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My portable HTPC project

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superboyac:
I am about to begin my portable HTPC project.  I want a small, portable box that I can easily carry with me in one hand and that will have a big library of media on it already and can connect to any tv or monitor.  The OS will be Windows 7.  The main interface for the media player will be J. River.  For those wondering why J. River?  I need a software to streamline the navigation of all my media.  The regular Windows interface is built for mouse/keyboard use on a monitor right in front of you.  For an HTPC, you need something with bigger fonts and cleaner interfaces, and not mouse or keyboard oriented.  If you think about regular dvd players, you see how you navigate mostly with up/down/left/right and an centered Enter button.  I need the same for an HTPC, along with support for a mouse if necessary.  What I'm going to do for that is get a Wii remote and use it on the PC.  You can wave it around like an air mouse, and it also has a cursor pad and buttons.  Perfect.

I need the htpc form factor as small as possible, but with hardware that can handle full HD.  I'll likely build it myself, but if there's a good one already available, I'm willing to get that also.  Any suggestions are welcome.

Any of you ever wondered why HTPC's have never taken off?  It's not because it's too hard or too geeky.  It's simply because the companies don't want it to be successful.  If HTPC's were common and easy, it would make pirating even more appealing.  Same reason why even after 15 years, dvd players still won't play a disc with regular avi files on it.  It's easy to do, they just don't want to do it.  And we can find the weird boxes that do this, but it's a niche right now.  People don't even know about it right now because it's not marketed.  if people knew you could just watch anything on your tv from the computer, the dvd market would die, and we'd start seeing a lot of really nice HTPC's all over the place.  How could you not want that?  It's basically a box that will play anything you throw at it right on your TV.

Eóin:
If you want portable hardware that can play full HD you should go for something with an Nvidia Ion chipset. To be honest though I can't see it being possible to put together something so small, yet powerful, yourself.

If you were to settle for half HD you could maybe build something custom around a BeagleBoard, would still be very difficult I'd imagine.

Personally, I'd go go something like the media center PC I have plugged into my HD TV, it's a ViewSonic VOT 132. Very powerful, runs Win7 and full HD movies (with CoreCodec) perfectly. Also it's actually very small, can easily be carried in one hand. Plus I'm sure there are better equivalents out there by now.

mouser:
wouldn't the simple answer be to get a laptop with a large hard drive and hdmi out?

app103:
I have a similar project I am working on, but with the intention of it being a HTPC, a spare PC for my daughter to use, and an emergency PC for my own use (in case something happens to my main machine).

What I am using is probably larger than what you want. It's an HP Compaq dc7100 Small Form Factor PC (about the size of an old school VCR). It's a very common model intended for use as a business work station. The higher end version (the one I have) has an 80G hard drive, a 3.2gHz P4 Prescott CPU, 1G RAM, and WinXP (Vista drivers are available, and I assume they will work with Win7). You can pick these up pretty cheap all over the place. I think my dad only paid about $150 for mine, at geeks.com (around xmas last year).

I am not the only one that saw this little PC and thought HTPC. This guy did too, and he has some photos that may give you an idea of the size and layout of the box.

You could probably use a cheap IBM ThinkCenter, too. They are about the same size.

superboyac:
wouldn't the simple answer be to get a laptop with a large hard drive and hdmi out?
-mouser (September 12, 2010, 05:49 PM)
--- End quote ---
yes, it is the simple answer.  But i'd like it to be a box I can open up and mess with.  I might want to put more connectors and stuff.  basically, I want a regular pc tower, just in the smallest form factor possible.

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