Thursday, May 29, 2008

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!