Do you think that a desktop can become an entertainment center?

[Camdra]

You may have an additional tower with power supply. What are the benefits of its implementation and serve as an entertainment center? Currently I have 46 "plasma 720 and a home theater system 5.1. Some of you have a tower configuration like the one I'm asking. I'm not sure of all the benefits of investment. Snypertodd and directed me to a large distance. My thoughts go first would be at least two large hard drives in a RAID 1. HDMI on the HT system. If you gave more details on this would be appreciated.

[Yitzchak909]

I think Windows Media Center, in conjunction with the remote, which works quite well. Moreover, not limited to the characteristics of something like a DVR. My dad has a blu ray (Sony) which has features of online video. However, there is Hulu. Also, Netflix does not stream videos fine - there is no damping. I wish I had built a Media Center PC instead. I have yet to try a TV multimedia center, though (probably a laptop).

[pddaugusto]

The benefits depend entirely on your personal situation and preferences. You have to answer that question. What do you want to do with the HTPC and what is the alternative to do it without the HTPC? If you decide to build for HTPC, will be limited to that or want to increase the budget to pay for other applications?
The costs of basic system components HTPC - motherboard, CPU, RAM, hard drive, optical drive and video card basics - will run about $ 350, more if necessary to add the operating system, mouse and keyboard maybe a little less if you skimp on parts and you can find some good deals. Add another $ 50 for another HD if you want RAID and another $ 25 each if you 1 TB drive to store lots of media instead of 500 MB.

[Howitzer]

At one point my media center was to control all functions of my DVR. Soon it will again - and save me a ton of money cursed. But more importantly, my media center does it all. I mean everything. I've set to copy all my blu-rays and their usage for my Amazon and Netflix movies. Currently I have 2 TB of storage space, providing a much more than any DVR on the market. I have an UPnP server in that country. It is used to stream media to my phone, used images of people on the website here, and even other media for the family. I even keep all my games in the center of the media. I can serve the entire contents of my all my media extensions. Now, all that applies to everyone? Nope. I suggest you go through the configuration of all this? If needed, yes, it works very well.

[samar69]

You can use the Blu-ray. I cannot emphasize this enough: buy a quality disc. For playback of content, this is not a big deal, as the copy will be slow no matter what you do. You can also use Nvidia video card as the 260 that are here now, he bought because it is necessary for 3D Blu Ray. However, never has been great to see any movie that has always had the kind of jagged, colored digital look to it as something you expect from a YouTube video on my 65 "MITS. On the one hand, I tried using a dual-core CPU for some time, but the two cores do not fare well with multiple loads. The quad core seems to be doing enough now, and 2 GB of RAM seems to be limited.
For hard drives, I will continue to recommend RAID 5 configuration and performance needed for the recording of several, or streams of playback and data protection is a necessity. You can try these.

[Mindstorm]

I think its worth (depending on your budget, of course). I built an entertainment PC so I could stream Netflix, Hulu, etc., and play Blu-Ray, in addition to storing all the mp3 of our music. I've connected to the 32 "Vizio. I can access music over a wireless network built by Philips Media Streamer, and is connected to our stereo receiver in the study. The system works perfectly was one of those funny the projects. By the way, Netflix is natively supported in the WMC everything you need for movies online is remote.