My Home Theater PC Build

[Hulk]

For the last year I've been finishing my basement. It's been an enormous project and now I'm pretty much finished. I've even set up an office/control room with double wall and other acoustic isolation for live recording.

Anyway one area is set up for a home theater I've decided to go with two sources:
1. HTPC for DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, streaming video, plus all of the video I have on hard drive.
2. Comcast HD cable box

I knew I'd be taking a risk on this so I set out to build a lean HTPC. Here are the components I used.
Antic NSK2480 case with 430W "green" power supply
2GB OZC PC6400 RAM
500GB WCD SATA hard disk drive
Asus P5E-VM HDMI mATX motherboard
LG DVD, HD-DVD, BR combo optical drive
E2460 CPU

The hardware cost me about $750. The most expensive thing was the combo drive which was $270 shipped.

The build was easy and I had it up and running in about an hour. A little testing an I got the stock 1.8GHz processor overclocked to 3.0GHz. The case is basically silent. You might wonder why I'd overclock for a HTPC? I wanted to try and play H.264 hi-def content without video card hardware assist, just using the HDMI out on the motherboard.

Using Nero Showtime 4 and CoreAVC ($15) I have smooth HD-DVD playback with processor usage around 43% most of the time. I haven't received a BR disc from Netflix yet so we'll see how that works out.

So far I'm very happy with this set up. My Sony 52XBR4 TV should be arriving early next week.

I thought I'd post this just in case anyone is planning a similar project.

[Pace]

I wouldn't like to count up how much my HTPC cost, I've done it incrementally, with the LG BluRay/HDDVD combo drive the latest purchase. I'm not sure whether to get any HDDDVDs - only a few appeal to me, and I either already have them on DVD, or are prepared to see if they get a BluRay version.

As for the experience itself, I now have three gripes:

1) Blurays don't play from within Vista Media Center itself (although it launches PowerDVD for me)
2) I can't get the high-def audio formats out into my amp
3) The MCE keyboard is all but useless, as its functionality is poor when I do resort to using it, and I can't use it to login to Vista as the IR software loads per user.

All-in-all it's fantastic though, I'm just have to set some time aside to work through the above.

[Hulk]

I'm not too concerned with purchasing discs right now because Netflix has a really nice selection of HD-DVDs and BRs. One you open up your account and let their system know to give you a choice when you browse for movies once you put the movie in your queue if the movie is available in different formats it'll have a drop down box and you can select the format of choice. It's a smart setup they have.

I didn't even want to think about getting into Vista or dealing with Media Center at this point. I loaded up XP Home and since I'm using the Logitech Cordless 1500 desktop I just use the keyboard and mouse from the coffee table to control the movie. All I ever do is pause (spacebar) or go back (go to top of screen and pull back bar).
I'm using Showtime 4 with the HD-DVD/BR plug-in pack and I plan to get the digital audio stream out the coaxial output of the motherboardand then into the surround sound reciever for decoding. Hopefully it'll work as I expect.