Theater PC. May 02 2011 We have covered a number of Beginner’s Guides in our effort to help out newcomers to the world of home theater computers. Topics covered include the basics, video resolutions, codecs and how they affect you, media players, frame rates and more.
So hopefully you have read and enjoyed those as now the fun part begins--building an HTPC! There are a variety of reasons why you might be interested in building a home theater PC (HTPC); perhaps you are intrigued by the idea of consolidating all your music, movies, and pictures into a central location. Or maybe the cable company upped their rates again and your only means of striking back is to build your own digital video recorder (DVR). We often start with the motherboard first as it’s the central brain of any computer and is the most difficult to change in the future. The ASRock 880GMH/USB3 was selected for the motherboard. Coupled to this board we chose the AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz processor.
Next up is the hard drive. What You Need to Build Your Own Home Theater PC. You can build your own HTPC that integrates with your home theater system — if you have the knowledge and the skills needed to install cards, drives, and so on. The information presented here is also useful if you want to order a new or customized PC online and need to know what specs you'll need for your HTPC. An increasing number of small, specialty PC builders, such as the folks at Digital Connection, can put an HTPC together for you. The key pieces and parts to any HTPC are the following: Fast processor: You need a fast Core II Duo processor (preferably 2.0 GHz or faster) or an equivalent AMD processor. You can get away with less, but you might have performance issues (such as DVDs having artifacts, or leftover or poorly presented pixels, on the screen because the PC can’t keep up the decoding of the DVD’s MPEG content).
Sufficient RAM: For an HTPC, you need at least 2GB of RAM; 4GB or more is a good idea. Home Theater Glossary An acronym for Advanced Audio Codec. Accessories analog. How to Whip Your Movie and TV Show Art into Shape for XBMC and Boxee. Mediacenter Master Walktrhough Adding TV Shows. The Ultimate Start to Finish Guide to Your XBMC Media Center. How To Use Ember Media Manager to Organize Your Media Collection.
A media center isn’t nearly as fun if all your media is mislabeled poorly organized. Read on to learn how to use Ember Media Manager to whip your media into shape and make your collection sparkle. Why Do I Need a Media Manager? Perhaps you’ve never heard of a media manager or if you have you’ve written it off as something for those obsessive types to tinker with. Media managers are invaluable for ensuring that what your media center displays is accurate, custom tuned, and ultimately shows off how awesome your media collection is.
So what is a media manager? A media manager is simply an application that catalogs your media and writes images and metadata to the directory the media is stored in so that media center applications can access that data in order to display the correct information for the movie (ratings, reviews, cast listings, etc.) and media for the movie (box art, movie posters, fan art, etc.). Why would you want one if your media center already has built in media scraping? Set Up an Awe-Inducing Media Center This Weekend.