Related articles

• How To: Build An HTPC (With Windows 7)

  I’ve been trying to build great HTPCs for several years, and several generations of PR folks at AMD (formerly ATI) have tried helping me piece together the right components to make my theater room shine. Incidentally, this is one niche where Nvidia has historically had little impact. Of course, those efforts have forever centered on All-in-Wonder graphics cards, which integrated 3D, OTA television reception, time-shifting, and video playback. Not that anything was wrong with the AiW lineup—the cards demonstrated tremendous engineering prowess, as ATI managed to fit all of its multi-media strengths onto boards that didn’t compromise 3D viability. The AiW boards simply didn’t break down all of the barriers to getting PC technology into the living room, as attractive as they were. Ironically, now that the All-in-Wonder family is all but deceased (with one lonely model representing), the age of the HTPC is arguably upon us. You see, previously, incorporating an HTPC into a home entertainment rack almost felt like showing off, since much of its functionality would be redundant. Yeah, you could get a PC wedged in between the stereo receiver and the standalone DVD player. But so much of the concept’s functionality still depended on other components in the rack. You’d run video from the graphics card out to a DVI input, ideally, or a component input if your TV didn’t have the digital connection. You’d run optical or coaxial audio to a stereo receiver, which would be responsible for taking that sound signal, decoding it, and outputting to the non-powered speakers typical in a theater. Adding an HTPC just seemed superfluous. And with a Playstation 3 in the loop, sporting its almost instant-on and rich audio/video playback (plus wireless network connectivity), there’s almost no reason to power-on a PC and wait for it to boot up into a Media Center environment—until now. Maui Makes Nice With The Living Room AMD recently (actually, not so recently—it was late last year) sent us an example of its Maui platform, a collection of hardware that, put together, achieves a remarkable degree of living room functionality despite its desktop PC pedigree. We’ve had the hardware in an HTPC role for a few months now and recently shifted the system’s software environment from the Vista Ultimate/Media Center/TotalMedia Theatre configuration that AMD shipped to a more streamlined (at least we think so) Windows 7/PowerDVD build. In this How To guide, we’ll explain why the HTPC now makes so much sense, we’ll show you the hardware that goes into our test platform (and how it all fits together), and we’ll walk you through using it with Microsoft’s Windows 7 beta, which should be shipping by the end of the year. Truly, this is the hardware/software configuration for which we've been waiting.

• As mentioned, our previous objection to a PC in the living room was its redundancy, especially in the face of modern networked gaming consoles designed to be there. Why bother booting a PC to watch a DVD when the PS3 has Blu-ray functionality built-in? Why bother booting a PC to record a TV show when so many services include their own DVR as part of your monthly package anyway? Why bother booting a PC to listen to .mp3s when your console is already wirelessly connected to the whole collection? But as soon as we got Maui into a living room, it became clear that this can not only be a play on enhancing the functionality of your entertainment center, but also on saving money. There’s no longer a need for redundancy, if you don’t want it. The HTPC we’re building here can take the place of your CD/DVD player with a built-in Blu-ray drive. It can displace your console with the help of an add-in graphics card. It can almost nudge your DVR out of the way, thanks to AMD’s TV Wonder card with dual tuners. And—most important—it’s able to displace your amplifier with its own 5 x 100 W PCI Express card. Or install the optional seven-channel pre-amp and use an existing amp to drive your non-powered surround sound speaker system. Hardware is only one half of the picture. We’ve also seen software take a huge stride forward. It’s true that there’s plenty to like about a Playstation linked up to a home’s media server with access to music, movies, and pictures—in addition to its core competencies as a gaming platform and Blu-ray player. But the console isn’t perfect. If you’re not meticulous about keeping your media organized, trying to find your favorite tunes on the PS3 can quickly become frustrating. In contrast, the Media Center software built into Microsoft’s Windows 7 beta does a beautiful job of tracking down album covers, movie information, and scheduled programming all on its own. Just point the software to your audio repository and video library. It does the rest. Microsoft has put a lot of thought into the 10-foot interface, too. Once you fire up Media Center, you can almost forget about the underlying platform running in the background (even though you’ll undoubtedly find yourself tabbing out to check email or search Wikipedia—I wanted to know more about the F-35 during Live Free or Die Hard). Flipping between music, movies, live television, Internet television, and photo albums with an IR remote is incredibly convenient and much more tailored to the content on your home network. Let’s move on to the hardware inside this improved HTPC.

• When AMD sent us its Maui platform to test, it had preloaded Windows Vista Ultimate, ArcSoft’s TotalMedia Theatre, its own AMD Live Explorer software, and TVTonic’s control panel. We used the hardware and software configuration for a little while and it worked as advertised. But, after sitting down with Microsoft at CES in Last Vegas and getting the full preview of Windows 7’s Media Center interface, we hurriedly chose to shift focus and give the Maui box a spin under new management. Getting the operating system installed (after downloading it from Microsoft’s site, which you can’t do any more) was a breeze. Most of the hardware was detected automatically, and the components that weren’t were summarily brought up to speed after a round of Windows Update. We’ll refrain from making any speed comparisons, since Windows 7 was loaded onto an OCZ Apex-series SSD rather than the PipelineHD magnetic drive provided by AMD. With that said, the Windows 7/SSD combination was smoking fast. From there, setting up the included Windows Media Center only took a couple of steps. Up And Running With Blu-ray We had ArcSoft’s TotalMedia installed in Vista—and it worked well—but we wanted to try out Cyberlink’s PowerDVD 8, which is also optimized to take advantage of AMD’s Avivo decoding technology. Our initial install enabled DVD playback right away, but we weren’t able to get Blu-ray content working. A subsequent patch, which the app automatically prompted us to download, rectified the issue. We were disappointed, however, in how PowerDVD handled Blu-ray content versus standard DVDs. With a regular DVD inserted, playing through Media Center is seamless. Playing Blu-ray content, you get kicked out to the Windows desktop, where PowerDVD fires up in its own window. It’d be nice to have the experience similar in either case. Aside from that one snafu, movie playback is as easy as clicking a button in Media Center. Turning On The TV Getting television up and running under Windows 7 was a little more complicated, but very much a rewarding experience (minus one small technical hurdle left to overcome). And it’s worth noting that the process absolutely demands that you have an Internet connection already up and running. With the analog cable line and ATSC antenna connected to their appropriate coaxial inputs, we began the TV signal setup process. Media Center correctly identified both attached devices and began downloading programming information for a two week span. After detecting available channels, we were able to see the analog and digital options available in one EPG--a task that had vexed Media Center editions prior. From there, bringing up live and recorded content was simple. If you wanted an individual show, right-click and Record. To save an entire series, right-click and choose Record Series. If a given time slot was scheduled to be in high definition, it'd sport an HD tag. Otherwise, the digital channels were easily identifiable by their x.1, x.2, etc. designations in the EPG. We'll get into our tuner-switching issue on the following page. It's also worth noting that Microsoft is counting on an always-on Internet connection here. Company representatives made it a point to show off the growing list of Internet television offerings. And although there is limited content available during this beta period, Microsoft seems determined to get very Hulu-like with on-demand content delivery. Listening To Some Tunes After all of the new (to me) functionality, it was nice to wrap up with my good old fashioned music collection. Whereas I'd persistantly fought with the Playstation 3 in order to get my library to display in some logical fashion (who has time to organize tens of gigabytes of music files these days?), Media Center dove right into the shared music folder on my NAS and created entries in its music library with album covers--where available--to make navigation easier. If you don't want to browse album names alphabetically, Media Center gives you a handful of other sorting techniques, though you're best off if you have put some thought into organization before-the-fact.