Hi Geoff, a great write up. I’ve been meaning to replace the innards on my MCE for ages and finally upgrade to Vista from XP (I’ve had the disc since launch but whenever I have tried vista I’ve reverted).
I have a couple of questions. Firstly I assume that this set up will play Bluray fine? Secondly How does turning the volume up and down work for you? At the moment on my set up if there is a digital output the MCE remote has no effect on volume, I have to use the amp remote.
I have 3 MCE’s in my house that all record to 1 Windows Home server so I can watch all the recorded TV in any house. It works quite well but I’ve had to use a non-storage pool drive for the TV as WHS couldn’t cope with balancing as stuff was recorded.
Nice article. I’ve had a HTPC in my living room for almost 4 years now using Beyond TV from Snapstream Media. It came to point that I had so much stuff packed in that little box I thought it was going to burn up.
So I bought I cheap tower case and transplanted the “guts” of the HTPC to it and moved it to the basement. It now has 3 OTA HD tuners, 1 PVR-150, 1 PVR-500 (dual analog tuners) and almost a terabyte of drive space. For my living room I built one using an ASUS M2A-VM HDMI and a left over AMD64 X2 4000, 2gigs of ram running Vista Ultimate and Beyond TV Link Client. I’m also in the process of ripping my DVD’s to a Divx format and dropping them onto my Beyond TV Server.
At this point I can’t imagine using the cable company DVR or Tivo. It just seems the have to many restrictions in place on how you can use the equipment. They may be in some cases cheaper but you know what they say…“Freedom ain’t Free!”
I’m curious as to how will the AMD processor handles x264 playback of 1080p. In my experience the hardware playback is useless at the moment to me, because most my movies are encoded in the MKV container, and no player supporting hardware playback (eg. PowerDVD) also supports hardware playback of x264.
What is the CPU load during playback? The CoreAVC decoder supports multithreaded decoding, and is a very efficient software decoder, so it’s the best option. My Intel Core2-Duo E6750 (non-overclocked) decodes 1080p x264 in CoreAVC with roughly 50% CPU-load.
Or are you able to play 1080p MKV movies using hardware decoding on your new HTPC?
Great, but:
If you get your HDTV from a satellite, what do you do?
Up here in Canada I use Bell ExpressVu.
How do we use that?
I used to have a Hauppauge card myself, but on satellite I never did figure out how to get a decent signal out.
Plus, I can find no way to change the channels for unattended recording of shows.
Any suggestions ?
Thanks for a decent article, BTW.
p.s.: For the Intel “fanboy” who wrote:
"For those that are AMD gunshy (like myself)"
Why?
AMD has a much friendlier warranty handling, and the Intel chipset uses as much power as the CPU, so the power figures for a similar rig are nearly 100W at idle, and about 175W at load.
I’m thinking of using the the Shuttle K45 as a base for a dual core HTPC and backup PC. (Uni soon too, may be useful for taking home during holidays.) The main problem is VGA output only. What can VGA easily be converted to, so that I can use it with a store bought TV?
As for remotes, I’ve used WinLIRC (for Windows - just LIRC for Linux). Can use it with either USB or serial receivers I think, and the serial receivers are simple enough for you to build them yourself. Then you can use any remote with it, which I love.
A HTPC is definitely something I’d like, but you need it to have a nice small case, and the barebones systems for HTPCs are never cheap.
Laptops are naturally optimized for low power usage
The computer has a built-in display and keyboard, so no need to much around with the tv or plug in a keyboard when things go wrong
Laptops are smaller and easier to place on AV racks
Streaming video from the computer only uses 1-3 watts more than running idle
The HD Homerun sits on the network and can stream live HD to any client on the network. It also can pick up both clear cable and antenna.
the Xbox 360 has a built-in Windows Media Extender, and the remote is aware. Simply press the green button on the remote and the xbox starts up, finds your MCE box, and gives you the full MCE interface
The Xbox already has vga and component output capable of 1080p (get the XBOX Elite for HDMI) as well as optical digital audio.
because Tuning, Storage, and display are separated they can be placed optimally in your house. Want to add the ability to view and record in another room? Just place a 360 there and it will act as another extender.
As a bonus, The XBOX itself provides the ability to rent and download High and Standard definition movies from XBOX Live, and the XBOX is a great gaming console
They’ve ported it to OSX in attempt to get over the limits of the XBox platform. I see the standardization of the platform as one of its best benefits. shrug Ah well.
I tried to put together a Home Theater PC about a year ago, and it was a complete disaster. The analog is ugly because I don’t have a good signal to feed it, and the digital is unusable - it looks like it gets about 3 frames every half-second on an HD channel, and SD has a weird stuttering effect like some frames are going backwards.
The worst part is, there’s no way to debug it. Where does the problem lie? Do I need new software, driver updates, a faster CPU, better video? The only way to move forward is to keep throwing time and money at the problem and hope that you luck into a solution.
I’m hoping to repurpose that system and start over with a new one, using a configuration that is known to work for someone else. Jeff, your article lays out a great benchmark system - thank you.
Many wrote product reviews at Newegg claiming that the GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard’s northbridge gets very hot.
“very hot” is subjective, of course, but I classify it as “so hot that if you touch it you feel like you run the risk of burning yourself” and I have yet to see that from the northbridge heatsink on the Gigabyte 780g.
I’m thinking about putting together a “media-center” for our living room.
We have two unused desktop PCs - both are XP Pro (Actually, one might be Media Center, but I’m not sure).
Both are a little long in the tooth, but I think we will be okay.
Ideally I’d like to get DVR recording, DVD playback and iTunes (iTunes - my wife has a huge inventory of iTunes, and she HATES media player).
We have Comcast digital cable - I would like to be able to record from the digital channels, so I imagine I’ll need something to support a cableCARD.
What I’m wondering is:
Is it worth retrofitting one of the PCs? If so, what would be the recommended pieces-parts to upgrade (my thought is graphics card for a TV tuner card, probably a 5.1 soundcard would also be good, maybe a Blu-Ray DVD drive, maybe a bigger HD - does memory and processor play a large part of a media player?)
Is there a way to keep iTunes in the setup? I don’t want to have to migrate it all to Media Player and convince my wife to use it (I would prefer iTunes as well).
The main problem with htpc setups nowadays for me is finding a DVD / BluRay player that will keep quiet enough. You mention cheap players being available, but you don’t happen to have any ideas on getting a quiet one, do you? (don’t say Plextor, because their consumer market stuff doesn’t have the option to throttle down speed anymore…)
I have been running mythtv on gentoo for a couple of years. While the approach I took (not using one of the pre-canned mythtv linux distros) takes some time, I view it as a learning experience (not sure is the wife agrees…).
For a hobbyist type, it offers limitless opportunity to tinker.
