I recently dropped DirecTV and switched to over-the-air HDTV, in conjunction with Hulu Plus and Netflix streaming. Of course, I still needed a DVR. Rather than opting for an HD Tivo, I built a new PC just for the purpose. It lets me stream my recordings to an Xbox 360 in the bedroom, it’s easily expandable, and it has the added benefit of letting us do stuff like watch YouTube and play games on our big living room TV.
Here’s my build, in case you’re considering doing something similar.
- Core i3-2100 Processor ($110, 3.1GHz, amazingly fast for the price but low power usage and sips power at idle, cool so the fan’s quiet). If you want true quad-core performance, the $200 Core i5-2400S has similar power usage, but is probably overkill unless you do a lot of video transcoding.
- Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 motherboard ($169 latest Intel chipset, supports swapping between onboard and PCI-E video to reduce power consumption)
- GeForce 560 Ti ($229, plenty of oomph for 1080P, low idle power usage, quiet). If you’re not gaming, you can omit this component.
- 8GB DDR3 RAM ($84.99)
- 2 Samsung Spingpoint 2TB drives ($79 each; Samsung’s the only drive brand I’ve had consistently good luck with in recent years)
- Media Center Remote ($17; mainly using this for the IR receiver as I have a Harmony)
- HDHomeRun TV tuner. This dual-tuner external device is awesome. Any computer in your house with a fast network connection can also access it to watch live TV.
- Memorex Blu-ray reader/DVD writer, $59 on sale at Fry’s.
Though components like this look intimidating, all you need to build a PC is a Phillips screwdriver.
Plus a quiet case (Antec P180; just stuck it behind the TV stand), 550W 80-plus power supply (OCZ, but they’re out of the power supply business), and my old SSD drive to speed bootup. I’m using a sadly now-discontinued MS Bluetooth media keyboard and mouse.
If you don’t want to do a full ATX board, go for an Asus or Gigabyte micro-ATX board based on the Z68 chipset. Then you can opt for a smaller case.
With this setup, the Xbox 360 in the bedroom can watch live TV and recorded shows from the HTPC, in addition to showing Netflix/Zune/Hulu+ content. Even buying 5 or 6 premium channel show subscriptions on Zune (for the shows where we don’t want to wait for the season to hit Netflix), it’s still waaaaay cheaper than a $100+/month cable/satellite bill.