KalNet Message Board

Since many people care about noise with their HTPC, here's a guide on how to control how loud your hard drives are:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ter ... ,2084.html

Guide to HTPC's for 2009:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/pcs/20 ... rs-guide/1

Some media players you may want to look at.

Media Player Classic Home Theatre:
-windows only but has some improvements over MPC

http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/


SMPlayer:
-windows and linux
-GUI improvements over regular Mplayer

http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

Surprisingly, this DRM cable card thing may open up:

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/20 ... er-pcs.ars

Cable on your HTPC again?



Precursor:
QAM (unencrypted analog cable) to be cut off:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/default.aspx#637

This post has a bunch of info and examples of what people are doing for their htpc servers and racks:

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/show ... tcount=259

XBMC to MAME:
http://lifehacker.com/5523672/turn-your ... e=true&s=i

IR Blaster / Receiver:
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Using_an_IR_ ... ith_MythTV
http://www.irblaster.info/
http://www.irblaster.info/distribution.html#IR_REPEAT
http://www.irblaster.info/index.html
http://www.irblaster.info/distribution.html
http://www.irblaster.info/receiver.html#Hauppauge



LCD Calibration:
http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10457



HDMI to component / VGA convertor:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/produ ... 1&format=2

It takes protected HDMI signals and breaks the coding.

Excellent MythTV build guide:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1236363

Bing Crosby paid someone to film a World Series game while he took a trip to Paris because he was too nervous about the outcome:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/09/25 ... rvationist

A bit more highend than you or me DVR'ing the game, but cool nonetheless.

Backends (support currently ongoing) for XBMC:

TVHeadEnd:
http://www.lonelycoder.com/hts/tvheadend_overview.html
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=91716

Video Disk Recorder:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=45314

MythTV:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?t=82015
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=MythTV_PVR_Addon

Sick Beard: http://sickbeard.com/
Automatic TV show downloading, cataloguing, and organizing.


Couch Potato: http://couchpotatoapp.com/
CouchPotato is an automatic NZB and torrent downloader. You can keep a "movies I want"-list and it will search for NZBs/torrents of these movies every X hours. Once a movie is found, it will send it to SABnzbd or download the .nzb or .torrent to a specified directory.


SABnzbd+: http://sabnzbd.org/
Newsgroup downloader.


Subsonic: http://www.subsonic.org/pages/index.jsp
Stream anywhere, any time, to anything, any which way you want.
http://www.subsonic.org/pages/features.jsp

OpenELEC is an XBMC centric distro that aims to make it easy to get 'er up and going, no matter the setup:

http://www.openelec.tv/component/k2/ite ... 1-released

http://www.openelec.tv/get-openelec (generic, ion, intel, fusion, apple tv, xtreamer ultra, etc. builds).

Nixeus Fusion XS NX-500 Android 2.2 Network Media Player

http://www.ncix.ca/products/index.php?s ... omoid=1297

http://forums.ncix.com/forums/?mode=sho ... msg2448260

Seems like a cool streaming box.

Comparison of all the new streaming set-tops:

http://deviceguru.com/google-tv-vs-appl ... e-vs-roku/

Looks like Homey B chose wisely.

OpenElec:

http://wiki.openelec.tv/index.php?title=Main_Page

Specific version of XBMC meant for Apple TV's and boards with onboard video.

Mediabrowser:

http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

Windows Media Centre plugin.