Since we now have a large LCD mounted above our living room fireplace and I have a DVI to HDMI cable it would be sinful not to have a computer of some sort hooked up to that large display.

I also just happen to have a decent PC tower that is only missing a hard drive that would work perfectly as a media PC or living room computer. So what do I hope this PC will add to our entertainment experience?

• True couch web surfing
• High quality viewing of video podcasts (Totally Rad Show)
• Living room experience for watching NetFlix streaming movies
• Viewing backups of my DVDs
• Living room experience for watching anything we might rent from iTunes
• Family data and organization accessible from the couch
• Widgets for weather, email notification, etc.
• Playing of some PC games in the living room
• Virtual aquarium or ambient video screen for parties

So what do I need to get this done? Well I need a hard drive for the PC obviously. I want to find a wireless keyboard with a built in pointing device, and due to an odd way that my TV ports are setup I’ll need to figure out some way of easily switching two RCA audio sources to the RCA audio on my TV’s component 1 inputs. Since we finally mounted the screen on the wall above the fireplace we’ll also need something to house our AV gear and this new media PC. Our AV stack is a HD Cable DVR box, a HDMI DVD player, and a Wii. With a three year old running around the house I’ve given up hope for 5.1 sound in the living room.

I really hate just about all forms of ‘entertainment center’ furniture or those shelving units that never quite fit things the way I want them to and always leave a pile of power strips and cords heaped behind them. I decided that I’m also a cheap bastard and I don’t want to go buy something so I’m going to make something to hold this relocated AV gear.

Hard Drive
Currently I’m looking at a 160gb SATA drive($41)

BETA
Having to really get down on the budget I’ve put off getting the larger hard drive. As a beta run I’ve scrounged up an 8gig IDE drive and have slapped that in with WinXP on it.

Wireless keyboard with mouse
I’ve got a wireless Microsoft mouse but the common wireless mice and keyboards are designed to work on a desk and not from across the room. This media keyboard($40) seems to be just perfect for couch surfing and at it’s the right fit for my budget.

After some research and digging that keyboard wouldn’t be my best choice as it seems pretty tied to the idea that it would be used on a machine running windows media center. My new choice is this keyboard that has a nice set of mouse buttons and a game-pad-like thumb stick for it’s mouse control.

RCA Audio switching
Found a $5 3 to 1 RCA (L/R/V) switch at Big Lots. DONE

Networking
Since I’m going to be shuttling large files into this box I don’t want to limit it’s bandwidth to WiFi so I’ll be running a Cat5 cable directly to the router. This will involve running it into the floor and then across the rafters of the basement and up into my wife’s office where we’ve got our networking living. Added to the shopping list, 100ft of Cat5 ($10).
UPDATE: I had to buy 50ft of cord for another project and got to thinking that I didn’t need 100ft of Cat5. I did a test run of feeding my rope from where I’m going to be sitting the PC and down into the basement, across the basement ceiling to where it would come up into another room where the router is held. A hundred feet would have been way to much so I’ll be getting 50ft.

Finding furniture grade wood at a local Lowes was a bit of a challenge. I don’t want to just use low grade pine and to keep the uprights as clean and straight as possible I decided on 4 poplar 2×2s. The only thing is that they are only 3ft tall. This means slimming down my shelves to just what I need to house the gear I want and reorganizing the gear a bit.

I also got a 4×4 piece of nice plywood with a good looking veneer on both sides. I might actually get to start construction this weekend.

Update:
Holding off on getting the big drive until I can see how this will work. I’ve also uploaded the first design of the media tower I’m going to build.