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Bitten by the Apple TV bug, I’ve decided to put a PC in the living room for use as a video player. I already have a DVR box, so I don’t really need another one, but it will be nice to get all my video content in one place. Eventually, I would like to rip all my DVDs to VIDEO_TS folders to that I never have to mess with physical media again.

As the proud owner of a 4:3 standard-definition TV, I don’t really need anything fancy. What I’d really like to get is a Mac Mini and a few of those stackable external hard drives designed to fit so nicely with it. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the budget for that, being a young, married student. I have an old PowerMac G4 350 MHz machine sitting here that I could slap OS X on (currently running 9.2.2), but somehow I just don’t think 350 MHz is going to cut it for some of the nicer modern video codecs.

So, in the end, I’ve decided to use my old desktop machine for the build. It was state of the art way-back-when, and it will be perfect for this monolithic little task. The specs currently:

• Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz processor (the hottest little proc ever produced, I swear)
• GeForce2 Ultra 64MB video card with DVI, VGA, and S-Video out for the TV connection
• DVD-ROM drive
• 16x CD-RW drive
• Soundblaster Live! sound card
• This strange old Winnov video capture card that I found somewhere, manfactured circa 1997, just in case I want to import video from other sources or actually do some DVRing
• 2 PATA hard disks currently, a 30GB and a 20GB (hopefully I can scrounge some up from work/friends and stick a couple of nice, larger-capacity drives in there, but it’s a start)
• Ethernet card or mobo integrated, can’t remember which

Now, it’s possible that I may need a few more things. I’m not sure if this machine has USB 2.0, and if not, I’ll most likely want to add it. Then I can slap my 250 GB external hard drive on it, which has mostly video content on it anyway, and use my old 60 GB external as my desk-bound data drive. If I have any problems with DVD performance (which I don’t think I will, either due to possible hardware decoding on the GeForce or because the proc is fast enough), I have an old DVD-decoder card somewhere. It came out of a PII-400, which obviously needed it. I don’t think I will here.

I haven’t built a PC for myself since my freshman, or possibly sophomore, year of college, when I built one mostly on my dad’s dime for my mother. That system, a casualty of a lightning strike, has since been replaced with a Mac Mini (That’s right folks, God wants people to be Switchers!). I’m strangely excited about it, even though the “building” is just a few parts swaps. I build and rebuild systems at work all the time, but somehow doing it for myself is different. Ever since I switched to the Mac in the fall of 2003, I haven’t really had the same constant hardware desires that once filled me with a lust for more megahertz and megabytes.

More to follow on the building experience, scheduled for this weekend.