I’m currently in the latter stages of transitioning my family away from cable/satellite for our TV service toward just using over-the-air, along with the internet. I’ve been a DirecTV customer since the summer of 2001, and the service, along with the bill, has been a part of life for over a decade for me. Our family income has remained steady through the economic downturn, and we are fairing well. However, we don’t take that for granted, and still take a look at our expenses from time to time and look for ways of cutting unnecessary expenses. It has come time that we are not only comfortable with losing our satellite service, we look forward to it. Our service costs about $100/month, which gets us: the “Choice Xtra” package, HD service, an HD-DVR, equipment protection, and a second receiver (a first-generation Tivo I bought shortly after getting DirecTV service back in 2001). That $100/month does NOT get us any movie channels, sports packages, or receivers beyond the two mentioned. We have two HDTVs, and I hooked them both up to the same receiver about two years ago. The one where the receiver is located is hooked up via HDMI, and the one upstairs in the family room is hooked up via Component cables that I ran through the ceiling and walls (five coax cables with RCA connections on each end). We control it through RF remote controls.

No more, we’re moving away from that and towards an extra $100 in our pockets every month.

This first post on our setup is dedicated to sharing the hardware that I used to build our system. We currently have a brand-new HTPC that I build in recent weeks hooked up in our entertainment room to the same TV that has the DirecTV receiver. We also have an older laptop hooked up to the other HDTV. The laptop is a Dual-Core Pentium machine running Windows 7 Pro – 32-bit. This machine acts only as a viewer, the new HTPC is doing the work of recording. We also have an X-Box 360 that can work as an extender, but it is hooked up to the same TV as the laptop, so it doesn’t get used much for watching TV (for reasons I may get into later).

Here is the hardware that makes up my HTPC:

The case

Some time ago, when the idea of an HTPC was first born, I found the nMEDIAPC Red Wood case at Newegg. It is simply a beautiful case. It looks like an old radio, and looks great on the shelf nest to the TV. I could have gone with a simple black box meant to go in an entertainment center with the audio receiver, DVD/Blu-Ray player, and other equipment, but the price on this one was similar to those simpler cases and was too cool to pass up. It’s slightly more complicated than your average case, since it’s made mostly from wood, but nothing too complicated.

I also sprang for the LCD display, a $40 add-on. The cool-factor is really there, though I can’t say it’s perfect. The driver on it often locks up, causing it to display a blue bar across the top row of the display, and the blue color of the display makes it difficult to read from more than 4-5 feet away. I have 20/20 vision and have a hard time reading it from the couch, about 8-10 feet away. That said, it is cool enough that I would spring for it again if I were to start over knowing what I know now.

The case was $90, and the LCD panel added an additional $40 for a total of $130.

The Power Supply

Not much to say here, I went to Microcenter and bought the best thing I could find in a mid-tier price range. It’s not worth skimping on a power-supply, as a cheap one will inevitably give you problems. On the other hand, spending $150 is a bit much. I opted for a Cooler Master 500 watt model for about $50 before a $10 Mail-in-Rebate.

The Motherboard

I got the Asus P8H67-M PRO/CSM. I wanted a board that had everything I needed at a reasonable price. This machine isn’t going to power cutting-edge games or edit home videos, so it didn’t need excessive power. Normally I opt for a dedicated video card, but this machine really didn’t need one of those either, so on-board video was the way to go. Just about everything you’ll need is on this board: video, audio, ethernet, and it has plenty of USB expansion, especially internally. The built-in card readers on the case, as well as the add-on LCD panel use internal USB headers, and there are enough on this board with a few left over for other uses (five pairs).

Another feature I wanted, which isn’t hard to find in modern boards, is RAID built in. For the most part this isn’t going to be necessary for an HTPC, but I had several 1TB hard drives laying around and wanted to combine them in RAID-0 to build a single 3TB drive rather than buying a drive larger than I had, especially with hard drive costs being what they are today.

I paid $116 for this board.

The Processor

I’m a bit of a processor snob. I don’t spend more on a processor than I would on an entire mid-tier computer, but I do look for an economical sweet-spot where I can get a good processor at a price that isn’t outrageous. For this, I went with the Intel Core-i5 2500K. It’s a perky Sandy-bridge based CPU that is more than capable for this particular application. It came in at $235.

The Memory

Normally with RAM prices what they are, I would have just maxed out the system at 16GB and been done. However, I didn’t think that was necessary at this time, and opted for half of that. The board will accept four sticks at 4GB each, and I got two. It can easily be expanded later if needed. I grabbed a Corsair XMS3 8GB kit for $48.

The Hard Drives

I’ve already mentioned that I saved a little money by connecting three 1TB drives together in a RAID-0 array rather than buying a large drive. Had I not had these drives on my shelf already, I would have gotten the biggest drive I could find in the $100-$150 price range, likely giving me about 2TB at today’s prices.

Those are only used for recordings though, I did spring for an SSD to run Windows and a few programs that are loaded on the machine. For that, I opted for the OCZ 60 GB Agility 3, which is a fast SATA III drive. It was a bit of a splurge, ringing in at an unnecessary $90.

The Tuner

You can’t have an HTPC without a TV tuner. Well, I suppose you could, but the purpose of this one is primarily to run as a DVR using Windows Media Center.

The most popular tuners on the market today are made by Hauppauge. Those are good cards, but that’s not what I’m using. Instead, I went for the lesser known HDHomeRun HDHR3-CC by Silicon Dust. This is an excellent tuner for several reasons.

First of all, it has three tuners built into it, so you start off with the ability to record up to three shows at the same time (or watch and record any combination of three shows).

Second, it isn’t an internal PCI-based tuner, but rather it’s network-based. This means that it doesn’t even need to be in the same room as the computer. Mine is in my utility room where all of my ethernet and TV signals come together. Another benefit from it being network-based is that multiple computers can share the same tuner. Since this one has three built in, it simply picks the first one available (you can set the priority in Media Center).

The third reason I love this tuner is that it has a Cable Card slot. We don’t intend to switch from satellite to cable, but the option is there should we change our minds and decide we just can’t live without the channels we’re giving up.

There is a caveat to the Cable Card compatibility with this tuner, though not one that effects me. That is that channels that are encrypted, and unlocked with the cable card are only compatible with Windows Media Center. Otherwise this tuner is compatible with MythTV on Linux or other DVR software packages on all platforms. Given that we are using only over-the-air channels, and the system runs WMC, this isn’t an issue for us.

The signal we are using is coming in from the cable company. We use them for internet and phone, and the local channels are all provided on the wire. In case you’re thinking “aren’t you stealing?” No, we don’t get any channels that aren’t (at least hypothetically) available free via an antenna. Also, the FCC requires that these channels be unencrypted, the cable company isn’t allowed to restrict them. Should this change (and they are trying), we can switch over to an antenna in the attic, though I pray we don’t because some channels don’t come in well with my existing antenna.

I was first inspired to get the HDHomeRun after buying an older model when it came up on Woot as the daily deal. My older tuner doesn’t work as well, has only one tuner, and does not support cable card though. I set this tuner as the last on the priority list in WMC so that it can be used if needed, but that is highly unlikely. It is priority 2 of 4 on the other computers that would only access it for live tv, also a rarity in our house.

The HDHR3-CC set us back $200.

Input Devices

The last bit of hardware that you’ll need is a way to interact with the machine. I went with a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard with a built-in trackpad that makes it a pretty good option to run the machine from the couch. It set me back $40.

I also got a cheap remote control and IR receiver combo for $13. It’s an off-brand, but if you do a quick search on Amazon or Newegg, you’ll find one cheap. It works well for what it does. The only thing I think it lacks is the ability to control the TV’s power and volume/mute. For this I used my remote to train a Logitech Harmony (the 200 model is only $20), but I don’t include this in the overall price because it really isn’t necessary.

The Operating System

The last expense in any HTPC is the operating system. For this we are using Windows 7 Pro – 64-Bit. The reason I opted for this particular version is that I have a friend who has an MSDN account who could give me a free, legal copy. He had several unused licenses and had no problem parting with one.

Had I not had that option, I would have gone with the cheapest version of Windows 7 I could legally get my hands on that has WMC. There are several options if you’re in that boat. One option is, if you know a student, or someone with a .edu email address, you can get a copy of Windows 7 Professional for $30 Directly from Microsoft. There is one huge caveat to this though (besides needing access to a .edu email address). That is that it is only an upgrade, not the full version. You’ll need to have XP or Vista installed on your machine first before you can load Win 7.

The other option I’d look into is an OEM copy (Original Equipment Manufacturer). Because this machine is almost exclusively used as a DVR, the only necessity is that it have WMC. This means that Home Premium will work just fine. Take a look around, you can often find OEM copies from retailers (online and traditional) that sell computer parts. As a general rule, if you can buy a processor or motherboard from them, you can probably get an OEM copy of Windows too. Newegg has the Home Premium OEM version of Windows 7 listed at $100. A retail copy of the same version goes for $190 on the same website. You’re paying for packaging, it’s the exact same software.

The Conclusion

Total price of hardware and software for my system was about $912.

If you’re building the same system, you’ll need a storage hard drive, which I didn’t buy for this. At today’s price, a 2TB drive will set you back a minimum of $120. You’ll also need a copy of Windows 7, which will set you back $100, assuming you go OEM. I’d skip the SSD if I were paying for another hard drive though. That brings the price up to just under $1100. It seems really expensive, but remember that I’m about to drop my $100/month satellite bill, meaning this system will be paid for in under a year, and I have a pretty cool computer to show for it.

Another option I did look into was getting a Tivo. The most comparable option was their top-of-the-line unit, which rings in at about $300 for a system with four tuners built in. Add to that the service cost, which is another $500 for lifetime service and you’re up to $800 for a system that will work on a single TV. I opted for what cost me an extra $112 and utilized another computer that otherwise goes unused so that I could expand to a second TV easily. Also, the WMC system allows you to, if you really want, burn recordings to DVD to take with you. I also love that there really is no limit to the media I can play on this machine. Any site with embedded video, any format of any media file, the choices are endless, and not constrained to what Tivo chooses to support. I also have a computer that can put to another use if anything ever changes.

That completes my system, at least in regards to hardware an operating system. In my next post on the subject, I’ll write about the software I have loaded (besides Windows 7), as well as settings and other issues.