Home Theatre PC

[ten0rplaya04]

I've been looking into building an HTPC for my tv. Right now it's running off my gaming computer which is fine for viewing for now, but I wanted to do some funky stuff. Has anyone seen software that you can create your own "tv station"? What I want to accomplish is use my cable with my computer, but "inject" a new channel or group of channels put out by my computer that will randomly schedule dvd movies saved to my computer.

The idea here is that my girlfriend has 1000's of dvd movies and she'll never watch the dvd. But she's subscribing to movie channels from satellite and even though she has the movie on DVD she only watches them on the satellite (minus her latest 2 dvd purchases). If I can get rid of the need for movie stations, I figure that'd save a bit of cash each month and her dvd's wouldn't be going to waste.

Things I know:
- Computer will be fast (i5/i7) to accommodate the encoding of multiple movies
- Probably need some sort of XML based channel guide (I can use batch files to add movies to the XML files)
- DVD movie itself needs to be ripped to the computer without menus into either AVI or WMV or the computer won't play the movie without user interaction.
- Channel guide on most software only supports Cable because Satellite guides do not transfer over to Computers....This is fine with me as we plan on getting Cable in the near future.

[Dex]

ok so what dont u kno

[ten0rplaya04]

LOL. Names of software that seem good in this instance. Basically a software program that is two fold:
1) Displays a customized tv guide based upon XML
2) Can force playback on an unspecified channel in the computer.

For example, my cable provider would use channels 3-250. I'd want to use channels 251-255 to play movies that have been randomly selected by a daily batch file. I'm sure there's an easier way to do it than the way I'm thinking, but I'm just throwing out what I can think of.