What is So Great About Home Theater PCs?

Most home theater junkies today start building their massive audio and video system with the latest flat screen HDTV, THX certified components and gaming system to work flawlessly together in a harmony of awesomeness. Unfortunately, most of the time, our great entertainment centerpiece is capped off by clunky cable boxes and horrible onscreen guides lacking features.

What Microsoft has done is provide a home entertainment plug-in for their newest operating systems. Windows Media center allows you to watch your cable TV channels as well as record them with DVR capabilities provided you have an installed TV tuner card from such manufactures such as ATI and Hauppauge.

What specific advantages you will have by owning a HTPC is the ability to customize your home theater experience to your taste. There are many features and plug-ins available some official and some not so official that you can utilize.

Windows Media Center also implements rich interactive web content to their platform. You can get clips and highlights of news, sports, business, tech, comedy as well as popular TV shows on demand. One of the greatest features that I use quite often is the internet radio option. Setup as many Internet radio channel streams as you want. There is virtually any and every Genre of music available that can be streamed to your computer from the web.

The biggest drawback up until now was not being able to receive encrypted digital channels and display them in Windows Media Center. The Cable Company for obvious reasons does not provide their premium channels in the clear; you have to use a provided cable box or CableCard.

Not being able to have all of your premium channels available through Window Media Center has made a lot of individual consumers shy away from this great product. There are OEM CableCard HTPC's available today but at a premium price. Many DIY home theater PC builders have cried out for some time to come up with their own solution and have finally come up with one. There are good guides available on the internet regarding the building procedures of a DIY HTPC.

Building your very own HTPC can be a rewarding experience. You will have greater control over your options and you can save a lot of money as opposed to buying an OEM CableCard ready system. You can also expand out to all of your TV's throughout the house with the option of purchasing a good quality Microsoft approved Media Extender. A little known fact that you may not know is that your X-Box 360 can double as a Media Extender as well.