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I have a HTPC at home.  Black-box built, the hardware specs are:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz
• 4GB DDR2
• ATI HIS Radeon 5450 w/ HDMI out
• Samsung Blu-ray DVD Reader/DVD Lightscribe Burner
• Microsoft XBOX 360 Controller Receiver
• 200GB Internal HDD
• 1TB External HDD

The software specs are:

• Operating System: Windows 7
• Starting interface: Maximus Arcade with XPadder turned off
• Media center interface: XBMC
• Bluray player: XBMC w/ AnyDVD to remove restrictions on viewing
• Netflix/Hulu/Amazon VOD software: PlayOn

With this setup my  wife_(soon-to-be) and I have enjoyed anything from a quick game, to a long movie, to a collection of music from our collection or an internet radio. 

Maximus Arcade as the first interface brings a delightful atmosphere to a collection of games we have at our disposal.Since its an interface that's best on dual-core setups (due to the exit routines), it holds access to every application I want to run.  Everything in here is controlled by an XBOX 360 Controller.  I have set the "Back" and "Forward" buttons, when pressed at the same time, to exit whatever application is being run and return to Maximus Arcade.

To switch to a media center, I added an XBMC.bat to a batch file folder specifically for Maximus Arcade.  When XBMC starts, it first runs Xpadder to convert the XBOX 360 button presses from Joystick to Windows Media Center Remote buttons which so happens to be XBMC's default buttons as well.  Very cool. ;-)

XBMC is my media center of choice.  I originally had a modded XBOX non-360 that had XBMC and loved it.  It lacked the ability to play high quality HD video (without conversions) and Blurays.  Now, with the current setup XBMC is better than before. It plays all my music from the external drives, radio from the internet, and with help from Playon online streaming from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon VOD, plus lots of others.  There are a few extra plugins I use, but its up to you to determine what your end goal is to achieve with your HTPC in this area.

However, all this led me to one problem.  Bluray DVDs were hard to play smoothly with any of these setups using PowerDVD or WinDVD.  They are pure bloatware when it comes to just watching Blurays.  In came AnyDVD.  With XBMC, when I have AnyDVD running, I put in a Bluray DVD in my HTPC and AnyDVD picks it up and clears the restrictions/encryptions on how I play it.  XBMC is sweet in this area and lets me select "Play Disc" to begin playing an unencrypted Bluray (thanks to AnyDVD) using the standard controls XBMC uses to play any movie.

To configure all the controls that make XBMC usable as well as other games I play (Need For Speed on the PC), I give complete props to Xpadder.  It made life simple.  Here is the link to the configuration files I used within Xpadder.  I got them from here.

With the setup above, this makes the television a fun and complete part of the home life.  Before it was a device that allows us to waste time.  Now its a device that makes me enjoy to wasting time. ;-)

My Home HTPC →