HTPC solutions.

I love my semi-HTPC.

What's a semi-HTPC? It's like an HTPC, but not quite so hardcore.

I get really bad free to air television reception here. I can see the tower a couple of kilometres away from my lounge room and the building has a good antenna, but when they rewired it some time ago for digital TV some wit decided that the terminal in the master bedroom was more important than the one in the lounge room. I didn't like FTA-TV anyway, so it's no big loss. For these reasons, I didn't want to install tuners in my HTPC. Besides, there was no room in the case after I put all the hardware I wanted in there.

The most usual Linux based HTPC solution is MythTV or the MythBuntu distro. This setup wins, pretty much hands down, compared to others that are available.

XBMC is really great too, but after playing with it I found it's not the best fit for my needs. One of the characteristics I found to not be what I wanted is how slow it is when it is shown a new NFS share. My HTPC box has about 2Tb (i.e. >2000 Gb) of content. The content is mostly my DVD collection ripped to the server so that I can watch what I want, when I want and preserve my DVDs in mint condition - especially the box sets.

After looking around, I found Elisa Media Centre. It works well and works simply. NFS shares don't bother it too much. It has a reasonably low overhead. The user interface is pleasant but is more file oriented than others so it's not a 'new appliance' to learn for non-tech members of your household. Well worth a look. Heck - just install it and try it.

Peace out.