The Home Theater Recommended List

Thanksgiving was pretty normal this year. Woody did the fried turkey at his place, so the whole family converged over there. Joy/Rob didn’t come, but normally we don’t really get to see Rob during the winter, coaching gets in the way. There was a lot of food though, the turkey, mac & cheese, and collard greens were right on the money. I didn’t really like the sweet potato though, and other items were on par.

Renee got to see the Popcorn Hour in action at Mom and Dad’s and was fairly impressed. It’s a device you really have to be a video pirate to appreciate, but there isn’t a better device of its kind anywhere, except for maybe the newer model that does even more codecs. It definite deserves to be in a dream home theater setup if you have Computer content you want to view on a TV. The GUI is fairly bare, but its no worse than streaming from a PS3 or 360, and supports more formats without the need of a transcoder.

The real dilemma of any home theater I think is what content do you get on it. Sure everyone wants a big screen, and big sound, but what are you actually going to enjoy? As much as I’m a fan of Media Center, honestly the costs are a bit too high. Considering that a cable DVR can do more or less the same job at $15 per month my HTPC does at $2,000, there’s no debate which is the better value. Now sure I have much more space, more tuners, and a lot more features (it does Netflix, web browsing, gaming, supports every codec on the planet, and everything else you’d expect from a computer), I can see why someone might want to go with a compartmentalized solution, and have their cable DVR (or better yet a TiVO) as one of several devices in the chain. Even if you add all the devices together, your budget will be less than have a fully speced out CableCard HTPC. So if you want all the features, at a fraction of the cost, this is what I’d go with.

• Cable or Satellite provided DVR


• Roku NetFlix Box


• Panasonic DMP-BD35 Blu-Ray player + 1GB or more SD memory


• Popcorn Hour A-110


• Monoprice 4x1 HDMI switch (gotta connect it all)

Total comes out to $610 in equipment, and whatever your fee for cable/satellite and Netflix will be. Game consoles would change that. A PS3 negates the Blu-Ray player, but there are transcoding issues you’ll run into with Netflix stuff or downloaded computer stuff. Also not having any IR capability means you have to use a controller or buy an extra piece of equipment to use a regular IR remote. The 360 now does NetFlix natively, but you won’t have Blu-Ray, and the transcoding issues will still potentially be there for computer stuff. But if gaming isn’t a concern, that’s what I’d go with. I’d imagine that an Apple whore would replace the Popcorn Hour with an Apple TV, but if you aren’t trapped into their DRM scheme, I’d stay as far away from that device as human possible.