My thoughts in e-text

This is an exciting time for buying HTPC devices. They come in really small sizes, they are efficient and yet can playback 1080p video and boot in under 30 seconds. The most exciting hardware (for me anyway) is the ION platform from nVidia. These are tiny motherboard and CPU combos that do wonders considering their size and power usage. I had my eye on this one for a while now. It looks great and for once I can put my HTPC in front of everyone in the living room. But there are a couple of reasons I keep reconsidering. First the bare bones HTPC has a small 2.5" 320 GB hard drive. Well I guess that is what gives it the small size. And the second reason is that it does not have a PCI slot. The tv tuner card I have sits in a PCI slot. Of course I can buy the latest and greatest USB tv tuner card, but I have my reasons to not to. I have painstakingly configured my PCI tv tuner card in Gentoo (my favorite OS). When I brought the tuner card the drivers were still buggy and you had to ...

I have my eye on a new HTPC, but what does my current one look like? Here it is. The desktop PC that acts as my apache, mysql, samba, vnc, nx, xbmc and mythtv servers. In addition it is a media player. I have to hide it behind my TV because it looks so big and ugly. But it serves me well. Even while running 24/7 for the past two and a half years, I never had a single problem. It has 2 fans, one to cool the processor and one at the back to blow the air out of the case. The fan at the back sometimes would not run after a restart and I have to kick start it by spinning the fan with my hand and it will continue to run. For this reason and also to keep the PC much cooler I have left one side of the desktop open. This is how my media center running xbmc looks like from the front. And here is the vnc viewer connected to my HTPC showing off mythtv tv guide. You can see the gkrellm running on the left side showing all the vital stats like cpu, gpu, hard drive temperature, memory, ...

It has been a while since I blogged here. Got very busy. But I am hoping to restart. We will see how it goes. Today's topic is HTPC. There are some really wonderful HTPCs coming out these days. I wish I could buy all of them :). I have an old HTPC now. You can barely call it a HTPC. It is simply a desktop that I filled up with a lot of hard disks. It has an AM2 motherboard capable of 6 channel surround sound with AMD X2 3600+ processor and nvidia 9800 GT GPU. The GPU is way too powerful than required for a HTPC I know, but it was also my gaming machine for a while. Crammed into all the spaces are 4 hard disks with 250 GB each. I also have a kworld pci ATSC/QAM tuner for all my digital tv recording needs. It was so much fun when I built it more than a couple of years ago. For the software I used freevo as my media center software. It would record shows too. So I did not need anything else. It was very configurable and everything is in python and most importantly it can playback ...