HTPC Musings
I’ve wanted an HTPC for a while now. Before, it was just a stereo component that could play mp3s, and pretty much achieved that, albeit in a pretty hacky way. Now I want something that can not only play mp3s, but also play hd videos at 1080p, in whatever format it’s in (AVI, QT, MKV, MPEG, etc.).
Now that I’m older, I don’t want to make it myself if I can avoid it. I’m past that point in my life. I want to just give someone money and then get back a working solution. Ideally this HTPC would also have dual HD capture ports (component and HDMI) for PVR functionality, but I’ll can do without, at least for now. I thought about getting an AppleTV, but its only 720p and it only handles Quicktime stuff, so that’s not a solution.
The main thing that’s keeping me away from building a MythTV is that I don’t want to dink around with hardware. Linux is always so flakey with hardware. I don’t want to deal with hardware. If I hard a list of hardware that I could just go off, buy a bunch of stuff, burn a disk image, and be guaranteed that it would work, then yeah, sure, maybe. The closest thing I’ve seen as something like that is this blog post, but of course since it’s Linux, this means that the hardware isn’t going to Just Work™. What’s the problem here? Audio out through HDMI doesn’t work. Normally I wouldn’t care about this, but the only HD ports that’s available on Andrew’s TV is HDMI, and we don’t have a receiver, so this is a required feature.
Google had a talk about MythTV, and when the guy talks about hardware (fast forward to 46 minute mark), it’s such a clusterfuck.
Now one of the reasons why I didn’t want to talk about hardware is that it’s different for everybody. Every video card is different. Every remote control is different. And some of them are fiddily, and some of them are just great. [...] Most people, in the US at least, end up with a Hauppauge capture card, and those Just Work™ — mostly.
God. It either Just Works™ or it doesn’t.
Apparently you’re now advised to steer clear of pcHDTV cards, since they can’t do anything useful. Furthermore, from what I can tell, you’re just fucked if you want HD content from a set top box.
God, this is so fucking horrible.
Well maybe the Hauppauge HD-PVR doesn’t suck, but if you want MythTV it crashes whenever you change to a channel that has a different resolution(!), oh and it’s not a complete solution.