April 11, 2006

The start of my new entertainment center...

I just finished building a media center PC. It convinced me to rebuild my media center. I bough mine 3 years ago as a mid/low end setup with the intention of upgrading over time. The upgrades have yet to happen but that is changing. I'm going to replace the TV now that I have a media PC with more to come later...

Open issues: Cable, Digital Cable, or Satalite? Tivo Series 3? DirectTivo? TivoHD? How do you get the Media center PC to work with anything not broadcast HD?

See extended for what I'm doing...

I decided that I needed a new TV. I made a list of things I wanted... I started wanting a 50+ inch screen but after doing some shopping around and talking to my wife it was clear that 50" would be too big for the room. I decided to start looking at 42" TVs. The next thing I wanted was native 1080p support. While there is very little 1080p content right now this TV needs to last many many years. It turns out that there are very few 1080p TVs on the market right now. None of the current crop of plasma less then 50" is 1080p. None of the projection TVs is 1080p. However, some of the LCD TVs are 1080p. The LCD TVs aren't as bright as the plasma TVs or projection TVs, however, they are very clear and sharp. The TV I have settled on is a Westing House 42" LCD TV - LVM42-W2. This isn't specifically a TV so much as it is a monitor. It has no tuner, not digital nor NTSC. All the reviews are good, I like the look, and it works well with computers and DVDs.

OK so here is our media center:

This system is going to become our file/media canter. The case has room for 6 or so additional drives. The intention is to go with Intel SRCS16 Raid Controler with 6 SATA disks of 300+ GBs in size (maybe up over 500GBs depending on the cost of disks when we finish the system build).

Posted by pqbon at April 11, 2006 12:16 PM