I finally finished up my Hackintosh HTPC project on Friday and have been able to do some tinkering with various media frontends to run on my computer. So far I’ve installed both Boxee and Plex and had somewhat mixed results.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo.

Boxee was originally what got me excited about building a Hackintosh in the first place. The concept of the project was to give the XBMC project a social makeover, enabling Twitter, FriendFeed, Last.fm and other services to be integrated into an app for the living room. The app comes loaded with loads of built-in services to enable you to connect to Hulu, Netflix, Pandora and many more popular services. And therein lies the problem. While this app would absolutely rock for US users, those outside the US are pretty much left out in the cold. I also attempted to get my streaming media to work over the network to mixed results. My goal all along has been able to stream HD content from my iMac to my living room. I currently have a wireless connection between the second floor and the basement, which is the probable bottleneck to the whole thing. I’m hoping to run cat5 cable down to the basement to get a hardwired arrangement going at some point.

I gave Plex a go and wasn’t too impressed with it. It was rather cumbersome to add network shares in and didn’t do a very good job of showing you onscreen status of processes. It would just sit there frozen for a few minutes while it worked whether it was actually going to load something.

The part that has irritated me the most about this whole process is that most of the media frontends leave much to be desired to those outside of the US. This really isn’t their fault, more so the draconian copyright rules that regulate content these days. The content rights holders are so worried about getting their slice of the pie that they forget about the people the content is created for, the consumers. Ideally I would love to use services like Hulu or Pandora to legally listen. The big content holders in the US like to point fingers at Canada as a haven for digital piracy, yet they put so many barriers in place to keep viable alternatives to downloading from showing up in Canada. I would gladly pay $10 a month for a Netflix subscription to have on-demand movie streaming. That’s a no brainer there.

Since we finally settled into our new house I’ve started upon doing something I’ve always wanted to do. Being a Mac guy pretty much since childhood I’ve always kind of envied the PC side of the computing world for the ability to build and upgrade their own PC boxes. I’m inherently a geek and just want to muck and fiddle with electronics. Macs have always had minor upgrades and tweaks you could make to the system, but since Apple ran on PPC chips very few manufacturers actually made compatible components. It used to be a task just to find a USB mouse that was Mac compatible, forget upgrading your graphics card. But that all changed after Apple switched the x86 cpu architecture and resourceful modders figured out how to run Apple’s OS X on regular PC hardware.

Now with that I decided to be a little resourceful and try my hand at building a home theatre PC for our basement. The goal I had in mind was to create a computer connected to my HDTV that we could watch movies and stream online content to the living room. I had originally bought the Xbox 360 to be able to handle being my media front end in the living room, but since it can’t stream online video it kinda failed in that regard. When Corina and I moved into our new house we decided to go without cable as a test. So far it’s worked out pretty well, though I’ve found the only bump in the road being that we couldn’t actually watch live streamed TV, having to resort to watching on the laptop of in my office on the iMac. Since I want us to actually use the basement to its full potential, HTPC seems the way to go.

nMedia 2000B HTPC case

I’m hoping to have everything assembled over the weekend and be a fully operational Hackintosh next week so we can watch the LOST season finale in the living room.

Build Specs
nMedia 2000B $134
GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L Intel Motherboard $61
Intel Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz Dual Core Processor $91
Enermax ETK405AST Tomahawk 405W Power Supply $54
Corsair DDR2 PC2-5300 2GB Ram $34
EVGA 128-P2-N428-LR GeForce 7200GS 512MB Graphics Card$29

Update May 13, 2009 My goal of being finished in time to watch LOST probably isn’t going to happen. Over the weekend I assembled everything, thought I was good to go and turned on the power, at which point nothing happened. Disassembled, reassembled to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and still nothing. After doing some troubleshooting it seemed to point to the power supply. I took it back to Canada Computers and had them test it, at which point it was confirmed to be dead. I picked up another, had them test it in the store to verify it worked, then reassembled my computer for what was the 3rd time. Flipped the switch and still no life. I posted on a support forum, got lots of handy feedback to be able to troubleshoot the issue. Turns out I had the 4 pin connector that is only supposed to fit in 1 way in backwards. I felt pretty stupid afterwards, but at least it seems to be working. Now I just need to try and get the BIOS setup and then an OS installed on the machine.

Update May 15, 2009 I am writing this update from my fully operational Hackintosh HTPC. Getting to this point was of course not without issues. After I got the machine powered up I couldn’t get my HDTV to display the BIOS settings. Turns out the TV couldn’t handle the resolution setting it switched to, so it just flashed at me. The solution ended being I had to borrow a decrepit 15″ CRT from my sister-in-law, which sorted the problem right out. From that point I was in business. I had some issue with installing the proper kext drivers for the video card and audio, but as usual the InsanelyMac forums came in quite handy.

Overall I am quite happy with the whole project. Having a fully operational, streaming internet in the living room is what I’ve always wanted. In future I’m planning on getting a video capture card, but since we don’t currently have any cable I guess it really doesn’t matter right now.