First Foray into Home Theater PC

I have a lot of media on my PC that I want to enjoy on my HDTV. Most of the media is DivX/Xvid encoded, high compression video codecs typically distributed in the AVI file format. This was pretty convenient because one can get pretty inexpensive DVD payers that also support playback of these codecs. Philips has an extensive line of DivX certified players (which also play Xvid), and I own the old DVP420 and the DVP5140 which were each just $60. These are great because I can just burn 5GB worth of AVIs onto a DVD±R and play them on the machine as easily as regular DVDs.

However, there has always been a lot of web content in Microsoft’s WMV only, and more recently the DivX/Xvid codecs have fallen out of favor for HD content. I don’t understand fully the reasons why, but I suspect it’s simply a bandwidth issue. WMV compresses video more than DivX/Xvid which makes it easier to distribute online, and everyone with Windows already has the WMV codecs installed by default on their system and need do nothing else to enjoy the playback. However, for a long time the proprietary codec appeared in almost no video hardware other than PCs and Microsoft’s own XBox. There are a few devices appearing now that play everything, including WMV and the newer H.264, but they fairly expensive and are really just lobotomized PCs.

My old fashioned method of watching WMV media on the tv was connecting a notebook via the s-video tv-out and streaming from PC to notebook to tv. Fine enough, but I wanted a permanent solution instead of hijacking my girlfriend’s notebook every time we wanted to watch. Also, the s-video and vga outputs are poor quality and cannot transmit HD content.

I thought a lot about media extenders and cheap HTPCs. In the end was unimpressed with the available extenders and their limitations. Good ones with everything I wanted (HDMI, 1080p, DivX/XviD and WMV codecs) crept up in price near the low end for and HTPC ($300), and I didn’t see too much point in paying the same for a limited half-computer as for a complete HTPC with far more capability. An HTPC would satisfy all my needs, but seemed extravagant and redundant considering my current PC already had all the storage and playback capabilities I wanted, and I was not interested in replacing my Comcast DVR with a homebrew solution. Not to mention the electricity of yet another always-on PC in the home.

For a very short period I was enamored with the Asus Eee Box as an inexpensive ($300) and extremely low-power-consumption HTPC. Throw a remote on this thing and it would be the ideal form factor and power usage for a media player appliance, while in fact being a limited but full-blown Windows XP machine. Unfortunately several reviews of the box panned it’s 1080p HD capabilities, citing stuttering and slowdowns as the under-powered Atom processor tried to decode the massive video stream. My HDTV is a 720p display, and the Eee Box apparently handles that ok, but I do have 1080p files that get downscaled, and eventually I foresee a 1080p display in my future. $300 is a great price for a PC, but unfortunately HD video playback is the primary requirement of my home theater setup, so the Eee Box doesn’t pass muster. So just tapping the underutilized display capabilities of my Asus Radeon 4850 video card seemed smartest. It already supports HD video, and I’ve already got the decent Vista Media Center.

(The new 204/206 models boast a faster Atom processor and HDMI output to supposedly handle 1080p content, and might still end up being my device of choice in the future.)

I cabled my PC to my HDTV as a second monitor via the DVI-to-HDMI adapter included with the lovely 4850. A pretty nifty solution, and I was happy to have the part included with the card (the advantage of buying quality brand cards from Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire, etc. versus the discount cards from other vendors). I thought about how best to additionally wire sound from my machine to the tv, because though HDMI can carry both HD video and quality digital sound together, DVI, the video output on the Radeon card, is video only. Or so I thought. I was thrilled to find out that a digital audio processor is built into the card (Asus’, at least), and that the mild-manned DVI port actually does include audio, specifically for porting to HDMI as I did. Awesome.

So in the end all it took was an inexpensive $22 25’ HDMI cable and I had full HD video and digital sound on my HDTV. Not only is the quality perfect, but compared to the $200-$400 extender and HTPC alternatives the price is unbeatable. The only thing I lacked was a convenient way to control the 20’ distant PC while sitting on the couch. But that was soon to be fixed.