"HTPC" - Where to start?

[roleki]

This past Thursday we hosted Thanksgiving at my home. In the four minutes I didn't have my eyes on them, my 2-year-old and his numerous toddler-aged cousins raided my DVD cabinet and ruined about 8 DVDs. This experience has me interested in the prospect of ripping all my DVDs to HDD & serving them up to a single TV in a common area. I'm not a videophile or anything like that... I don't necessarily care about HD or 7.1 or any of that business, I just want to be able to preserve what's left of my DVD collection until the kids are old enough to be [s:9bcac1e478]beaten[/s:9bcac1e478] trusted to be alone in a room with AV stuff. The ability to view specific episodes of, well, episodic collections would also be a bonus but is not an iron requirement.

I have a spare P4 machine lying about with a 2.4Ghz processor and 2GB of RAM, and XP Pro SP2 though I could change the OS to something Linux in short order if need be. Any suggestions?

[edDV]

I suggest you get a WDTV player instead. $74-89 plus an external drive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urViZNQYhAw
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/WDTV/

[CBC]

Update to SP3, and a large hdd to rip your DVDs to,& check out XBMC

http://xbmc.org/

[roleki]

Thanks for your replies; the WDTV sounds like it'd be the fastest route, but xbmc looks like something I could really get behind. In fact, I'm downloading that right now. Wish me luck!

[CBC]

I also own a WDTVLive, & I really like it, but if you have the spare PC on hand, I think you will like having the added features with using XBMC. The new Camelot beta w/ the Confluence skin is th' bomb.

[usually_quiet]

A few things to consider when re-purposing an old PC:

Make sure your video card has a port you can use with your TV. If you need a new AGP card, choices are limited, and a more recent AGP card may also require you to get a new PSU with higher wattage.

To have sound from the TV, you will need an adapter cable to connect the PC's speaker port to the RCA right-left audio connections on the TV.

As you guessed, some things will likely not be possible using that PC. If you are using home-theater speakers, you will only have stereo available from the PC unless it has a discrete sound card with a better connection available. Also, with a P4 2.4 GHz CPU, you shouldn't expect to use it for Blu-Ray movies or HD downloads some day.

[SatStorm]

A nice / fast / cheap and perfect alternative for your needs is GeexBox.

[lordhutt]

A nice / fast / cheap and perfect alternative for your needs is GeexBox.

There is absolutely NOTHING perfect in the world of HTPC or MediaTanks.

Trust me...HTPC's can be an extreme pain in the ass to get running the way you want, and XBMC is not the most user friendly software.

I would use Media Portal first before that.

Actually from my experience, if you have a pc powerful enough to handle windows 7 then Window Media Center, with Media Browser and MetaBrowser is pretty easy to get running with all the bells and whistles.
This is what I am currently using for mine.

HTPC's are more for the hobbyist...if you are not prepared to put quite a bit of time into it, learning, tweaking, getting the right codecs, etc etc etc...then go with one of the media tanks below

I have a WDTV which is not bad and a Popcorn Hour (more expensive)...either of these will work well if all you need is movie playback.
Never tried the media players with tv series but should not be a problem...might just take a little effort is all.

You can get tons of info on this in the AVS forums.