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hello, I had this idea of making a nice computer for my living room- it would hook up to the stereo and TV, and be used for music, tv shows, movies, pictures and video games. I recently downloaded a lot of roms for the old NES and SNES systems, and from what I've seen it shouldn't cost too much money to make something like this. I had a few questions though, that someone might be able to help me with- what kind of video card should I use, if I'm going to be using a TV as a monitor? ITunes is great for playing and organizing music, but is there a similar program for movies, where you can categorize them by genre, producer, etc? What is the best option for expandable hard disk space- external hard drives that can be chained with firewire, or some kind of RAID setup? What do you think?
I don't really know if 'gadget freaks' is the right place to post this, but I was also wondering if it's difficult to upgrade from a video card that's on the motherboard to a separate one- do new video cards have separate outputs for monitors/TVs and stuff?
hey
get yourself a mac mini, run vista on it for the roms, don't bother for the video card.
Most recent graphics cards will have a variety of outputs on the back - just plug it into a PCI socket and install the drivers and it should take over from the integrated graphics.
The most common output on graphics cards that can plug into a TV (I think) is S-Video. You can get HDMI, but you'd need a TV that has the requisite input. You may also me able to get cables that convert from VGA or DVI ouputs to something you can plug into your TV.
I'm in the middle of trying to do something similar, but my S-Video cable hasn't arrived yet so I coulnd't say how well its worked. I have an ominous feeling that I'm going to need to find a separate audio cable (and given the 10m gap between PC and TV, that may be difficult)
MediaPortal has an excellent feature set. It has a largish memory footprint, but that shouldn't be a problem on a dedicated box.
damn.. after thinking about this for a while I decided to look around to see if I could find reasonably priced hardware to take the input from a set top Sky Digital box (probably SCART) and capture it onto a hard drive, or push it straight back out again to a PC monitor, or a TV screen.
Harder than it should be, but maybe I need to think through exactly what it is that I want to end up with then look again
Trying to find a cable to connect a Scart lead to a computer is hard, as is trying to find a decent TV capture card for less than £300
yea, i wanna do something like this.. hopefully!!
My plan has progressed
I realised that we don't use the aerial connection for TV (because it sucks) but use our Sky-box for everything. I also remembered the little adapter thingy I have that turns SCART into PC-friendly S-Video and Phono audio connections
With a little research, I found a thing to split a SCART in 2 (one output going to 2 inputs) so I can leave Sky connected to the TV whilst connecting it to the PC as well, plus a lead to go from the 2 phono connections to an audio jack (to connect to the PC)
So, TV can come in through the Sky Box then be sent simultaneously to TV and PC (found a £30 video capture card too), on the PC end it splits into audio and video before it gets there, and is then sent to monitor and speakers respectively, or recorded onto the hard disc.
In reverse, files on the PC can be sent out of the S-Video connection on my graphics card and the line out (audio jack) from my sound card, (which is then split into 2 phonos by another of the same cable) and displayed on the TV.
Unfortunately all this cable, whilst not that expensive per cable, adds up by the time you have audio and video going both ways
MediaPortal has an excellent feature set. It has a largish memory footprint, but that shouldn't be a problem on a dedicated box.
*Looks at this in an interested way*
If I went ahead with the plan outlined above, would it be able to figure out that Sky has a whole bunch of different channels that all come in via one line and be able to change channel within that?
I get the impression that if your tv card (or whatever) can handle it then so can MediaPortal.
Make sure that MediaPortal supports the card you're using though
I'm getting (read: have already ordered) one that's very similar to one listed - same manufacturer and a similar looking box, but a different model... that should be fine right?
I can vouch for MediaPortal. I like everything about it except for the PVR capability. For PVR i use BeyondTV .
I recommend Mythtv but only if you're comfortable with linux. I've set mine up and love it
Go buy a prebult media center from the shop with Vista Ultimate on it... then install the cole2k codec pack. You're done and you'll love it.
and how much will that cost?
I would also resent having to support Vista, and end up wanting to destroy it if it ever tried to DRM-inate me
