These days, more and more people are giving up their cable tv connection and are watching television content online – via Hulu.com, Netflix or by downloading tv from Bittorrent sites. If you’re like me, this has started to limit your tv watching to your laptop screen. But, with a small investment and half a day, you can build a dedicated, silent, home theater PC to connect to your flat screen tv. This post on Lifehacker covers how to use the open-source XBMC software to run on a $199 Acer Aspire Revo to build a comprehensive home theater PC.
What You’ll Need:
- Acer AspireRevo: This $200 nettop ships with 1GB of RAM, an Intel Atom 230 processor, 160GB
- XBMC Live: This is a Live CD version of XBMC that boots directly into XBMC and has a tiny footprint. You can find the download specifically set up for these NVIDIA ION machines on this page, you can grab the direct download here, or download via BitTorrent here.
- A thumb drive: It doesn’t have to be huge, but this 8gb Kingston Datatraveler is cheap ($15.95) and will be useful for other projects as well.
- An IR receiver/Windows Media Center remote: This isn’t strictly necessary, but if you want to control your shiny new XBMC via remote control, you’ll need some sort of supported remote with a USB receiver. I got this Mediagate remote for about $30 and it works great. (Incidentally, it also works like a charm with XBMC as soon as you plug it in.)
Read the full post here on Lifehacker how to create XBMC HTPC Nettop.
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