Home built media center pc's (commonly seen around the internet as Home Theater PC's, or HTPC's) are quite common topics, and you can build one pretty easily. Here's the choices I made that got me mine.
My first choice was I wanted it to stream Netflix. I'm not even sure why this was a requirement other than, if we were going to cut the cable, it seemed logical to supplement OTA TV with a $8 a month streaming service for shows and movies. Kudos for Netflix for being ubiquitous enough that I'd consider them first without even having a subscription. But that influenced the decisions I made quite a bit.
If you want to stream Netflix via a PC, you are limiting what you can do (but probably not more than simply having to to choose another streaming service, like Amazon). But if watching Netflix on your HTPC is important, it pretty much means you will be installing Microsoft Silverlight. And at the time I was going through all this, you could only install Silverlight on a Windows or Mac system. Sorry Linux. So, with Windows 8 released at an introductory low price of $39.99 and no interest in buying a Mac, I started down the road of building an x86 Windows machine.
So on Black Friday 2012 I started my build by purchasing a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 on sale for $75 to give me the DVR function I wanted on my HTPC.
Then (a few days later ironically) I found this in my RSS feeds: Netflix finally comes to ubuntu in the form of an unofficial desktop app. All of a sudden, a Linux machine was a possibility again. But, either way (Linux or Windows) I was already committed to an x86 machine. This just allowed me to experiment with the OS: I'd try Linux first, and if that didn't work, I would try Windows next (hopefully by the time the introductory Windows 8 pricing ended - so by the end of January 2013.) Either way, I still had to find the right hardware for the job I had envisioned for it, and had a deadline that I had to meet if I wanted to save some money.
It was during this build that I realized the truthfulness in what Steve Jobs (at least I think it was him) was once accredited with saying: people don't know what they want, they have to be told what they want. It's true, and I think he took a lot of flack for saying that. But it's still true. I don't know how many times someone will call me up and ask "I'm thinking about buying a [insert make and model] computer. Is that a good one?" To which I always ask, "What do you intend on using it for?" Do you want to play a graphically intensive game on three monitors, then no. Do you want to browse the internet and check your Facebook and email, then it's more than you really need. People more often than not don't know what they want. That's what makes the iPad so dang successful. For people that just want to browse the internet, it's enough. It's a form that meets it's function quite well. I admit it. But computers as they get smaller and smaller will be more and more tailored to a specific function, and it's form will follow.
As was the case with my build. I needed 1080p video support (we planned on getting a new HD TV for Christmas) and as much hardware video support I could get. I wanted low power, low heat, and low noise. I wanted as small a form factor as I could get. (The Roku inspired these points.) And I needed plenty of storage for my DVD collection that I was in the process of converting to mkv's. And it needed to have a PCIe 1x slot for my tv tuner card. Luckily, I had fell in love with a system months prior in my search for a low powered NAS. I went back to www.mini-box.com, and to my surprise they had a new Intel board perfect for my needs: Mini-Box M350 Intel DN2800MT. So I picked it up with a shield bracket and PCIe 1x riser (and shipping) for $180.53.
All that was left was memory and storage, then I could start dealing with the software. The memory wasn't an issue. I had upgraded my netbook memory from 2GB to 4 when I bought it, so I've had 2GB of laptop memory laying around with nothing to do. So as soon as I got my mini-box, it had a home. And 2GB is plenty for what this little system would be doing most of the time. To put a price on it however, I spent $27.90 for the memory: the cost of the 4 GB of memory I put in my netbook. If you were pricing 2GB of laptop memory for this board nowadays, it'd probably be around $20. For storage, I picked up a Samsung 320 GB Hard drive for $40 and a Western Digital Passport 2TB for $150.
I'll note here that I had originally bought the external hard drive to use with the Roku. I ended up re-purposing it at this point because it was unclear if I could fit a second hard drive and the TV tuner card in the mini-box computer. Now that I settled on the mini-box and have it in hand, I probably would have bought an extra HDD bracket for the Mini-Box case and an internal 2TB drive. It would have cost me $40 more, but the box fits two hard drives and the tuner with no problems and would be in a cleaner package behind my TV. I would have probably got a case fan for $4 too. I'll follow up on these points and others in a future 'improvements to be made' post.
I also needed to pick up a USB keyboard for this project (I'm actually quite embarrassed to admit that I haven't had a USB keyboard until now...), and thinking there might be a possibility of using it from the couch, I bought a Logitech K400r (it's wireless and has a mouse touch pad built in) from Walmart for $30. The USB dongle/range extender hides quite well in the front "hidden USB" port of the M350 case from Mini-Box, which frees up the rear ports for other things. This brings the total spent at this point to about $515. What was I saying earlier about not wanting to spend $500 on a Tivo? And I still didn't have an operating system. That will be discussed in my next post.
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