Hey folks!

Been a while since my last blog, but I've been so incredibly busy with Ugame and mostly Fnatic that I haven't been able to do much besides those two things. I have however picked up a new personal project.

For those who don't know, HTPC stands for Home Theater PC. The idea behind it is that you use a computer to watch your films, listen to your music and possibly even watch TV.

About four years ago, before this term was even invented, my dad and I had this running off his computer at the time. With an S-Video-to-SCART and later DVI-to-HDMI cable we used VLC to play films off his HDD, and it worked quite well. So well in fact, that we started looking around for proper software for this purpose. First one was obviously Windows Media Center, but that was (and still is) pretty shit because it's so limited in its functionality. It didn't take long until I found Media Portal: Open source (and thus free), highly configurable, and with an extensive plugin system.

Played around with that, and we started loving it so much that we decided to build a PC to use as our central media hub. Ripped all of our CD's to MP3 (26000 tracks and counting with every album we get), set up Media Portal properly and because by then we had an LCD TV, we hooked it up through HDMI. Proper HDMI-to-HDMI I might add. Cost us quite a bit of money, as motherboards/video cards with HDMI output weren't as common as they are now, but it was 100% worth it. We soon got rid of our CD and DVD players and replaced it with this massive single database of all our music.


Recently, we've been redoing our living room (new surround set = win!), and we wanted to get rid of the big case we have our current HTPC in now. Again, because we adopted the idea so early, small and HTPC cases weren't easy or cheap to come by, so we just went with a normal midi-tower. I've just ordered a completely new system, which is about twice as fast as the current system, and only like a fifth of the size of the current one :D

I went with the ASUS P4-P5N9300 barebone, and I'm gonna fill it with an Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 and 2x1GB PC6400 RAM. For comparison's sake, the old system is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with just 2x512MB of RAM.


The reason for this blog though, is the new remote I went out to buy today. We've been using Microsoft's MCE remote, which is a fine remote..for the HTPC. None of the universal remotes we've had worked well with the HTPC and the MCE remote doesn't work with other devices, so we decided we'd spend some money on that this time. I did some research, and ultimately went with the Logitech Harmony 785.

Not cheap (90 euros), but oh my fucking god is this thing awesome! Took me a good 10 minutes to go through the setup wizard, but now with the press of a button I can turn the HTPC+TV+Receiver on, set the TV to the right channel and set the receiver to the right channel! I'm absolutely loving this thing, and although it's a bit pricey, I'm so glad I bought it. Means we can get rid of the remotes for our receiver, TV, settop box and the old MS MCE all at once!


More to follow once I get the new hardware, might even make some pictures of the new setup!