Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Home Theatre PC - HTPC

A Home Theater PC as opposed to a Media Server.

An HTPC has all the capabilities of a PC that will play all forms of HD content. It may or may not be equipped with a BD drive and a TV tuner. It may be capable of recording program material and function as a PVR.

A Media Server is purely the source of digital media that can be distributed to any number of HTPCs on a local network. A Media Server can also function as an HTPC but this is not necessarily the case. The power, in terms of CPU and memory speed do not have to be the same for a Media Server as for a HTPC. A Media Server is likely to feature mass storage in the region of 1T Bytes or more. There is no reason why a Media Server cannot be built with a computer such as the Raspberry Pi and it need not run Windows even though the HTPCs on the network are Windows computers.


  • The distinction between a Media Sever and a Media Centre

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