Daydreaming

I’m not really very happy with my current home theatre/HTPC setup right now, mainly because the HTPC is a big, ugly, noisy, power-hungry tower made out of leftover components of older systems (typically stuff gets ‘handed down’ from my gaming system to the Linux box).

What I sometimes think of doing is replacing the whole thing with a small form factor PC of some sort, like a Mac Mini, which would certainly be much smaller, quieter, and use less power. But, in order for it to fulfill the same duties, some other pieces are needed:

TV capture
Fortunately MythTV and the Linux drivers support some USB capture cards, so I don’t need it built-in to the base system or a free PCI slot.

Storage
I’m currently using a fair bit of storage, and part of the reason the tower works well is that there’s plenty of room for hard drives in it. I have a total of 1.25TB of disk space across three drives right now, which certainly isn’t going to fit inside the Mini or any other SFF box.

So, what am I actually using all that space for? About 350GB of it is ‘personal’ files (pictures, music, non-TV video, documents, archives, etc.), 470GB of it is MythTV recordings, 40GB is backup data, and the rest is mostly free space. That makes things a bit hard to split up, since although I have 500GB and 750GB drives I can reuse, they’re 3.5″ and the internal Mini drive is a 2.5″, which limits me for now to 320GB of internal space (looks like the only 500GB 2.5″ drives right now are slower 5400RPM ones). There are probably other SFF boxes that will take 3.5″ internal drives, but it would take a bit more research.

In any case even if I can fit the 750GB drive into the HTPC, that’s still not enough total space, so some external space would be needed as well. I could slap 4x1TB drives into a Drobo…if I were rich. Since I’m not, a standard USB/FW enclosure will have to do. A 500GB internal drive for the personal files and a 750GB external drive for the MythTV recordings would probably suffice for quite a while (or possibly a double-drive enclosure for the other 500GB drive or future expansion).

There’s still the issue of backups though. There might be enough free space to squeeze them onto one of the above drives, but having them on the same system makes me a bit nervous. It would be better if backups were kept separately, which leads me to…

Networking
My old Linksys router is working fine, but it’s missing gigabit ethernet and Wireless-N, which would be rather nice now that I have systems capable of them (the Wireless-N in particular, since there’s still a fair bit of 2.4GHz interference around here). Both would be provided by something like Apple’s Time Capsule, with the added bonus of being able to do Time Machine backups to it for the laptop, and the ability to add a USB drive to it for some network storage, which could be used for the aforementioned backups.

Audio
It would be nice to clean up the audio mess too, since right now I’m routing the audio through two PCs in order to mix in the consoles and get everything to a single set of PC speakers, which means that I have to have the gaming PC turned on just to get the audio from the PS3. And right now I actually have two sound cards in the HTPC since I want some audio output to go to the TV (i.e., MythTV), and some to go to the computer speakers (everything else). Since I hardly ever actually use the console of the HTPC, I could just let everything route to the TV, and a decent receiver and set of speakers should take care of that.

In the end, the gaming PC would be hooked up directly to the PC speakers, with a headphone switch, and everything else would go to the receiver.

Power
Unfortunately the change to using external components winds up adding three wall warts to the AC power requirements, and it often feels like I’ve got too damn many of the things already. At least total power consumption would still be a bit lower.

Television
And I still need a new TV of some sort. I still need to do more research here, but it doesn’t really affect anything else as long as it has enough inputs (at least one HDMI for the PS3, one VGA for the 360, one component for the Wii, one more DVI/HDMI/VGA for the HTPC, and one or more HDMI/component for a potential future digital cable box, TiVo, or whatever).

Miscellaneous
I’d also probably need a new KVM so that I can continue to use a single keyboard and mouse for both the gaming box and the HTPC. I already have one, but it’s for PS/2 devices, and it’s about time to switch over to USB anyway.

Cost
At the bare minimum, just replacing the HTPC, I’d be looking at $650 for the Mini or comparable SFF box, $170 for the USB TV tuner, $60 for a decent enclosure, and $30 for a bare-bones VGA+USB KVM, for a total of $910. And that’s just to replace something that already works just fine with something that’s just quieter and smaller.

Then add on another $390 for a Time Capsule and another enclosure for the network and backup improvements, for a new total of $1300.

And then here’s where the daydreaming ends, since it would be nice. But not that nice…