2010-10-21, 06:04
Hi,
I'm new to the world of Home Theater PCs, but I've heard good things about them and the concept seems very cool and useful. I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction as far as getting started and make some recommendations for me. I want to build a Home Theater PC. I saw an article on Lifehacker that used a Nettop PC for this, but I was wondering if this is the best option.
I would like to minimize cost without sacrificing too much in quality. I would like my Home Theater PC to be able to play the many TV shows I've already downloaded from torrents (some HD quality, some regular quality), as well as work with torrent trackers to automatically download new episodes as they become available and seed torrented TV files to keep my ratio up on the trackers. I plan on starting with one, but depending on how this goes, will eventually move up to three PCs, each hooked up to a different TV in a different room in different parts of my house. I would like to share libraries between the three, so I'm guessing a large external hard drive plugged into one of the Home Theater PCs and shared over my wireless network would be the best bet?
Right now, I have a MacBook Pro laptop running Snow Leopard as my main computer. I also have a desktop with Windows 7 that my brother mainly uses but I can use it if I needed to set something up for this that was only Windows compatible.
What do I need to buy to get this project started? I would like to keep things as simple as possible at first, while still having my Home Theater PC be torrent/seeding compatible. I guess I need something simple, small, and quiet, but still powerful.
Any help/advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
I'm new to the world of Home Theater PCs, but I've heard good things about them and the concept seems very cool and useful. I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction as far as getting started and make some recommendations for me. I want to build a Home Theater PC. I saw an article on Lifehacker that used a Nettop PC for this, but I was wondering if this is the best option.
I would like to minimize cost without sacrificing too much in quality. I would like my Home Theater PC to be able to play the many TV shows I've already downloaded from torrents (some HD quality, some regular quality), as well as work with torrent trackers to automatically download new episodes as they become available and seed torrented TV files to keep my ratio up on the trackers. I plan on starting with one, but depending on how this goes, will eventually move up to three PCs, each hooked up to a different TV in a different room in different parts of my house. I would like to share libraries between the three, so I'm guessing a large external hard drive plugged into one of the Home Theater PCs and shared over my wireless network would be the best bet?
Right now, I have a MacBook Pro laptop running Snow Leopard as my main computer. I also have a desktop with Windows 7 that my brother mainly uses but I can use it if I needed to set something up for this that was only Windows compatible.
What do I need to buy to get this project started? I would like to keep things as simple as possible at first, while still having my Home Theater PC be torrent/seeding compatible. I guess I need something simple, small, and quiet, but still powerful.
Any help/advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.
