Tag: Guides

If you have been a loyal ArcSoft user like many of us have for the past few years, you may have noticed the amount of logos on their splash screen continuing to increase. It has come to the point where when you want to play a Blu-ray movie you are forced to stare at these logos while it loads. Well […]

The question has been posed more times than I can count, and part of the fault lies on the HDMI specification itself which took computer manufacturers seemingly forever to figure it out. The holy grail of getting Blu-ray from your HTPC to your home theater was always being able to bit stream HD audio formats, such as Dolby TrueHD and […]

I have had 2 copies of Windows 7 lying around the house ever since it was released.  One version is Home Premium and the other is Professional.  I had been debating whether to go with a 32-bit or 64-bit install on my HTPC client and with some gentle nudges, I decided to take the plunge into the 64-bit pool. For […]

UPDATE: New and easier to read GPU Comparison here. CHARTS UPDATED January 7, 2011! With all kinds of questions about what GPU can accelerate what codec? and how much acceleration does it offer? I’ve been working on helping to answer these questions in various revisions of this guide off and on since 2008… Updated with Flash 10.1 and HDMI 1.4 information! The Table and […]

I have an older Ahanix D4 case housing my main HTPC, one of the main reasons I bought this case over some of the completion was that it was one of the few full ATX cases with a parallel port (LPT) based Vacuum Florescent Display (VFD) at the time.  Recently the display started to fade and some pixels have gone […]

Proper standby support is an essential part of the HTPC experience, something that can help transform the “PC” experience into one much closer to “CE”. While it’s not great when the HTPC in the living room wakes up for “no reason”, when the one in the bedroom does it in the middle of the night – it can be a […]

Mythdora 10.21 Installation Guide It’s not scary, it’s easy.           There seems to be a misconception among HTPC users that Mythtv is scary to use because you need to run Linux and Mythtv needs a little configuration in many cases to get what you want out of it.  Well, hopefully this guide will illustrate exactly how […]

When the announcement came that ATI would be releasing a new firmware for its cable card devices which would properly support the Copy Freely protections of shows, I got excited. For the past 2 years, I have been a dedicated cable card user within my Vista Media Center to enjoy high definition recordings via Comcast, even though it meant ditching […]