Ok guys, a friend of mine was abt to buy a home theatre system(no speakers, just the DVD/VCD player and the TV) before he got in 2 minds. He wants to know if a certain computer configuration could be a substitute. After all u can do a lot more on a computer. My guess is a reasonably powerful system, maybe a celeron on a good mobo, equipped with a great sound card with good dolby playback, a graphics accelerator and a DVD drive ofcourse. What do you think? Please suggest the components.
cheers

ya i suggest

Cel 1.7 (northwood)
Good 845G Mobo
256 Mb DDR Ram
80Gb Hdd
SB Live Audigy Sound
any good ATI card (9000,9100) with remote wonder
Sweet Klipsch 5-point Speakers or Cambridge Soundworks
Asus DVD drive or combo dvd drive (CD-R CD RW+ DVD Rom)
get rest as you prefer


There is another cheap mobo CPU Combo i would suggest
Athlon XP 1800+
Asus Nforce 266 mobo
(Asus Nforce Onboard Audio and Onboard geforce2MX are more than enough for home theater system)
But If you go for this you will still need to get a ATI's remote Wonder card... donno how that will fare in your budget ?

tell me what you eventually ended Up

Kyro.

thanks!!! the configs sound neat. sadly, AMD's out of question .
I hope the audigy dont cost a fortune :roll: . I'm about to call up my dealer now and will follow up soon .

Another Option Could be:
If your friend wanted to he could get a computer like an old:
MS-6178 Motherboard
533 Celeron
384Meg ram(PC133)
DVD Drive
10Gig HDD
SBLive 5.1 Digital Edition
An Older ATI card, Something like a Radeon ATI 7000+ with tv-out, or an NVIDIA Geforce(I'd advise to get a Radeon for tv-out)
And also buy a TV, then connect the TV to the comp .
Sound systems, There's so many different ones to choose from. Logitech in the later Z6*0's are also worth a mention.

If he doesn't know much about Linux he could just Download the Geexbox Linux Distro iso[4Meg in size] and it's as easy as pie to just burn the iso, setup the CD as the first booting device in the bios, insert the CD at bootup, let the cd do its stuff. Then once it's loaded MPlayer Insert a DVD press enter and voila you play the DVD on the TV .

There's a few Linux Distributions for that sort of stuff.
Geexbox is just one of the smaller packages to download that's all.
http://www.geexbox.org/en/index.html

I myself have something slower than that sort of system running DVD's at full speed with different Linux Distros. So that'd run DVD's fine, and if you wanted to, you could install Windows of sorts on it to use for office use.

nforce for tv-out... nvidia isnt actually known for their tv-out support. you'll need a bunch of 3rd party software to get a decent output :|