As many of you may or may not know is that I am a huge HTPC nerd. Ever since I got into home theater I’ve also been hugely engrossed in the HTPC community especially AVS Forums and their HTPC sub forums.

Recently this article posted over at Arstechnica was posted asking if the HTPC was dead, and this article over at geektonic was written to counter the arstechnica post.

After closely reading both posts, I’ve come to the conclusion of has the HTPC market even started yet? The way I look at it, is that it is still in pre-alpha stage, maybe even earlier. Look how long it took for the average house hold to get a tv, and then look how long it took for the average house hold to get a pc, now your asking the average house hold to connect said pc to their tv, and calling it a Home Theater PC.

To me the HTPC is still a niche market, where enthusiast, the brave, and the adventurous dare to be different and don’t conform to the norm. For me I got into HTPC’s because it at the time, was the cheapest way of upscaling DVD’s, post processing the dvd’s, and getting the best absolute picture quality out of the DVD without spending tens of thousands of dollars on a high end video processor/scaler.

I soon learned that on top of dvd post processing/scaling that I could also catalog my dvd collection via third party plug-ins like My Movies or enabling the DVD Library cataloging inside of windows media center. I then went one step further and discovered that I could turn my dvd upscaling pc, into a DVR. Soon I was busy purchasing tuner cards, testing them out, adding additional storage space and by the end of the whole ordeal I am now running vista media center pc, with 1.5TB of hard drive storage for DVR purposes, to store all the recordings that I can make with the 6 tuners I have installed in said pc.

I recently even went a step further and picked up two Linksys media center extenders on sale for $125/each with free shipping though the dell affiliate program. I put one extender in my bedroom, the other in my office. On top of the new extenders I also have an xbox 360 that I use as a media center extender. So between the three extenders, I now can stream live TV, and recorded (DVR’d) tv shows on any tv in my home.

My eventual goal is to replace the comcast cable boxes with these extenders and my htpc setup so that I no longer have to pay the $15/month hardware rental fee’s. I currently am paying for 4 boxes with my comcast subscription, and paying a total of nearly $40/month in just hardware rental fee’s. If I could use the extenders and drop the comcast boxes after one year I’d have the extenders paid off. The main issue however is HDTV, and trying to get HDTV from cocmast into my HTPC.

Currently my only option is to buy a bran new PC, such as a dell XPS 420 with dual cable card tuners, as the only way to get cable card support is by purchasing a bran new pc from an "approved" OEM vendor such as dell. This requirement alone is one huge road block for making htpc’s main stream, but I also think that because HTPC’s are not main stream is the reason for cable card support to be so complicated and cumbersome.

Yes you can do things like Firewire into your pc, but then your still back paying hardware rental fee’s to comcast, which for me is the biggest proponent to using a HTPC is to get rid of the monthly hardware rental fee’s that I pay to comcast. There are also things like the Hauppauge HD-PVR which allows you to capture and record up to 1080i via component video, however it is mpeg4 only and currently doesn’t support Vista Media Center which again is a huge downer for me since I am a huge proponent of VMC.

HTPC’s also gain you access to a huge online video store, IE Hulu, Youtube, Joost, ect… I just got into using Hulu, and have been using my htpc for youtube and Joost for a while now. I love being able to load up Hulu and just start streaming tv shows and movies right from the website onto my tv. I truly believe that if more people found out about how easy it is, and how you can watch hulu on your tv instead of the small pc monitor more and more people would get into that in a heart beat.

Other added benefits to HTPC’s like big screen pc gaming, Pandora radio, and Last.FM radio, pictures, movie guides, Netflix streaming, Amazon Unbox, you name it, just adds to the benefits of what make a HTPC that great of a tool to use. Whether or not it will totally replace a stand alone STB remains to be seen but in my home the HTPC is more alive now than it has ever been.

In the end I think THPC’s still have a long way to go, and are just starting out, give it some time and you will see, till then keep on HTPCin!

- Josh