Question of the Day: What’s an HTPC?

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I received an email yesterday wondering what exactly an HTPC is, and why wouldn’t I just hook up an inexpensive computer to my flat panel for music, pics, DVD, and video? As I told George, that’s exactly what I’ve done.

A Home Theater PC (HTPC) is more of a usage concept rather than a specific piece of a hardware. Generally speaking, one would want an HTPC to have at least one tuner (ATSC, NTSC, DVB-*, CableCARD), an appropriate video card for HD playback, and some sort of software package(s) to power it all. In my case, I’ve temporarily repurposed an inexpensive HP desktop (a1600n) which ran ~$650 18 months ago. (Vista was a free upgrade by mail.) Because the unit lives in the open, instead of within an AV closet or another room, I purposely sought out a fanless video card to limit noise. Under XP, Microsoft’s media center + DVR software was initially an upsell (XP MCE) and initially only provided to OEMs. Whereas typical multimedia-centric consumer Vista systems (Premium, Ultimate) now include this functionality. (And Apple offers Front Row.) So it’s pretty easy to get into the game. HTPCs provide a whole lot more power and flexibility than a typical DVR or extender, but they’re not necessarily economical and require a larger investment of time in configuration and maintenance than a dedicated consumer electronics device.

And speaking of Vista Media Center (VMC)… I’ve been hounding some of my pals for good sources of info (plugins!), in addition to the AVS and Green Button forums. Jason Unger (CEPro) directed me to several PDF presentations on optimizing MCE from the recent Media Center University @ EHX. But I’m still on the lookout for the definitive list of must-have VMC enhancements. Chris?

13 thoughts on “Question of the Day: What’s an HTPC?”

  1. Hey Dave,

    Wondering if you have any tips or resources for me. I’m trying to set up a HTPC on a Dell P4 3.2 GHZ machine (it’s at least 4 years old) with 3GB RAM. I have a AGP nVidia 7600 at 512MB and I’m running XP Pro. I’m using a Hauppauge 1600 NTSC/ATSC tuner card.

    The problem is, OTA HD is not reliable at all. I’m getting great signal strength, but the video is very jumpy, frames freeze all the time and then catch back up, etc. Is my machine just too old to handle this new video stuff?

    It handles HD over the internet pretty well (quicktime, etc.) but it does stumble on that sometime as well.

    Any advice?

  2. In my experience, it’s usually the video card and I don’t know much about the card you have. For low hanging fruit, though I’d fire up task manager and get a general idea of CPU and memory usage when video isn’t playing and when it is. Are there any programs or processes you could/should kill? Do you see the stuttering/frame drops only full screen or also in a window? Also, you didn’t mention what program you’re actually using to play the television content? That’s something else worth exploring. And of course, make sure all your drivers/firmware are relatively current (tuner card, video card, audio, motherboard, etc).

  3. Good luck on your efforts.

    I haven’t been able to find the “Holy Grail” of HTPC but I have recently come to a decent compromise.

    Tivo HD + MacMini. The sad truth is that nothing in the HTPC realm compares with Tivo HD (dual tuner encrypted digital + HD channels). The one thing that TivoHD does horribly is playing back stored video (besides Tivo recordings). For that I rely on a MacMini running either FrontRow or XBMC (OSX version). For most everything I prefer XBMC because the MacMini replaced my aging Xbox w/ XBMC. At first I tried out several products on OSX, XP Media Center, and Vista Media Center. None seemed to compare. One product would do one thing very well and fail miserably at others. I had almost given up when I ran across the osxbmc project. It is still in its infancy but the developers have done a lot in a short amount of time. I still user Front Row every once in awhile when i run into the odd video file that gives me trouble on XBMC.

    The best thing about this setup is that it is super quiet and very compact. Ive had friends with HTPC boxes from HP and others and they just arent designed to sit in a living room. They often have very noisy fans and hard drives, are extremely bulky and produce alot of heat.

    Anyway. Good luck in your endeavors. I look forward to reading your findings.

  4. Dave,

    I’ve used the same tuner card on this machine with the Hauppauge WinTV application as well as on a slightly slower (2.8) machine with MCE 2005, both had the same issue with HD.

    The frame drops occur in full and windowed mode. I don’t think memory is an issue, but I will check that out. I’ve considered buying Vista to see if the MCE on that helps things but I don’t want to drop the coin to find out that my processor was just too slow or that it’s too hard for AGP video cards to handle HD, which would mean I’d need a new box.

  5. Phil, I wouldn’t put Vista on that same box as it’s more processor & memory intensive than XP. Do you have apps other than WinTV you can try? (If not, try a free trial of BeyondTV maybe?) And again, I’d make sure everything is current and that superfluous processes/apps are prevented from starting up. (msconfig from the Run or cmd line)

    Charles, XBMC on OS X is looking pretty good. I used it previously on the original Xbox and was impressed. Does the current build support Python scripts (i.e. Apple Trailers) yet and there must be something obvious I’m missing because I haven’t been able to make it go fullscreen…?

  6. Oh man, I could write volumes on this subject, but will spare you all my political rantings…

    To me a HTPC is a tool to eliminate all the people who artificially insert themselves between me and the media I enjoy ( be it music, TV shows, movies or electronic documents ). I have been hacking away at this for a while now and it seems at every turn there is some form of nasty DRM, proprietary hardware or industry standard licenseing fee standing in the way.

    My HTPC starts with a hacked up version of Mythbuntu, tricks the HDCP signal path into thinking everything is OK, rinses DRM out of everything and has an interface as smooth and as easy to use as Apple TV. My HTPC does this and more using all Open Source software and common, off the shelf hardware.

    *If* such a HTPC existed, I would be looking at years of prison time just for having it in the room with me, let alone actually enjoying my media with it. How does that quote go? “When HTPCs are outlawed, only outlaws can watch HDTV…” no wait, that’s not right.

    Reference: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD

  8. Charlie, my top priority is video podcasts. Any suggestions there? Also, WebGuide looks useful though it looks like development has been paused? Any movie trailer browsing and playback plugin? Thanks!

  9. PS, For those interested Hulu isn’t looking so good full screen but Netflix Watch Instantly is – and with a community-built plugin, it now lives within VMC including remote control. Nice.

  10. Phil, OTA HD is some 19Mbps, while your HD Quicktime is maybe 6Mbps, so the demands on the system for decoding are quite different. The Quicktime is probably h.264 so its harder to decode than the OTA MPEG-2, but still the bandwidths are so different. Sounds like its NOT a capture issue, i.e. the recordings you create, if played back on another machine with more oomph, are okay, its just an issue with playing back HD on THIS machine?

    Dave, how do you playback Hulu through the 10-foot interface, i.e. is there an MCE plugin for it? And are you saying Vista MC doesn’t handle video podcasts? What good is it then? :o)

  11. Glenn, I’m sure it does. In fact, I’ve got the TVTonic widget doing it. But I want to evaluate all my options.

    There may be a Hulu plugin, though I haven’t looked yet. I’ve been using my wireless keyboard and mouse (IR), but have an RF remote on the way (right, Brent?;).

  12. Glenn,

    That’s a great point, I never thought to record something and play it back on a newer machine. I’ll give that a try and see what happens.

  13. Phil,
    I second Dave’s comment about doing the free trial of BeyondTV. I had an experience very similar to yours, and BeyondTV made a big improvement.

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