I kind of fell into building a home theater pc. It started by wanting to be able to use my tv as a monitor for music selection but it stopped there for a long while. Than I got a free computer from work that had some unstable video issues that were bad enough for me not to want to use it as my primary computer but fine for a project pc like the media center. But I still had no way to get the signal into our old TV until Dell ran a special and I acquired a 24″ LCD TV with VGA input for around $80. Now we are off, running, and configuring a media center pc based on a fairly crappy 16 MB video card but it works great!
Goals:
- Low Cost
- Reuse things I have
- Play music on my stereo with a menu on the TV; local media for now
- Bonus Goal: To be able to play Hulu, YouTube, etc on it as well
