Digital Home Thoughts: Home-Brewed Media PC: Trials and Tribulations

"Five years ago, I built a multimedia-enhanced PC platform for the living room. Now for the encore: Just how much could I squeeze into one box, how small could the box be, and would the result meet or beat the multiple boxes it replaced?...This time, in the hope of potentially extending the system's living-room occupancy, I began the project with two admittedly stringent requirements. First, Spirit could be no bigger than the other components in my home-theater cabinet: an audio/video receiver, a Voyetra Turtle Beach Audiotron, an HDTV receiver, an Xbox, an analog tape deck, a DVD player, a ReplayTV 4040, and a VCR. It also couldn't be audible over the normal ambient room noise if I was farther than a few feet away from it. But I also wanted one box to encompass as many as possible of the functions those other components currently performed. Challenging? You bet."

This is a wonderful article, written by Brian Dipert, that covers some of the trials and tribulations of building a home-brewed media centre-type PC. It's a hard-core article for the hard-core among you, and I couldn't help but feel a little thrill of victory as Brian worked through various challenges to get his PC to meet his needs. Ah, the thrills of being a geek. :D