Our home theater PC -- the one labeled "HTPC" in this diagram -- died today. The boot drive, an old 40GB PATA drive, emitted the spiraling whine of death and failed to restart. R.I.P. old friend.
So, what should I replace it with? Or should I even bother at all? We basically used it for serving up MP3s to our SMC EZ-Stream audio streamer. But since I run Orb on another PC in the house that has a copy of all our media, and Orb acts as a pretty capable UPnP server, we no longer need a local PC to serve up music to the SMC.
We also sometimes occasionally used it to play back XviD and DivX movies to the TV. I suppose I could just hook up the laptop to the TV's VGA input in those rare instances instead.
Since our two TiVos and one Time Warner DVR handle all our time-shifting needs, I'm struggling to figure out just why I need an HTPC after all. Sure, there's the extremely infrequent case where pulling up a browser is handy. But my laptop is rarely more than a few feet away, and that's usually a more convenient alternative than dragging out the Gyration mouse and keyboard.
So, should I even bother with an HTPC? Would something like Apple's forthcoming Apple TV offer me functionality that I just couldn't live without?
Or, should I just fill the empty space in our entertainment cabinet with a Wii?
Decisions, decisions. If you have suggestions, email me at craig DOT froehle AT gmail DOT com. Thanks.
Maybe you should have a look at the linuxbox project or how to put linux on an Xbox. Alternatively an XBMC should do. Due to hardware limitation, some of the HDTV shows will fail to play well, but it does the trick for the rest (I only had problem to play just a single divx: "all quite on the western front" in HDTV). Apart from that it is simply a softmod.
Cheap, amusing and useful. ;)
Tam