My First HTPC's Core Components

I described the core components of my first HTPC previously but the real guts of it were the following components:

• The secondary 80Gb hard drive was replaced by a Maxtor 200G 6Y200PO for storing media files.
• Hauppauge WinTV 150 PVR video capture card.
• Pioneer DVR-105 DVD-RW drive

I like to put my operating system on one hard drive, usually an 80Gb to 200Gb drive and set up my user folders on a second, larger hard drive. This allows me to image the O/S drive and restore it easily if I have any hardware or virus problems. Keeping data files on the second drive allows the creation of easy backups. The 200Gb drive was quite adequate for recording TV shows in high quality mode on the Hauppauge card.

The Hauppauge WinTV 150 video capture card is a basic analog TV card but it comes with WinTV software to watch TV and Ulead’s DVD Factory to convert and burn videos to DVD. It works quite well and the onboard MPEG2 encoder takes the load off your CPU and video card while capturing video. I believe it will still work if you are using a cable box or digital converter.

It is available at numerous vendors including Dell or NCIX.

Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150MCE - TV / radio tuner / video input adapter - PCI - NTSC, PAL



The Pioneer DVD drive was one of the first good DVD writers but boy was it slow, recording only at 4X speed!