One of the concepts that for years has not been heard or read at all is the acronym HTPC, a type of PC that was extremely popular in its day but over time has ended up in disuse until becoming part of the pile of technologies of the past that seem to have been erased from our minds and memories.
What is an HTPC?
HTPC is the acronym for Home Theater PC and refers to PC configurations intended to be connected to a television, so we can simply say that it is a computer in the living room, but the concept goes much further than connecting a simple PC tower to the largest TV in the home.
In the first place, we cannot use a regular box since not only would it not fit aesthetically but also because the furniture where we usually place a television is not usually prepared to house a tower, so it is necessary to use a box with a factor different shape than the usual ones used in PC.
Second, and in line with the first, this greatly limits the configuration of the PC that we can build since the components that we can put inside the box will be limited by space at the outset, which means serious limitations when it comes to mounting. a powerful enough living room PC.
The HTPC, a concept that did not catch on due to usage habits
The idea of the PC in the living room did not catch on on several fronts, one of them being television content since originally the HTPC concept had a different conception. Nowadays, many people wonder if it is worth mounting an HTPC when we can buy a USB + HDMI dongle to convert a television into a SmartTV or simply buy a television of this type.
But the original concept of HTPC was not limited only to the reproduction of multimedia files on the television, since one of the ideas was to include a large capacity hard disk and a capture device that could record said content to watch it whenever you wanted.
The arrival of streaming platforms and the ability not only to be able to select the content to watch and at the right time made it no longer necessary to store the content on a large hard drive for many people, so one of the reasons when building a HTPC to view multimedia content disappeared.
But the main reason was the price, nobody is going to spend a huge amount of money for something that they will only use to reproduce multimedia content, there are boxes based on Post-PC hardware with the ability to reproduce that content and for a price against the that so-called living room PCs cannot compete.
Apple’s failed attempt at Steamboxes
If there is an HTPC product that was given a lot of hype in its day, it was the Steambox created by Alienware, the so-called X51, which had in a console factor the hardware of a gaming laptop where a GeForce 750 Ti stood out, equivalent to a GeForce 860M or GeForce 960M.
The truth is that their hardware to play games was not bad, but it was a huge commercial fiasco, since the enthusiastic PC user likes to configure their PC to measure and make updates in the system and with a system like this you cannot On the other hand, the ordinary user who seeks only to reproduce multimedia content is overcome by the specifications of a complete PC and did not need such a complex system.
Valve bet a lot to put the PC in the living room, the problem is that it had to compete with video game consoles that cost a fraction of the price and allowed to play almost the same games. Things did not end well for the Steamboxes and the adventure of placing a PC in the living room failed again.
What is the best solution to connect a PC to the TV?
This that we are going to recommend may sound strange, but it depends on the space you have at home and where you live, whoever writes this article lives in a small apartment where he has a large UHD television in the same room and the PC next to it, so that I only needed to use a powerful HDMI cable to connect my PC to the TV, without having to create a specific build for it.
What we recommend is that if you have a gaming PC and what you want is a large screen, either a television or a monitor, to play from bed, then we heat our heads by building an HTPC just for that, but kill two birds with one stone and it will be much cheaper than having to build an HTPC or re-position a mini-PC as an HTPC.