Give the Gift of a Home Theater PC with These Media Center Builds

Know someone whose home theater is in need of an upgrade? A custom home theater PC is a great gift, no matter what your budget is. Here are three different builds that will fit any set of needs.

Home theater PCs can do everything from playing simple videos to streaming from the internet and even playing video games. What you build will be based on what you want to do. Here, we're providing three different HTPC builds:

1. A tiny, silent, cheap, low-powered media center the size of a deck of cards that can play all your basic media in HD
2. An inexpensive computer that can play HD video, and provides tons of beautiful, fast-loading menus for a fairly low cost
3. A powerful, but still small and quiet PC that can play your saved media, play DVDs and Blu-Ray discs, stream HD video from the internet, and even run retro or modern video games you desire

In this guide, we'll provide three specific builds that fit these niches, as well as a few customization options to help you craft the perfect machine for your giftee's needs.

The Tiny Raspbmc Box

The Raspberry Pi provides the perfect starting point for the smallest, cheapest media center you can build. It uses a special build of XBMC and requires only a few parts:

Seriously. That's it. You'll need a few other things on hand like an HDMI cable to hook it up, an SD card to install the software, and a Micro USB cable to power the whole thing, but as far as the build's hardware goes, all you need is the Pi and a case. Heck, if you wanted to save a few bucks, you could even build a case yourself out of LEGO or print one out with construction paper. The world is your oyster. Click here for more details on what you'll need to do once you've got the hardware.

Note that this is the bare minimum when it comes to media centers. Don't expect fast, beautiful menus or HD video streaming from the internet. You can play your locally saved HD videos, but that's about it.

The Midrange Media Center

If you want something a bit more powerful than the Pi?whose menus can be a little sluggish?you'll want to build yourself a more powerful computer. This one's fully capable of playing whatever media files you throw at it, and is powerful enough to give you quicker access to the beautiful menus of a program like XBMC or Plex?all for a little under $300. You'll need:

This build is slightly better than the Raspberry Pi build, offering some faster hardware for speedier, more graphics-intense menus as well as customizability. It still won't be able to stream media very well, but it'll play your local HD files with ease. We recommend XBMCbuntu for your operating system, but you could also install a regular Linux distribution and use another media center application like Plex.

Note that you could also buy a pre-built barebones system like the Zotac ZBOXNANO-AD10-U, though you won't be able to customize it very much. And, speaking of which...

Upgrade Options

We recommend the following upgrades for a more complete media center experience:

Buy this build on PCPartPicker ($268.53).

The Ultimate HTPC for Playing, Streaming, and Gaming

If you want the complete media center experience, you'll need a more powerful build. Here is our dream media center build, which for $500 can play any video you throw at it, stream from services like Hulu and Amazon, and even play your favorite video games?from retro NES games all the way up to modern PC games. Here's what you'll need:

This beastly build will do just about whatever you want it to: you can play your local media, watch Blu-Ray discs, stream HD videos from services like Hulu and Amazon, and play just about any video game you can think of on moderately good settings.

Check out our full build guide for this media center for more info on setting it all up.

Upgrade Options

We recommend the following upgrades for a more complete media center experience:

• A more powerful APU for even better gaming: If you want to play more modern games like Skyrim or Battlefield 3, you'll want a more powerful APU to get the best graphics possible. Grab the A6-3500 ($70) or A8-3870K ($100) from AMD to boost some of that graphics power.
• A bigger hard drive for storing your movies: The above build will let you hold a few movies on the HTPC, and you can stream as many movies as you want from another computer or home server. But, if you want to store a larger collection of videos on the HTPC itself, we recommend upgrading to the 2TB version of that Western Digital Caviar Green ($110)
• Video game controllers: If you plan on playing video games, you'll want a couple of solid gamepads like the Xbox 360 controllers ($35 each), which work fantastically with Windows

Buy this build on PCPartPicker ($371.67).

Putting Them All Together

Once you've got all your hardware, check our our computer building guide to learn how to put it all together. Of course, building the hardware is only half the battle with a home theater PC. You'll also need to decide what you want to use for a remote (your phone will work fine for free, but a few bucks can get you much more), so check out our HTPC remote guide for more info. And, of course, see our ultimate guides to XBMC and Plex for setting up the media center software of your choice.

A special thanks goes out to everyone who provided suggestions last week! It made putting together these guides a lot easier, and a better fit for you.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/zDgXcXkKGjQ/give-the-gift-of-a-home-theater-pc-with-these-media-center-builds

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