Build a Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC)

Save Money by Building a Computer to Run Your Television

First, the upfront facts. I built this computer for a couple of reasons. I noticed that my wife and I were watching more and more content online via the Internet. Sites like ABC.com, NBC.com, etc. where we could watch the shows that we missed from the prior week. Also, Netflix introduced its online movie streaming and we were watching quite a bit of content from there as well. I stopped and thought to myself, why do I have a TV sitting here in front of me when I ended up watching more on the laptop sitting on the coffee table.

Also, as you probably are aware, digital tv is here and soon, February, it will be the only option. Analog tv signals will go away and I only had an analog television. I needed to do something if I wanted to use my television for more than a place to set today's mail.

The last thing that made my mind up was that I wanted more content than just the local network stations. I'm too smart (my wife would say cheap) to pay for cable or satellite services. Call me crazy, but I don't like paying for television that just repeats all month long. I had hear rumors that the Microsoft Windows Media Center offered the ability to work with a tv tuner (for local channels) and provided additional Internet content. Add that to the services I mentioned before (ABC.com, NBC.com, netflix) and more, and I had all of the content that I could stand.

So, off to building a computer.

The main steps:

1) Get the computer. In my case, I bought all of the parts to build a computer. I work with computers for a living so I know my way around the insides of one. Certainly, you can choose to purchase a media capable computer from any of the popular vendors. You can also purchase a regular computer and then add the missing parts to make it a media capable pc. I chose to build my own because, first, I think it is fun to build computers. Second, I wanted to make sure it was capable of doing many things and expandable for the future. Lastly, I wanted to obtain a specific look from the computer, so that it didn't just look like a computer sitting in my living room.