Home Media Center

I recently re-purposed an old PC as a home media center in a room that has an old 27" CRT TV and a Dish Network DVR. Our kids wanted to watch DVDs, and this would make that possible, along with a few other things. I would have preferred to use LinuxMCE or Mythbuntu (Ubuntu-based MythTV distributions), but I wanted to be able to watch streaming video from Netflix, and their player only works on Windows. Therefore, I installed Windows XP and the Windows version of the open source VideoLAN VLC media player. This is an excellent video player that accommodates a wide variety of video codecs/formats, including Ogg Theora. I went through the house a while ago and gathered up all our DVDs and encoded them into Ogg Theora files on our home file server (an HP MediaVault MV2020) using Thoggen, which comes with Ubuntu Linux. It's delightfully simple to use. At 50% compression, a typical movie takes about 2 GB of disk space, and I can't tell that it's been compressed. Now, in addition to Dish Network, we can watch DVDs, all the movies I've stored up on our file server, Netflix streaming video, and any other videos on the Internet (e.g. YouTube, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.). The media center PC is connected to the TV with an S-Video cable, and it has its own set of nice speakers, including a subwoofer. The TV simply appears to the PC as a second screen on its extended desktop.

I've also been exploring the idea of using a 24" iMac as a media center. The screen is about the same size as that nasty old 27" CRT; larger if you consider that it's a wide screen. I found a device for about $200 (eyeTV from elgato) that would let me plug in other video sources, such as free broadcast digital TV, my Dish Network DVR, VHS video player, etc. Their software also gives you DVR functionality on your Mac. I just might have to take the plunge and go get that 24" iMac :)

I've also been exploring ditching Dish Network for free broadcast digital TV. We pay about $60/month for Dish, and there are only a couple shows that we watch that aren't available on the local stations, Netflix, or the Internet. Hmm... $60/month for two shows? Not a very good deal. For broadcast TV, you can see which stations broadcast in your area and where to point the antenna at AntennaWeb. The DB4 HDTV antenna at Antennas Direct looks like a pretty good deal for $69. I'm still thinking about it...