Before we get started here, I need to make clear what I consider a home theater. I actually am not a huge fan of the term, because some people take it over the top. They think of a dedicated room in the house with automated blinds, a 100+ inch projected screen, theater style leather seating, and an audiophile-type surround sound setup with custom-built speakers. This type of setup might be nice, but it can run tens of thousands of dollars, and it is not what I am referring to.

I’m talking about piecing together a nice practical setup in a typical home for under $5000 with equipment that can be purchased at a warehouse club or a well-known national electronics store. At minimum, it will have a 40+ inch HD display and 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Added to the mix will be a high-definition DVR, a current-generation video game system, and a home media extender. The end result is a system that you can comfortably watch TV and movies on, as well as listen to music and play your favorite games.

I’ve tried a lot of different DVR systems, and my current one - a Tivo HD - is my favorite so far.  It has a built-in ATSC receiver, so it can receive HD broadcasts over the air.  Additionally, it should work with cable service as long as you rent CableCards from your cable company.  I have seen a Tivo HD used with CableCards, and it records and plays back shows quite well.  The only drawback I have seen is that when you tune to a new channel using CableCards, there is about a second of silence and a blank screen before the channel comes in.  Tuning is instantaneous when using the antenna instead of CableCards.

Nowadays, more and more of our media lives in digital format on a hard drive instead of on a disc.  This goes for both music and movies, as well as pictures.  We shouldn’t be constrained to watching this on our computers - ideally we would be able to watch movies and listen to music in our home theater setup. This is where media centers come in.  This can be any computer hooked up near the home theater and outputting video to the TV and audio to the receiver.  For aesthetics, it may be desirable to have a smaller PC, or even one with a case specifically designed for a home theater.  In my opinion, the most important thing for a media center is ease of use.  It should have an interface designed for use on a TV instead of a computer monitor.  And it should work with the file formats and codecs that are most popular for video and audio.   From what I’ve seen, the original Xbox, when modified, is an unbeatable device as a media center.  The software to run on it is called “XBMC” - formerly called Xbox Media Center.  XBMC supports playing files via SMB shares over a network and also locally on a hard drive or CD/DVD.  There is even support for add-ons that allow queries to IMDB, loading movie trailers, and even connecting to a MythTV backend.