Justin's Zone

Some of you may not know what a Home Theatre PC is.  Basically a HTPC for short is a PC that is dedicated for your TV.  There are many ways to create a HTPC, the cheapest of course using generic parts with hardware hd decoders running Linux.  I have setup three HTPCs all of which worked great.  It took me about 6 months to get the bugs worked out of them.  I can say they can be very nice once you get the kinks worked out.

Do they play Blurays?  No.  Well not easily, see Blurays are encrypted and require special codes to decrypt them.  It’s not as simple as just popping it in and playing.  To play a Bluray you have to decrypt it to your hard drive and then it can be played.  This takes a lot of time and is pretty much useless.  In the future I am sure this will change but right now it sucks.

So why a HTPC?  You can play downloaded HD Video, stream video from YouTube, play music, look at photos, etc.  The possibilities are basically endless.  The best part is you can throw a big hard drive in your computer and stream to as many HTPCs as you want through your home network.

How much?  It depends on what type of HTPC you want.  Do you want the ability to decode HD Video with no lag or skipped frames?  If yes you will need a hardware hd decoder which costs more.  Do you want to burn cds/dvds on it?  If so that costs more.  I really depends on what you want it to do.  I will say though for about $200 it would be possible to build a decent HTPC that would decode lossless HD Video.

Does this replace the need for a Bluray Player?  No!  If you are planning on staying legal you should obviously purchase a Bluray Player.  It will make your life less complicated reducing the need to decrypt and play Blurays which can take as long as a few hours.  The film studios work hard to produce movies and therefore why would you want to steal movies?  It’s illegal to download copyright movies and not only that you lose quality in the video.  Copied Bluray movies are normally transcoded to a smaller size which loses quality of the video.  Signup for Netflix and rent Blurays through the mail!

If you are interested in learning more about HTPC I would suggest looking at Xbox Media Center.  It doesn’t require an XBox, just a Linux or Windows PC.  Although I would highly recommend using it on Linux.  In addition I would recommend using a NVidia GeForce video card that supports hd decoding (aka PureVideo HD).  Xbox Media Center was developed originally for hacked XBoxes (not XBox 360).  It started as Xbox Media Player.

I have been thinking about the different ways you can play downloaded HD Video on your TV.  So far I have been using hybrid Home Theatre PCs to accomplish this.  Just recently I decided why not purchase another XBox 360 for the bedroom.  Now we have two XBox 360’s that are capable of playing HD Video.  The only limitation with XBox 360 is that you cannot exceed a 4GB file due to the FAT32 filesystem.  In addition I tried formatting my external HDD as HFS+ which worked and would allow greater than a 4GB file but the XBox still wouldn’t play it.  It seems there is a limitation with XBox that doesn’t allow any files over 4GB unless they are in Windows Media format.

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I just purchased another server from Linode.  They offer virtual private servers that are amazing!  I decided to run my new sites on a bigger server.  Now my sites and friends sites are hosted on a faster server.  The previous server was a Linode 360 with only 360mb of memory.  The new one is a Linode 540 with 540mb of memory, 24gb of disk space and 300gb of transfer at only $29.95 a month.  It’s running Linux of course (duh!!!), Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit to be exact!

Okay so it’s been a while since I have actually updated my site.  I decided to change it into a blog.  I think this will make it much easier to keep my site up to date and manage.  The days of having static websites that don’t change much are a thing of the past.  In todays world we have Facebook, Twitter, etc. so I figured it’s time for me to adapt as well.  I hope you guys like my blog!