My home theater PC
February 9, 2009 interesting, movies, music Comments OffA little background
Pretty much every show that Mrs. Chickenbutt and I like, I torrent. I also use bittorrent to check out earlier episodes of shows I might like, but haven’t had a chance to watch yet. If the shows are good, I buy the DVDs and spread the word to friends.
We have a pretty decent home theater set up:
- Samsung 46″ 720p DLP HDTV
- Sony 7.1 receiver with DTS decoding
- 5.1 surround speakers
Not top of the line, but certainly nice enough to enjoy most of what modern movies and TV have to offer. I should note that we also have a nice iPod dock for when we want to play music through the home stereo.
I’m always interested in using my entertainment technology to its fullest potential. We have a hi-def DVR cable box with a full gamut of HD channels from our cable provider. The HD content always looks awesome, even on our 720p TV.
I think the jury’s still out on how successful downloaded movies will be. (I’m personally against the idea, because I know that they’ll just be infested with DRM.) In the meantime, Blu-ray has my attention. I looked at several standalone Blu-ray players but couldn’t find one that could legitimately replace the functionality of my existing DVD player, particularly DivX playback. No Blu-ray player that I know of plays DivX-encoded video, which has become the de facto standard for the bittorrent community.
Until recently, we were using a Phillips DVD player with DivX capability and a front-mounted USB port for playing media off a thumb drive. This was how we watched most of the torrented stuff. It’s often a hassle to transfer my recently-torrented shows to a 4gb thumb drive, then wait for it to load on the DVD player. And if there was a lot of intense action, or too many fast edits, the playback would become choppy due to the slow data transfer rate of the thumb drive.
I decided I wanted a solution that could play Blu-ray and DVD, as well as torrented content over our (gigabit/wireless-n) home network. After a little more deliberation, I figured such a system should also perform media-server duties and become the entertainment/media center of our home.
