In progress...

Building a HTPC became a necessity when I found all my digital media - photo, audio and video - became scattered over various PC's and storage medial like optical disks and external hard disks. Storing the media on an optical media is not reliable and looking for a particular audio, video or photo became more and more difficult every day with growing content.

In the series of reusing existing resources, I came across this laptop with its screen broken. Vivek made me aware of his earlier laptop which he had discarded as its broken screen required £170 to be replaced. A laptop with broken screen is unusable on its own right but can be used as a server - specially as an HTPC. Vivek liked the idea and was happy to bring the laptop to my workshop for evaluation. I hooked the laptop to my HD TV and was amazed to find that it supported the HDTV resolution without any issue.

The first thing I wanted to do when I bought my iPhone was to put my videos on it. The video format that is accepted by iPhone is mp4. There must be countless tools available for windows to do the conversion but I wanted the ability to do it using my current linux setup i.e. using Ubuntu. As usual I started searching a tool that is simple and just does the work. I searched a lot on the Internet but was not happy with the solution for one or the other reason.

Rashmi is a big fan of Hindi movies and this keeps our collection of Hindi movies growing every day. Songs are one of the best features of the hindi movies and Pankhuri is one of the biggest fans of the video songs. I realised that many times I had to keep the whole DVD on my disk just for the sake of one song. Further, I wanted to extract the songs from the DVD and make a video album along with the playlist. This would make every ones life easier.

Though Sky+ comes with a planner and recorder but getting the recorded program out of the Sky+ box is not straight forward. Only official way of taking a program out of the Sky+ box is to play the recorded program and record it with a DVD recorder or VHS recorder. Further, if you need to record programs for longer duration and if your collection grows more than 80G you need to find an alternate method.

The search started when Vinay expressed his wish to build a HTPC with stunning looks. It didn't took us long and we figured out that we are going to build the HTPC with Silverstone ML02MX. The HTPC uses a MoDT (Mobile on Desktop) motherboard and a mobile processor, meaning it is very power efficient as well. It is currently hooked to a 42" full HD Samsung TV and outputs the picture at full 1080p resolution and outputs the audio to Denon+KEF audio setup using optical out.

Specification at a glance

I shoot my home video with a Sony DCR-PC110 Mini DV Camcorder. This article summarises the steps I perform to capture the video from the Mini DV tape to mpeg file. Please note that I do it on a linux box (running Ubuntu to be precise) and may not be the best way of digitising a home video.

The article contains the details of my HTPC (Home Theatre PC) and all the excitement associated with it. I started building it with great zeal and then there was a time when I had all the components with me for more than 8 weeks and I was unable to figure out which component is faulty. Nevertheless, I managed to identify that the RAM was faulty and not the PSU. I got it RMA'd and once it booted up, it started to rock.

In progress...