This is my new toy. Warning: geeky description to follow.

A couple of weekends ago, I was going through the place recycling all my obsolete computer junk when I found my old STB WinTV card among other sadly unused relics. A quick Google search discovered that someone had written open source drivers for this and other Brooktree-based boards. So I stuck the card in my Windows XP box, installed the drivers without much hassle, and then installed DScaler, and was soon happily watching TV on my screen – albeit without working sound (something to do with the sound chips on that make of card).

I then looked around at the rest of my sorry computer equipment: one homebrew 700 MHZ XP machine, plastic front taken clean off (after the last vacation it refused to start until I yanked the front and jiggled random cables, snapping the plastic front off my DVD-ROM drive at the same time); one homebrew Linux gateway machine, with a half-dead video card (drew half the screen in psychedelic colors). I thought about: my growing MP3 collection (legit – I convert all my audio CDs immediately); deinterlacing hardware I had recently considering purchasing; how slow Warcraft 3 played on the XP box; and future plans for buying a projector and upgrading to a better stereo system.

Then I found the article “Building A Home Theater PC” over on ExtremeTech, and my fate was sealed. Based in large part upon the recommendations in that article, I bought components from Newegg (whom I heartily recommend – cheap and fast processing), and built myself a new PC, destroying the XP machine for spare parts and rebuilding the Linux box at the same time.

I stuck with the recommended Cooler Master ATC 600 case, which is a nice case for that high-end stereo component look. To keep things quiet, I went for a Zalman CNPS6500B CPU fan and an Enermax power supply; these fans are absolutely silent when cooling a 2 GHZ Pentium IV chip (which is what I bought). The noisiest thing in the case right now are the 3 smaller case fans (I could probably disable those) and the hard drive itself (which I transferred from the old machine). The DVD-ROM drive is an old Pioneer I’ve had for a while, while for the video board I threw in an ATI Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder,

After two weeks I’m quite happy with the result. It’s now sitting on the floor of my living room (no stereo rack), halfway between my TV and the rest of the computer equipment. The TIVO, cable, and PS2 are routed through the composite input (no component inputs on ATI boards, unfortunately), while video outputs are going to the TV and the computer monitor. The ATI card and its associated software is responsible for switching among and deinterlacing video inputs, playing DVDs, and sending output to the monitor and TV, and it’s controllable via the remote control that came with the graphics card. That part works reasonably well now, although it was a bit of a pain to set up – ATI’s software is not that tolerant if you do things out of order; it also could use a bit of work in the robustness department particularly if you start closing the multimedia applications and trying to reopen them. When everything is actually running though the results are good.

Meanwhile I’ve moved all MP3 collection over to the new machine, and have finally started to rip all of my classical CDs as well. Audio is currently just using the mainboard’s builtin, and going out my crappy mini-stereo, controlled by MusicMatch (and only because their interface to tagging is pretty good; I still use LAME on Linux to convert CDs). Still it sounds as good as it did before, and it’s a hell of a lot more convenient.

For future work I plan to get a clean sound card for digital out (the M-Audio Delta cards look nice), a receiver to decode, some more speakers for a 5.1 setup, and a projector hooked up to the VGA output. And by then I better have some more living space to put them in..