reviews in specialist magazines of high end Home Theatre PC’s have demonstrated that the PC’s compute power and upgrade flexibility give it the capability to quickly adopt emerging standards and surpass the performance of a dedicated device. Typically a dedicated device will use relatively long in the tooth trusted and reliable old technology. Utilising processors from five or so years ago when a modern video card for example has over a Teraflop of compute power to bring to dedicate to the process of decoding Blu-Ray content and displaying it in the best possible quality, frame after frame.
De-mystifying the common techno-babble
Rarely have there been so many standards and acronyms and consequentially misinformation tied up with what is essentially a very simple task. From the viewers or listeners perspective all they want to do is watch a film or listen to music, or both. We don’t care how it’s stored, what cable it comes out of, how it’s encoded or copyright protected etc. All the acronyms and technical specs you see are really about these things and understanding what they relate to makes it very easy to work out what matters and what doesn’t. So let’s divide these up into categories and see what there is, and what we really need. After this background it will be easier to understand what you need your Home Theatre PC to do and why.
Copyright protection: There are a variety of standards but for the HD broadcasts or pre-recorded content HDCP is the one you want to make sure your Home Theatre system is compliant with. That means everything in the system; the player, monitor, Digital Signal Processors (DSP) and receivers. Anything that isn’t HDCP compliant