Rig of the Month: Home Theater PC
Gyro has commented a few times on the advantages of building a home theater PC to be able to record televised content. He was kind enough to write me about his rig, and include some snapshots. It looks like with a better remote (check out the Logitech Harmony...) and a software upgrade to fix his clicks and captions, he really will have an awesome system. Wise move going with a dual core processor, and a separate SATA hard drive. Strong work, you made me and Bill proud!
--Jonas
OK, here's a few quick pix of the PVR system I'm using. It is nothing fancy. The computer is an AMD 3800 X2, 1 gig of memory, and a 320 GB SATA drive for the media. The boot drive is a 40 GB IDE. The video card is the ATI X1300. To be quite honest, the computer is a bit of overkill I think but I wanted to make sure I had enough horsepower to record and playback HD. The computer monitor is just a 15" LCD I had available and the TV is a SANYO 30" CRT based 16x9 HDTV that was purchased at Wal-Mart. Sorry, they don't make it anymore! Cost at the time was around $750.
The analog output of the X1300 feeds the computer monitor. The DVI output feeds the HDMI input on the TV. Audio is analog 2-channel for the moment. The X1300 is setup to run desktop on the LCD and any video on the TV. You do not see desktop on the TV. It goes to blue screen when there is no video.
The heart of the system is the OnAir Solutions HDTV Creator marketed by Autumnwave in this county. OnAir Solutions is a Korean company. It comes with software that allows you to set up a record and playback schedule. The tuner has one RF input and can handle digital and analog cable as well as digital and analog off-air. The only connection to the computer is a USB jumper. It comes with a hand unit that allows you to control the Creator just as you would a VCR. Fast forwarding through HD content at lightning speed takes some getting used to.
The attached pictures show the computer screen with the normal operations panel visible, and another shot with the channel manager screen visible which is actually laying on top of the operations panel. You access the record menu from the channel manager screen. Records can be set up by date OTO (one time only) or repetitive on a weekly basis. A one hour HD recording takes about 8 GB of HD space. One picture shows all of the hardware sitting in the living room. The computer is sitting on the floor next to a credenza that is part of an entertainment center. The rest of the entertainment center is not in place as the carpeting needs to be changed before we assemble the final unit. Sitting on top of the credenza is the SANYO HD TV, and the Creator sits on the corner of the credenza between the computer and the TV. In the overall shot you can see the same pix on the computer screen and the TV. There is one final pix of just the TV with a full screen pix from the Creator.
I am looking into a remote control for the computer itself. The Creator remote will power off the computer but will not power it on. That may be a function that OnAir Solutions adds to the software. Also the Creator at this point does NOT do captions. That is a shortcoming they are aware of and I'm told it's being worked on. Although both my wife and I have normal
hearing we do use the captions because sometimes the dialogue gets lost in the sound effects. Not having captions is an pain. There is also an annoying feedback audio click that occurs everytime you use the remote. The software has a switch to turn it off but it doesn't work.
Trust me the click gets old fast. Again, it is something they plan to address in future software releases. One other shortcoming is that the Creator software can not wake up the computer from the sleep mode. I tried leaving the computer on and allowed it to go to sleep to cut down on the noise. The record schedule is not able to wake up the machine fast enough so the recordings fail. I've groused about that and OnAir Solutions promises a fix. So when you want to do some recording, you must leave the computer turned ON. That's a lot of extra noise in the living room but I suspect you could get around that with a quieter case. You can program the records to shut down the computer when finished so if you want to record Leno or Letterman every night the computer will put itself to bed when it's finished. I've been through a few software upgrades since I first got the unit back in the spring. I think they're about ready for a major new release that will do captions and hopefully correct a few of the shortcomings and "bugs."
No way this thing is ready for the average consumer. But for the crowd that's a bit higher tech, this is one cheap solution to the VCR problem, AND it does HD. I have a minimal investment and can now watch all of my HD shows that I timeshift in HD. Plus this will become my audio jukebox when the entire entertainment center is finally completed.
--Gyro
--Jonas
OK, here's a few quick pix of the PVR system I'm using. It is nothing fancy. The computer is an AMD 3800 X2, 1 gig of memory, and a 320 GB SATA drive for the media. The boot drive is a 40 GB IDE. The video card is the ATI X1300. To be quite honest, the computer is a bit of overkill I think but I wanted to make sure I had enough horsepower to record and playback HD. The computer monitor is just a 15" LCD I had available and the TV is a SANYO 30" CRT based 16x9 HDTV that was purchased at Wal-Mart. Sorry, they don't make it anymore! Cost at the time was around $750.
The analog output of the X1300 feeds the computer monitor. The DVI output feeds the HDMI input on the TV. Audio is analog 2-channel for the moment. The X1300 is setup to run desktop on the LCD and any video on the TV. You do not see desktop on the TV. It goes to blue screen when there is no video.
The heart of the system is the OnAir Solutions HDTV Creator marketed by Autumnwave in this county. OnAir Solutions is a Korean company. It comes with software that allows you to set up a record and playback schedule. The tuner has one RF input and can handle digital and analog cable as well as digital and analog off-air. The only connection to the computer is a USB jumper. It comes with a hand unit that allows you to control the Creator just as you would a VCR. Fast forwarding through HD content at lightning speed takes some getting used to.
The attached pictures show the computer screen with the normal operations panel visible, and another shot with the channel manager screen visible which is actually laying on top of the operations panel. You access the record menu from the channel manager screen. Records can be set up by date OTO (one time only) or repetitive on a weekly basis. A one hour HD recording takes about 8 GB of HD space. One picture shows all of the hardware sitting in the living room. The computer is sitting on the floor next to a credenza that is part of an entertainment center. The rest of the entertainment center is not in place as the carpeting needs to be changed before we assemble the final unit. Sitting on top of the credenza is the SANYO HD TV, and the Creator sits on the corner of the credenza between the computer and the TV. In the overall shot you can see the same pix on the computer screen and the TV. There is one final pix of just the TV with a full screen pix from the Creator.
I am looking into a remote control for the computer itself. The Creator remote will power off the computer but will not power it on. That may be a function that OnAir Solutions adds to the software. Also the Creator at this point does NOT do captions. That is a shortcoming they are aware of and I'm told it's being worked on. Although both my wife and I have normal
hearing we do use the captions because sometimes the dialogue gets lost in the sound effects. Not having captions is an pain. There is also an annoying feedback audio click that occurs everytime you use the remote. The software has a switch to turn it off but it doesn't work.
Trust me the click gets old fast. Again, it is something they plan to address in future software releases. One other shortcoming is that the Creator software can not wake up the computer from the sleep mode. I tried leaving the computer on and allowed it to go to sleep to cut down on the noise. The record schedule is not able to wake up the machine fast enough so the recordings fail. I've groused about that and OnAir Solutions promises a fix. So when you want to do some recording, you must leave the computer turned ON. That's a lot of extra noise in the living room but I suspect you could get around that with a quieter case. You can program the records to shut down the computer when finished so if you want to record Leno or Letterman every night the computer will put itself to bed when it's finished. I've been through a few software upgrades since I first got the unit back in the spring. I think they're about ready for a major new release that will do captions and hopefully correct a few of the shortcomings and "bugs."
No way this thing is ready for the average consumer. But for the crowd that's a bit higher tech, this is one cheap solution to the VCR problem, AND it does HD. I have a minimal investment and can now watch all of my HD shows that I timeshift in HD. Plus this will become my audio jukebox when the entire entertainment center is finally completed.
--Gyro
posted by digitaldoc at 9:35 PM
2 Comments:
One correction. The company that manufactures the HDTV Createor is OnAir Solution, no "s". My mistake.
Also for those of you who are interested in the mpeg stream, you can get a free version of TSReader and use it along with the HDTV Creator to analyze the signal. In fact AutumnWave sells the HDTV Creator along with a professional version of TSReader as a low cost stream analyzer.
Update. Found out how to get rid of that dreaded "clicker" noise. The checkbox in the Creator software does not turn off the click. However, right clicking on the remote icon brings up a menu that allows you to turn off the click! Whoopee.
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