Decisions decisions - HTPC

#1

As I said I’m meant to be building a HTPC for the family TV, and I’ve just spotted 2 come up on OCAU.

What I was plannin to build:

AM3 x4 640
Antec NSK2480B
2GB DDR3 1333
WD 1.5TB
Leadtek WinFast DTV2000DS
Hauppauge MCE Remote Control Kit

The main one I’m considering is this sucker

The tech’s gettin a little older, but if it can handle 1080p and can output through the vid cards HDMI, I don’t see any real drawbacks. Plus that is a sweet lookin case :shades:.

The other is this, which is more or less what i was lookin to buy anyway minus a few parts.

Thoughts?

#2

That first OCAU system is similar to what I built for mum and dad. It hasn’t shown any weakness yet. Handles BluRay/1080P easily.

The 2nd OCAU system is similar to a HTPC that I just finished helping a mate build with left over parts, once again, does the job.

The one you want to build is closer spec’ed to my HTPC. IMO, it’s overkill but you will always know that you won’t have to upgrade for a very, very long time.

The biggest thing to get your head around with HTPC’s is that nearly any computer could function as one, even with ancient components. My mate ran a single core AMD in his for around 12 months and it still handled 1080P as it was handled by the GPU. It was a bit sluggish though. Dual cores are a minimum.

The Hauppauge MCE Remotes are great, just plug them in and they work. They are also natively supported by MediaPortal if you decide to use that over WMC.

Get the biggest HDDs you can afford, you’ll fill them quickly and then not have any more space inside the case for additional ones.

Looks like you’ve already decided on this, but if you want dual digital tuners, get a single card with dual tuners. I did the opposite, twin single card tuners. Works the same, but you loose an expansion slot. The Leadtek DTV turners are great value, I have used them exclusively over anything else due to the cost. Hauppauge are probably the best, but you really pay for them. Don’t bother with hybrid tuners, nobody cares about analogue any more.

There’s a lot that I’ve missed (rushing a bit due to needing to study, I can’t resist the forums), but if you want any more opinion on other things that I didn’t answer, just give a yell.

#3

Cheers Nip,

I’m thinking I’ll offer the res price on the Lian Li system. Do like that case and saves a few bucks. Once I do get some system i’ll come back and ask about mediaportal and what not.

#4

The Lian Li system is nice, actually passes as looking like a DVD player due to the case height. 9/10 people wouldn’t even know it’s a HTPC.

One very important thing I forgot to mention previously. In regards to HD media, I have not found a reliable solution to play 1080i VC-1 smoothly. 1080p VC-1 works fine strangely enough. Short of re-encoding to another format, a lot of GPUs do not support it as far as I know (well not my 9600GT anyway). This is mostly an issue for HD Doco’s that the BBC release as they seem to favour the format. Now that I think about it, I tested the same sample video on my parents HTPC (using a 4350) and it played it perfectly. I guess what I’m trying to say is even if the GPU has more than enough grunt, it may not support all the DXVA standards depending on age. Good news is that HTPC video cards usually cost around $50.

PDVD plays it flawlessly which can be integrated into MP and WMC, but it’s not really seamless.

#5

Good stuff to know. Another thing i’m pondering is whether it’d be worth throwing one of these SSDs in there. Guess I’ll wait and see how she runs to start with. Plus i reckon if I did come to own a SSD, it would somehow miraculously appear inside my own PC :sweat:.

#6

Haha, well it really isn’t needed considering most people put their HTPCs to sleep rather than shutting them right down. PC turns on in about 1 second.

It would be slightly beneficial if you shut it down of a night like I do, as it would load MP/WMC quicker on startup. But for everything else, it wouldn’t make a big difference, not as noticeable as it would be if you put it in your own system which is what I think you are hinting.

Also, as the SSD is potentially taking up a HDD slot that would otherwise be holding a storage drive, I would say DON’T DO IT as you’ll need all the internal HDD space you can get. It’s not like a regular case where you get ~20 HDD bays, in a small case you’d be lucky to get 2.

My LC17 will take 6, but my 9600GT length means that I can’t use 3 of them. I will buy a shorter card later on, but even with 3TB of space, I am quickly running out. My next lot of HDDs will be 2TB each, if not 3 TB as they are finally on the market.

#7

Agree get as many big hdds you can and 2 tuners on 1 card is minimum plus i got a motherboard that cold handle 1080i so i was chewing the extra power by running a dedicated gpu and 4 gig of ram helps but not necessary

#8

Yeah, I run 4GB of RAM too, nice to know it’s there. It’s DDR2 so there was no reason to have anything less than 4GB at the time as it was so cheap.

Still, my parents HTPC which I built for around $500 is just as brisk as my HTPC which cost me closer to $1500. So it’s not the end of the world, but I’d recommend it if RAM is cheap.

Power consumption is another good point, considering most HTPCs are on as much as your TV (even more so in my case), you don’t want something hugely thirsty running all day long just to download movies/record tv shows etc (essentially idling). My HTPC is closer to a (entry level) gaming system(have a wattmeter to check) and it draws 122W just idling. That’s not too bad, but I am pretty sure that my parents HTPC drew under 100W idling last time I checked. That’s using a HD4350 which is fairly lightweight as far as power draw goes.

I guess you could get into a habit of turning the HTPC off when you finish using it, but in my case, that would mean that I would be turning it off and on again multiple times a day which would be a definite way of killing HDDs prematurely. Also a good idea to tell W7 not to put HDDs to sleep when they aren’t being used. You’d save on power, but it probably wouldn’t really make a huge difference.

#9

Another advantage that just popped into my mind that I forgot to mention.

If you don’t have a TV in your room due to not having good reception/socket in the wall, you will be able to stream the live TV feed to your PC if you install the MP client on your own PC.

If you have dual tuner, it means that two separate streams can be running at once, so you’ll be able to watch TV on your PC, whilst people on the HTPC will be able to watch the same or a different channel at the same time.

It’s a very handy feature. Set up a mates system like this a while ago. His room has concrete filled block walls which make running wires practically impossible, and it also ruins his reception with a conventional TV antenna. He can now watch TV in his bedroom via a wireless N connection to his HTPC in his lounge. Wireless G should still be sufficient, ethernet is obviously the best case scenario.

EDIT: Just confirmed it on my own system. Wireless G handles SD flawlessly, but it stutters on HD. That could be due to the stream source coming from a PC that uses a crappy wireless G USB dongle, rather than a proper adapter or a WAP. My system was utilising about 22% of the 54Mbps available on wireless G before stuttering which is why I think the source was the problem. Could of even been the router struggling to send and receive that sort of throughput. SD used about 10% and was perfect.

#10

Ah nice. Forgot to update this thread. Got the Lian Li PC on the weekend, workin like a dream. Its the first PC I haven’t bought in pieces and built myself for years, which makes me feel a little dirty :sweat:. But it saved a few quid and it does the job I needed perfectly. Aside from dumping a whole bunch of tv and movies onto it, I haven’t done much else, so it’s still using WMC. I know you people rave about MediaPortal so I’ll have to look into it. What’s the main benefits of switching?

#11

Haha, I’m probably the only person who raves about MP.

In a nutshell it is just far more flexible and customisable. It’s like IE vs FF. One is propriety software allows no addons, the other is open source and allows people from all over the world to make kick ass plugins for it.

Check out their site if you are interested. http://www.team-mediaportal.com/

The moving pictures plugin and the TV series plugin will be the two most used things on your HTPC, without question.

Other benefits include what I mentioned above, you can stream Live TV to any PC in the house, as well as local media via the network. It’s basically rock solid these days too, not as silky smooth as WMC but it’s not far behind. Custom skins help a real lot. I’ll have to put some screenies up for you.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xRr2VeDx0o&feature=player_embedded[/ame]

#12

I will just add that with all the extra freedom you get with MP, it does mean that you need to spend more time setting it up and making it function correctly for you. Once you get over that very small hurdle, and it won’t take you long at all, you’ll not be able to go back to WMC.

#13

how do you make wmc play all types of files? can you load codecs? or does it just suck,

#14

It’s half and half. If you install codecs that WMP can use, then it should also work on WMC. I found its file support to be a bit average which is the reason I originally stopped using it.

Might be a lot better than it was when I first used it, but I couldn’t get it to reliably play divx/xvid files, wouldn’t fast forward, wouldn’t rewind, wouldn’t save position. Worked completely fine for DVDs but that was about it.

I was using Vista Media Centre though, I think W7 has native support for more formats so it should be a bit better.

#15

yeah thats what i found, interface i really liked but couldnt play anything i had.

#16

I couldn’t get mp to run stable enough for me though if i didn’t have the shitty case and ikon remote probably would have made a difference

#17

MP certainly isn’t perfect, still has a long way to go to achieve the user friendliness of WMC. I wouldn’t dream of asking my parents to configure MP, it just wouldn’t be possible, haha.

It took me a good 12 months from when I initially tried MP to when I actually sat down and made it work. No denying that WMC is far easier to get going. I did spend a lot of time on the MP forums and worked out the kinks. I had Live TV pixelation issues (related to signal quality, not MP) that used to drive me mad. Never had software stability problems since the 1.0.2 final came out. Using 1.2 Alpha atm and it’s the best yet. 1.1.1 final had a gui bug that made menus a bit sluggish.

I also had to do a lot of mucking around with my remote to get it working, if I bought an MCE remote then I wouldn’t of had an issue. If it wasn’t for event ghost, I never would of got my remote working. The other two HTPCs in the house use MCE remotes and they work 100% from the get go. Of the 2 other HTPCs that I’ve built and worked on for friends, I told them not to use any other type of remote, and they have not looked back.

Of the total 5 HPTCs that I have built (one being mine) I’ve only had what I would call issues with one of them. It was a PC that was about 7 - 8 years old. Single core AMD Athlon 64, 1.5GBs of RAM etc. It worked ok but it would struggle with HD and some more CPU demanding apps. Note that WMP would also struggle, wasn’t a MP problem. After putting a X2 core CPU in it (had a spare in my cupboard, lol), everything was sweet.