For those of you who are fans of internet video streaming from your HTPC but are plagued with studdering and video playback issues you just might want to update your flash player. Adobe has finally released Flash Player 11 and a few of the many new features, Flash Player 11 adds native 64bit support as well as full hardware accelerated […]
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I’ve never been a regular user of XBMC, but I happened to be up late last night testing an XBMC install for a special project and noticed a message on the RSS ticker announcing a feature freeze for “Eden”. Being otherwise occupied, it took me until today to follow up on the XBMC blog. Sure enough, XBMC 11.0 “Eden” is […]
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The quest for the perfect and smallest home theater PC (HTPC) is one that has gained momentum over the last few years. Not that long ago it was a significant challenge to build a small and quiet home theater PC (HTPC). However, this is no longer the case and the options to create an efficient small form factor PC are […]
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I’ve always preferred a larger HTPC so I can put additional cards or more disk space, but I know many people prefer them as small as possible. An interesting little device reviewed here, but it would appear to not handle HD playback very well. If you’re in the market for a little PC to hitch a ride on your PC […]
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Many moons ago, when I first got started playing with HTPCs, I spent a lot of time vacillating between various Windows front-ends and media-centric Linux distros. The Linux distros in particular always intrigued me because most of them were available as Live CDs. One of those distros was GeeXbox. GeeXboX development has always been on a slow burn and I […]
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Asrock has demonstrated a marked interest in the HTPC market over the last few years and has assembled a solid lineup of SFF barebones kits specifically aimed at HTPC enthusiasts. We even reviewed one of the early models, the ASRock ION-330 Nettop. The current cream of the crop Asrock SFFs are the Vision 3D line that combine an Intel Arrandale mobile processor with […]
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Intel has quietly introduced a whole heap of new Sandy Bridge processors, modestly cut the price on some old processors, and even discontinued a few Pentium processors. Most of the new models are simple speed bumps of previous models. There are couple of new low power processors, including the Core i3 2120T and the Pentium G630T, each bringing an extra 100 Mhz, […]
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Steven Sinofsky and the Windows development team recently launched their development blog, Building Windows 8. Every entry has proven to be interesting reading, but today’s entry touched on the new element that most interests me as an HTPC enthusiast: the new Metro-inspired Start screen. The tile-based Start screen is being designed to work with touch, mouse, or keyboard and immediately stood […]
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Last Christmas my wife, reprising her role as Santa Claus, climbed down the chimney and left the Logitech Harmony One universal remote under the tree. It was gleaming in the early morning sunshine–I got a little misty-eyed. After fulfilling my familial obligations (I love watching my son open presents) I scurried upstairs and began tinkering. I had two objectives in mind […]
Read moreIf you’re into really large HTPC cases, this may be the guy for you. My preferences generally run the other way though – preferring to push the hard drives into another location where the rattle doesn’t matter as much. The CW02 from Silverstone’s Crown Series is crafted to allow users to really appreciate the design of this high quality HTPC […]
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