Egg -cited!

There's a new kid on the (online computer retailer) block in Canada starting today, October 1st.

NewEgg the American retailer launched Newegg.ca today adding some competition to the field.

Unfortunately I bought a video card at TigerDirect yesterday that is $43 cheaper at Newegg on sale and $33 cheaper at Newegg's normal price! It will be interesting to see if I can get a price adjustment.

Power cords strike a chord!

I have UPSs (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) on two of my home computers to protect them from power brownouts and spikes and to allow me to save my data and shut them down in a blackout. I got them because our local power grid was unreliable when we first moved and the summer peak demands have caused brownouts.

One of the big problems I have is managing all the power cords for the computer and monitor, and in particular the power bricks or large plugs for the DSL modem, router and other devices in the limited number of sockets on the back of the UPS.

I found some solutions to this problem at TigerDirect.

Ultra and Cables-to-Go make foot-long extension cords, as well as splitter cords that allow you to plug in 2 devices (think of a Y) or 4 devices to one cord. They work better than multi-taps (you know the devices that allow you to plug 3 or 6 cords into a block) because the ends of the cord separates to allow you to plug in those large bricks. They range in price from about $3 to $13 so are relatively inexpensive for the high quality of the cord and the benefit

I originally used a couple of the foot-long cords shown below and built a wood rack around my UPS that holds the bricks all in a line


Ultra and Cables to Go make a 1 to 2 cord splitter or Y splitter also shown below. As you can see they are fairly similar.





However, I recently decided to switch to the 1 to 4 cord splitter shown below for one of the UPSs. This should really eliminate the cable clutter at the back of my UPS!


Clicking on any of the images will take you to corresponding page at TigerDirect!

It ain't difficult folks!

So the whole point of the previous entry was just to say that a basic media PC doesn't require a whole lot of horsepower.

Ripping your CDs, editing your photos and recording TV to play back later doesn't require a very sophisticated computer. My 6 year old PC still does these jobs admirably.

Now video editing is another story.....

Coming next: a description of the actual guts of my first media PC.

My basic Media PC

My experiments with a media PC began fairly simply with the family PC that I had custom built in April 2002 by local computer builder Network Supply. Their web site at the time allowed me to select the components I wanted, gave me the price and they built it in a couple of days. It has had a couple of upgrades since then but it is still running reliably over 6 years later!

Here are the basics of this system:

• A really big Antec full tower case and Antec power supply

• MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard

• AMD Athlon XP 1.5Ghz processor

• 512mb of ram

• ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card

• A CD burner

• Maxtor 40Gb 61040J2 HD

• Windows XP (Windows Media Centre wasn’t released until 2005 and when it was, it was only available to system builders).

I initially used this machine to rip MP3s from my CD collection. I initially used a free version of MusicMatch Jukebox. I purchased an upgrade to get improved media tagging and used it until about a year ago when I started having some issues with it.

I was playing the MP3s on my Sony Clie PEG-N760C. I bought my Clie, which is a Palm operating system PDA, in 2001. I was still using it as an MP3 player with a tiny 128Mb card until this spring. Unfortunately the catch holding the Memory Stick broke so the card was always ejecting. The battery on this thing is still working wonderfully which is a rarity for rechargeable batteries! I still use the Palm PDA functionality which is enhanced by Iambic's wonderful Agendus software. I'm still using an older version of this software from 2003 (v6.14) because it works so well.

An introduction to HTPC - September 2005

I first became interested in media PCs or HTPCs back in September of 2005 after attending a meeting on Home Theatre Technologies at the Ottawa PC User Group (http://www.opcug.ca/public/index.htm).

The majority of discussions were on regular home theatre components such as projectors (LCD, DLP or CRT - it was after all 2005 before the flat screen boom!) and amplifiers. However the last segment was on providing inputs to the system by using an HTPC.

The presenter spoke of options for DVD player software such as Cyberlink PowerDVD, WinDVD and ZoomTek.

The presenter also discussed software programs to use as HTPC such as XLobby (http://www.xlobby.com/), Main Lobby, Microsoft Media Centre and BeyondTV.

Microsoft Media Centre was, at the time, only available on really expensive media PCs costing $2500 or more and it wasn't available as an OEM or retail package.

I tried XLobby on a spare PC and it was really cool, but a bit buggy in 2005! It would be interesting to take a look at it again. Unfortunately I didn't have any other HTPC components to test out anything more than the media organizer features for my music files.

For personal video recorder (PVR) hardware, the presenter recommended an ATI All-In-Wonder video card with integrated tv tuner or the Hauppauge PVR 250 TV (http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_pvr250.html) tuner card. The recommended PVR software was SageTV (www.sagetv.com).

This meeting sparked my interest in HTPCs.

Next: My first HTPC components.

An Introduction

Hi there!

This is my new blog to chronicle my experimentation with HTPCs. Hopefully I will be a bit more prolific on this blog than my other two....

If you are asking what HTPC means, then you are probably in the wrong spot...just kidding.

HTPC stands for Home Theatre Personal Computer. You'll also see the term Media PC used frequently. A HTPC is essentially a personal computer that has additional components that can potentially replace the functionalities of a home theatre system. HTPCs can also be thought of as the next generation of home theatre systems because they create, manage and exploit the digital formats of music, videos, photos and so on.

I think this concept is very exciting because we are moving farther and farther away from physical media for our photos, videos and music.

Just look at iTunes and the whole iPod revolution. You don't see people carrying CD players on the bus any longer. It is all about iPods and MP3 players.

Video editing is relatively easy to do on a PC with video from almost any recent video camera, so don't keep those tapes any longer. Video edit them, add menus, music and burn then to a DVD that you can send to friends and family.

Want to watch and record TV? Use your old VCR, the PVR (personal video recorder) cable or satellite box or the fancier Tivo systems.

While we have download services for music now we will soon have video download services for movies. In fact, Bell (as in Bell Canada) just announced a new video download service this week that will let you rent or permanently buy a video by download.

Finally photos. Digital cameras began to outsell film cameras for the first time in 2006. Mega pixel ratings for cameras have increased from 1.3M to over 10 megapixels on some current cameras.

So these are all things that a HTPC can do.

So my goal as I go along is to talk about my experiments with HTPC, hardware and software, discuss some of the more useful articles I've seen on the web about HTPC components and software and hopefully with time, chronicle the building of my own high-end HTPC.

So come back often!