I have a HD Home Run and it is an excelent tuner for the HD channels my cable provider has. It is a network attached tuner and is a bit annoying to get running but once it’s setup it acts just like a regular tuner. Most of them are QAM so it will pick those up without a problem. It won’t tune analog signals so you’ll still need a tuner in your box.
Not exactly cheap, but an excellent Media Center keyboard is Logitech’s diNovo Edge.
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/keyboards/keyboard/devices/192cl=us,en
Wireless, rechargeable, built in mouse, slick.
Curious what keyboards/pointing devices folks are using for HTPC. I have the Microsoft one and the point stick is terrible. I have another RF one and it drops keys constantly. Looking for a good one…
I remember a while back reading your blog about efficient power supplies. I bought one for myself and loved it so much, I bought one for my wife. My computer room is so much more peaceful and quiet! Just wanted to say thanks!
Meh… Nothing all that special here. I can buy a Mac mini with a smaller hard disk but includes an OS (with Front Row), a remote and warranty and customer support for about $40 more. When I can cobble together a decent media PC that I can leave running 24x7 without worrying about power consumption for under $350 then maybe I’ll replace the DVD and Tivo.
It is nice to read the notes about being able to connect to a standard ED Plasma which is what I still have.
I started frequenting this blog a few years ago because there were relevant postings about programming and human factors. In fact, it had me with, and I quote, “if you’ve written code, you’ve failed”.
Jeff, now it’s mainly you talking about your latest toy. You come across as a guy with enough time and deep pockets on your hands to build (another) “HTPC” or acquire the latest racing sim seat or whatever. It’s boring, and you’re gonna start dropping in the ratings.
That all sounds cool, I definately like using a media center as opposed to normal telivision or opposed to fumbling through all my DVD’s to find something I want to watch. I went the route of Xbox 360 though, given that I play games too it just seemed a more logical case. I still store my videos on my PC, but I can use a program called TVersity to more or less play them as a stream to the 360. I initially attempted to use Windows Media Center (given that I acctually bought Windows Vista Ultimate) but I found that when trying to play on the Xbox, it had more support of video codecs (only able to play .wmv files and I wasn’t about to spend all kinds of time converting all my avi’s and mpegs).
I’ve got a similar rig that I’ve been running for a couple of weeks now. The motherboard is definitely sketchy. You need the latest Catalyst drivers, the updated F4 bios, and a couple of patches from Realtek.
Initially, it would constantly “lose” my TV and then forget it had digital video output, requiring me to use a VGA cable to get a desktop back. It would then only display in low colour mode.
Since applying the stuff I mentioned in the first paragraph, it has become infinitely better. It still occasionally forgets that it is outputting sound through the HDMI cable, but it is a lot better. I think a couple of more revisions of drivers will have it sorted.
One issue I ran into was lack of audio using the HDMI connection. For some reason (I suspect more DRM garbage), Vista shuts off the audio portion of the HDMI output whenever I play a DVD. I could just connect the separate audio directly to my receiver, but then it wouldn’t be synchronized with the video (one big negative of an LCD HDTV - all that signal processing takes time. Enough time to desynch the audio and video display. The TV has delay circuitry built in, so if you run both the audio and video through the TV, like HDMI is supposed to do, then have the TV feed audio to your receiver, everything works fine. Vista won’t allow this for DVD - sigh). I can watch recorded videos and such just fine, just can’t watch a DVD.
My main sticking point before I jump in- Since, obviously, there’s no way to use your media as a digital-cable box (I’ll just call it DCB for short) due to cablecard restrictions- Is there a way to control your DCB FROM the media PC? Make it flip channels, etc? Ideally I would like to have a setup where I could set my media PC to record certain things on certain days, and have it just flip the station of my DCB on the correct day, at the correct time.
I’ve heard of people achieving this particular level of voodoo with the linux equivalent, MythTV (Flame Retardent: “equivalent” in this context means “Media Center is to Windows as MythTV is to Linux”) but the thing that always trips me up when attempting anything complex or new in Linux is trying to get so many different peices of hardware to work together in harmony.
Thanks for speccing out a cheap but powerful setup- I tried a while ago, and I think I overestimated what would be required because my end cost hit around $1200- Though that was a year or two ago- and it just wasn’t worth that big an investment to me.
I really, really wish I could go the HTPC route, but HD is the deal breaker. I know there are OTA options, but without the ability to pull HD content from Dish network, my HTPC wouldn’t get used (FWIW - Dish’s claim that their box is “better than Tivo” had to have been uttered by someone who was a complete retard, or really stoned.)
Hopefully the DirecTV tuner will ship soon. I’d switch for that alone.
I can buy a Mac mini with a smaller hard disk but includes an OS (with Front Row), a remote and warranty and customer support for about $40 more
Not really an Apples-to-Apples (I know, I kill myself) comparison, though, is it?
- far more powerful graphically
- slightly more powerful CPU
- has HDMI, eSATA, and optical out
- 2GB vs 1GB RAM
- tiny hard drive (120gb max)
- records television
- a million times easier to upgrade (seriously, have you ever tried opening a Mac Mini?)
a couple of patches from Realtek.
Geoff, which patches are these? And what do they fix?
I’m using optical out and the VGA connection for now, but if I upgrade my television I may use HDMI and/or DVI to connect in the future.
hmm you do not confuse the build quality that you will get with an acer vs the components that Jeff has chosen.
As with most things in life you get what you pay for.
hmm do not confuse the build quality that you will get with an acer vs the components that Jeff has chosen.
It is unlikely that you will get anywhere near the same low power consumption with the acer.
46 watts is amazing
As with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
Yeah I don’t get the Front Row/Mini comparison either. Front Row is no MCE but then isn’t trying to be as it only puts a dorm-room-perfect interface on existing capabilities. If you’ve got a DVD player and Tivo already the mini doesn’t really add much. In that case an Apple Tv would be a far better - cheaper, rentable movies etc. - choice.
for those of you on the Media Center bandwagon… are you using extenders? I can’t find any that will play DivX content out of the box. Any recommendations?
Great post - I’m now jealous of your low standby power consumption since my HTPC build from last year runs at around 80-90W at idle.
One thing, though, is that I would highly recommend using automatic standby. I’m not 100% sure about MCE, but I use BeyondTV and it will automatically wake up the machine for recordings, which can save so much more power. With S3 (STR), I’m using only 1-2W more than if the machine is in S4 (hib) or S5 (soft off).
I just built a system with the very same board… But… I installed Vista. It entered a cycle of doom when it saw one of the devices I installed doesn’t have a recent driver (a netgear internal wireless card)(which it did) and eventually it started up with an option to override the cycle… But aside from the vista fluke, it’s a nice system.
I was surprise with the Windows rating myself. What’s up with that? Least it comes with a PCI x16 2.0 slot just in case.
wow. Media Center. I will have to read up on this, as I have just been staying at my sisters, who was persuaded to move from a mac running osx and eyetv to windows and media center.
I was looking after her house while she was away, and as a windows head, I expected to enjoy the new setup.
I was shocked to my core. Want to record a tv program while watching a dvd? sorry… I get asked ‘do you want to cancel the recording and watch a dvd?’. Want to watch 1 channel while recording another… nope. even with my Hauppage dual tv tuner? Nope - which makes no sense.
Living in the UK, can I get the guide downloaded…? Nope. the tech guy told me everyone in the UK is having the problem because of British summertime. I cannot quite believe this (partly because the tech guy has been known to be a waste of space in the past)
Everyday having to spend 5 minutes to reboot the machine because it didn’t shut down live tv recording… which recorded 20 hours of tv! Nowhere I can find to say…‘keep only 1 hour in the buffer’
Only 1 success… causing my sister to faint when informed that her Windows head brother wanted to kill someone at Microsoft (primarily the interface designer, but maybe a couple of bullets for the functional spec guy’s legs)
Now I read this entry with the seemingly inoccuous sentence ‘I’ve been a fan of Windows Media Center…’
I shall join a forum, scour the net for information on what I am obviously missing, revisit my sisters house and do what the tech guy obviously can’t (set it up properly) and show my Sister that Blow Jobs is still just an overdressed underachiever.
Many thanks
Many wrote product reviews at Newegg claiming that the GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard’s northbridge gets very hot.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16813128090SortField=3
Have you found that to be the case with yours, Jeff?