Building a "Media PC"

I decided to undertake a new mini-project. The goal was to eliminate our satellite television service, and thus save a decent but not huge amount of money each year.

I had taken a half-day from work because of crap weather; I figured that was a good time to try working on this back-burner project. I pieced together a system from old spare parts and installed Windows XP on it (I had a number of systems that I had removed Windows from and installed Linux, so licensing shouldn't be a problem).

We have a Vizio LCD television that had an RGB PC connector and an audio input jack...plugged in all the cables, and it actually worked fairly well as a computer with a giant monitor. I was fairly surprised at this!

Now...TV. The name that came to my mind for streaming television shows was Hulu.com. My son is absolutely in love with the cartoon Voltron now thanks to streaming Hulu to the TV.

The results weren't fantastic, but they weren't totally horrible. We have a 1 megabit download speed over DSL, which is the bottom rung of what Hulu said is needed for streaming their content. What this means in practical terms is that any sustained download...that is, anything that takes more than a minute or two...causes the Hulu stream to pause. Ouch!

Because of the way Hulu has licensed their content from studios they can't allow people to cache more than a few minutes' worth of the shows. They are using some wonderful Adobe Flash feature to prevent you from downloading the entire show for viewing all at once so it doesn't hiccup and burp in mid-viewing.

Because I have a computer, my wife has a computer, my son and daughter have a computer...if any of them are downloading updates, updating iTunes podcasts, or transferring a Pogo.com applet, the Hulu program pauses on us.

Annoying? Yes. I don't mind this inconvenience much because any shows we really liked we bought on DVD as a whole season, but for my family this could be a deal breaker.

I downloaded an alpha version of Boxee, an open source cross-platform video viewer program that apparently has a lot of features (including a free iPod/iPhone application to act as a remote!). It was so very promising...but I can't yet know if it is decent or not because it doesn't work on the media computer I cobbled together. The system has a Rage 128 Pro video card in it; okay enough to use as a basic workstation graphics card, but on launching Boxee all I got was a white screen from which I could only exit using the Windows task key, then telling Boxee to quit from task manager.

I looked around online and it seems that Boxee requires OpenGL 1.4 or higher. The Rage Pro supports, I believe, 1.3 or lower. Since it's a legacy card no longer supported that means no OpenGL updates. That leaves me with having to find a cheap video card to replace this one before I can test Boxee.

I installed iTunes on the old media system as well. I opened sharing on my personal iTunes system and enabled it on the media computer, and it played my music library without any problems and played an open source movie my son loves watching called Big Buck Bunny without any issues as well. So if I buy any TV shows, buy any movies, or download video podcasts then I should be able to see them just fine on the media computer.

I also connected an old webcam and inexpensive omnidirectional microphone to the media system and installed Skype. Our TV is now turned into a giant videophone. Pretty neat when the grandparents call in to talk to their grandson!

So where does that leave me? At the moment, I have to purchase a newer video card, and the streaming of TV programs only works "so so". Anything with iTunes, streamed from another system or on the computer itself, works well. We already have a DVD player so there's no incentive to rip my DVD's to the hard disk.

The computer itself is rather weak on the horsepower scale with a 1.7 GHz P4 and 1 gig of memory and a 40 gig hard disk, but as I mentioned the only problem I've had has been the fault of Hulu's crazy caching issues coupled with our "measly" 1 megabit download speed.

I'll have to see if Boxee improves things with cached downloads, otherwise I might only have a neat gadget for web browsing with a giant monitor. If anyone has suggestions for viewing ad-supported television content from the web I'm open to it!