Ok – first thing, I don’t want to put a tower case near my TV. The whole point of an HTPC is to put something a bit less of an eye sore in my leaving room. The case, the micro-ATX I need for it plus a special DVD drive that fits in the case, together add up for more then half the cost of the device. If I don’t get these, a standard computer that can do MPEG4 decoding is about 1000NIS – I can get one and a laptop.

Also, the most modern CPU I have in my PC graveyard is about a P3 600 – hardly in the same league as an XP2200+, and I don’t believe it can handle MPEG4 decoding in real time. Building an HTPC from the parts I have available is not an option.

I was toying with the idea of just getting the parts for an HTPC and assembling it myself, but this would save me the 150NIS Plonter is going to charge me for the work, and maybe about 100NIS more for parts that I can find slightly cheaper elsewhere. Really not worth it, especially considering that building stuff into a slim HTPC case is rather difficult and easy to mess up.