So this weekend I finally did the thing I've been talking about since like August: I built a home theater PC out of parts that were just sitting in a closet doing nothing. My roommate has been asking why there's a milk crate full of computer guts under the stairs for months, and now there isn't, so that's something.
The bones of it are an old Core 2 Duo box I built back in 2008, the one with the cracked front panel USB port that never worked right. Motherboard's a Gigabyte, 4 gigs of RAM, and I dug up an old Radeon HD 4650 from when I upgraded my main rig two years ago. None of this is impressive hardware even by 2011 standards, but it doesn't need to be — it just needs to push 1080p video to a TV and not catch fire.
The actual work took way longer than it should have, mostly because I decided to be cheap and reuse an old 250GB hard drive instead of just buying a new one. Spent forty minutes Saturday morning listening to it click and grind before I gave up and admitted it was dying. Ended up driving to Micro Center and grabbing a 1TB Western Digital Green drive for about $70, which honestly should've just been step one instead of step three.
XBMC, and why I'm stubborn about it
I put XBMC on it (the Dharma release, not messing with anything newer than that on hardware this old) instead of just running Windows Media Center, mostly out of spite from years of fighting with WMC's remote control drivers. XBMC just works once you get the library scraper pointed at the right folders, and the interface still looks better than most stuff Microsoft ships. It took about two hours to get all my ripped DVDs organized into something that actually shows cover art instead of a wall of file names, which is tedious but weirdly satisfying, like alphabetizing a bookshelf.
I did try Ubuntu 11.10 on it first, actually, since I've got it on my laptop already. Big mistake. Unity on a five-year-old graphics card is rough, and I don't care how many people tell me I just need to get used to it, laggy window animations are laggy window animations. Wiped it and went with a leaner Linux install just for XBMC to sit on top of. Not dealing with that again until Canonical figures out what they're doing with the Dash.
The remote situation ended up being the dumbest part of the whole project. I had an old Windows Media Center remote from a Dell I don't even own anymore, and it turns out the USB receiver still pairs fine and XBMC recognized it immediately, no config file editing needed. I was bracing for an hour of googling and instead it just worked, which almost never happens with anything computer related, so I'm choosing to be suspicious about it rather than grateful.
Streaming-wise I've got it hooked up to pull from my NAS for the movie collection, plus I threw a Hulu Desktop shortcut on there for my girlfriend since she's the one who actually watches network TV shows the next morning. I'm not touching Netflix on this thing yet, the plugin situation for XBMC and Netflix is still kind of a mess and I don't feel like debugging DRM nonsense on a Saturday.
Total cost for the whole build, since I'm nosy about other people's numbers when I read stuff like this: $70 for the drive, $12 for a mini-HDMI adapter I didn't already have, and a six dollar case fan because the stock one sounded like a dying hair dryer. So $88 out of pocket for a computer that would've cost four or five hundred bucks new. Not bad for a weekend.
Only real complaint is heat. The case I'm using wasn't designed to sit flat in an entertainment center under a TV, and after about three hours of playback the CPU fan starts ramping up loud enough that you can hear it over quiet dialogue scenes. I might drill some extra vent holes in the top, or just accept that action movies get a little fan noise now. There are worse problems to have.
Next weekend project is probably setting up some kind of remote access so I can queue stuff up from my phone without getting off the couch, because apparently getting off the couch is a bridge too far for me at this point.