Building an entertainment PC

atothej

Hi Folks - I had a brilliant brainwave a while back of inventing (!?!) a compact sized PC to replace the clutter you have around your TV, such as dvd player, stereo, divx player etc... I couldn't believe nobody had thought of it sooner! I have since seen the adverts for PC World, where indeed people had thought of it, and were producing them at a mass scale!:mad:

Anyway, I'd like to build my own version - I don't know much about the inner workings of computers, but thought I'd give it a go. Any advice would be really appreciated. I would like it to:

* Have a large hard-drive, so I can put on all my albums and downloaded shows
* Be quite small is size and quiet (my current PC soundslike a tractor)
* Have two outputs - one for the TV, but also another small monitor, so I don't have to have the telly on when listening to music etc... Can this be done - WOuld a touch screen monitor be possible?
* Have a dvd/cd rewriter - Do they have HD versions of these yet?

So what do you reckon? Would it be worth trying to build one of these, and would it do the job?

Is there anything else I should be thinking/concerned about?

Sorry for the barraige of questions, but after having months of swapping scarts, lots of plugs and extension leads etc... I wouldn't mind putting this into action

Any help appreciated - cheers

Blacksheep1979

Have a look at MythTV - loads of forums reccomending hardware depending on what you want.

neilwoods

I was looking at building a similar system, until i bought and Archos Av500.

The price i was looking at was around the £500 - £600 range.

If you are serious about it, go a Miro-itx board about half the size of a micro atx, and is also fanless, so no noise.

a 10" touch screen is about the £200 - £250 and will work fine. Also go for wireless or bluetooth, for the speaker system.

So not cheap.

May be better to turn your existing pc into a media centre.

http://www.pcplus.co.uk/tutorials/hardware/the_diy_media_centre

atothej

Thanks for the advice guys - I've scrapped the whole touch screen idea once I saw how much that would cost, and since discovering my lcd has that picture in picture, so no need anymore.

And yes twist3d - thats the sort of case I would want - nothing too bulky, but it would need to be quiet - I've found a very nice one, but its a bit steep at £110 - http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/129281/rb/0

I've also stumbled accross pc remote controls which would be very handy, but are they any good?

So the search continues......

Conor_3

If you use Windows Media Centre either in Windows XP MCE or Vista Premium/Ultimate, the controls are great. Also, I prefer Media Center in Windows because it seems to work a lot better and with a lot less hassle than MythTV and the 7 day EPG is great.

350nutter

I've been running a media centre PC in the living room for the last 2 years. It's lashed up around an old shuttle PC which is hidden in a cupboard, with just an infra red eye visible sat on the TV.

Love it, I intended running it for a couple of weeks to see if I liked the idea before building a better spec'd machine but just carried on using it caus it does the job.

If you're interested these are the specs,

Athlon 2800 processor
512Mb Ram
2x 250Gb Samsung spinpoint HDDs
DVD-RW
Windows XP MCE 2005
2x Hauppage TV tuners (freeview)

I will upgrade at somepoint when HD TVs and HD-DVD (for PC) are cheaper, but for the next couple of years it'll be fine.