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I started thinking about building a Home Theatre Personal Computer (HTPC) after my VCR started to deteriorate. I looked into buying a new VCR, but the quality wasn't anywhere near my 12 year old model. I also wanted the ability to record more than 10 hours on one tape. A PC solution seemed to fit the bill.

I feel, at the moment, HTPCs are still an experimental use for a computer. For this reason I took an "out of the box" approach to hardware and software. I bought a video card with TV In/Out and found software that had all the functions needed for an HTPC. There are separate solutions for each task, but until I know more about the subject I did not want to have to fiddle with a lot of different hardware and software. I started building my HTPC in early 2003 and it took a few weeks to get all the settings optimized but after some tweaking I have a very stable and capavble HTPC.

It has been tremendously rewarding and successful. So much so that I wish I had bought a whole new computer and built it as a dedicated HTPC machine. In the future I would like to build such a beast, based hopefully on Linux, since this is such a fascinating OS.

Please email me at:

me if you have any comments, suggestions, additions. The purpose of this website is to encourage people to try out HTPCs and I hope this helps, but of course I will not be liable if anything goes wrong. All prices are in Canadian dollars.

Last Updated 2007/05/04

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