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Using Your PC as a Home Theater

By Alan M Johnson

What could be better than relaxing at home watching a film, browsing the Internet for sites of interest, listening to your favourite music, watching your favourite TV show either live or recorded from digital High Definition TV or spending a couple of hours whacking your enemy, the Horde, in World of Warcraft. Once upon a time you needed at least half a dozen different expensive items of hardware in your home to do this, but not any more.

It's a truism now to say that readers of newspapers and magazines are down while online based news, reviews and entertainment are up. Even more true its proving far more resilient in these tough and turbulent times than traditional media. Computer entertainment is so engaging and involving. You can immerse yourself in a virtual world of an alternate reality it's no surprise it's proving very attractive and growing an ever larger community.

What is an HTPC?

The Home Theatre PC is just that, a PC which is capable of also serving as a home theatre system. You can use it to:

• Watch films on Blu-Ray, DVD or HD-DVD, or directly off the disk storage in your PC
• Watch live digital or analogue, terrestrial, cable or satellite TV (known as DVB-T, DVB-C and DVB-S, or for HD content DVB-T2, DVB-C2 and DVB-S2)
• Listen to high quality music from CD, DVD-Audio, SACD or High Definition audio on Blu-Ray
• To manage your own personal video (H.264 or MPEG4) and photograph collections
• To manage your own music collection in MP3, record off your CD collection or directly from the Internet through Spotify or a similar channel
• Browse the Internet or your emails
• Do your office word-processing or financial admin
• Play PC games and simulators with wireless motion controllers and game pads

Because of its incredible versatility the PC can do everything you'd expect of a PC and all the functions of a high end powerful Home Theatre setup. Modern advances in monitors, keyboards and mice also mean they are very useable from the comfort of your living room. No need to tuck it all away in your home office.

Why is an HTPC better than a BluRay player, or specialised device?

Recent reviews in specialist magazines of high end Home Theatre PC's have demonstrated that the PC's compute power and upgrade flexibility give it the capability to quickly adopt emerging standards and surpass the performance of a dedicated device. Typically a dedicated device will use relatively long in the tooth trusted and reliable old technology. Utilising processors from five or so years ago when a modern video card for example has over a Teraflop of compute power to bring to dedicate to the process of decoding Blu-Ray content and displaying it in the best possible quality, frame after frame.

De-mystifying the common techno-babble

Rarely have there been so many standards and acronyms and consequentially misinformation tied up with what is essentially a very simple task. From the viewers or listeners perspective all they want to do is watch a film or listen to music, or both. We don't care how it's stored, what cable it comes out of, how it's encoded or copyright protected etc. All the acronyms and technical specs you see are really about these things and understanding what they relate to makes it very easy to work out what matters and what doesn't. So let's divide these up into categories and see what there is, and what we really need. After this background it will be easier to understand what you need your Home Theatre PC to do and why.