Media Ripping

This is the longest part of the process. Ripping your media to the computer. When I got an ipod years back, I ripped all of my cd's, so I didn't have to go thru that. Simple drag and drop to the media server. DVD's are another story. I for one was not a dvd fan. I would only buy them if I knew I would watch them more than one time. Therefore, I had about 60 dvds. I didn't have the same rule for my kids. We had about 40-50 for them. I proceeded to look for a dvd program that would make this process easy. I had a program called DVD Copy Pro. This I found out didn't work with Windows 7. So I had to search for something else. I found a free on trial program called DVD Fab. The trial was supposed to last 30 days, but I was able to erase and download it again many times, until I was actually done ripping all of my dvd's. It did finally stop working on me, but I liked it so much, I went ahead and bought it. Ripping 1 dvd takes up to 30 minutes, depending on the size. Just change them to an .avi or .wmv, whatever format you like and save them to the media center. I set up categories, Kids, Movies, TV shows, Documentaries, and sub-categories in each. Makes it a lot easier to view with the device I use to stream them, I explain this in a later post. So, you can do the math, 30 minutes, times 110 or so dvd's. It took a long time. I would spend my nights after the kids went to bed ripping dvd's, weekends, I would make sure there was one always working while I was doing weekend stuff. I finally finished and can now just do them one by one as I acquire them!

Build Information

I did a lot of research on an htpc build. What I was mostly looking for was low power consumption. It is going to be on 24/7, so I don't want to push my electric bill too high. You need to start with the case. I chose a Cooler Master Elite RC-330 ($35). It has 4x5.25" drive bays and 7x3.5" drive bays, plenty of space to add more storage down the line if you need it. I chose a 400w power supply, which didn't come with the case. Plenty of power, brand doesn't really matter. ($18) Motherboard is very important. I chose the Asus M3A78-CM ($100). They are hard to find now, but the Asus brand is known for low power consumption. 11w when in use, 1w idle. It has has 6 SATA ports for plenty of add-ons. 4 gb of ram, don't know a whole lot about it, so went with suggestions from a build I found online. You need an optical drive, if for nothing more than loading your operating system software. Processor was the AMD Athlon X2 4850e. Not much to write home about here, but the key is heat. At only 45w this baby will not put off much. With the server being on all day and night, this is key. Finally, hard drive. I chose the Western Digital Caviar Green series. 2 1tb drives that provide plenty of storage. Since there are multiply drive bays, you can always add on later. I have also bought an external 1tb hard drive to back everything up.

When I finally got it all together and turned on the power, nothing happened. I freaked. All this work and nothing! I checked out all the wiring again to the motherboard. Low and behold, I missed 1 pin on a connection. Presto! The computer came to life! I installed Windows 7 for the operating system and haven't looked back. I love it!

All in all I was very proud of myself for building this computer. I honestly didn't think I would be able to succeed. It has ended up being the beginning of a 6 month, ongoing, never ending process.

I you choose to do this, be prepared for what's to come. It only gets more time consuming. My next few posts will show you how I was able to use this computer to have all my entertainment in one place.

No Cable TV

I am going to start blogging about not having cable tv. We cut the cord on Monday June 28, 2010. I will give daily updates on what I have done to compensate. I have many hours of work to get to this point, and I can show you how to get it done. It is going to save us $85 per month, and we didn't have any movie channels, or sport packages. Tomorrow I will go over building a home theater pc.