Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Determining Functional Requirements
For this third iteration, we were determined to design a media center system
that fit our actual needs, rather than those of some hypothetical “average”
reader. By following our thought process, you should be able to come up with
a media center system configuration that fits your needs as well.
We've never really needed our media center system to include TV recording
functions, and it's becoming increasingly obvious that many other people
don't, either. So, we'll design this system to focus on pure media center func-
tions. If we need to record TV programs, we'll use one of the methods we listed
in the previous section, and we'll assume that you will, too.
Here's the list of requirements we came up with:
Video output requirements
Obviously, the low resolution of our current 27” analog television severely
constrains what we can do with the system. It was about time to replace
our old TV anyway, so we checked Costco to see what TVs were selling for
nowadays. We were surprised to find that we could buy a pretty reason-
able 42” HDTV with full 1080p support for $600, so for design purposes we
assumed that would be our media center system display.
HDTV 1080p resolution is actually 1920
×
1080, so we'll need to make sure
our video adapter can drive the display at that resolution. We'll also need
to verify that the outputs on the media center system match the inputs
on the TV, which are HDMI/HDCP times four for video, and SP/DIF digital
optical plus stereo in for audio.
Watching DVD videos
We currently watch rental DVDs using a standard Panasonic DVD player,
which the media center system will replace. We don't currently own or
rent Blu-ray discs, but we want to make sure that our media center system
can be easily upgraded to support Blu-ray in the future.
Rather than handling the physical discs, we want to rip our collection of
purchased DVDs to the hard drive so that we can watch any of them just
by pointing and clicking. That means we'll need plenty of disk space. We
want sufficient storage for 500+ DVDs. Allowing additional capacity for
music and other files means we'll want perhaps 4 TB of disk space in our
media center system.
Watching web videos
We find ourselves spending increasingly more of our viewing time watch-
ing web videos on YouTube and similar services. We don't care about sup-
port for iTunes or other copy-protected video download services, but it's
essential that this system make it easy to browse/watch unprotected web
videos.
