Modding A Free Ghetto HTPC - Now with LEGO!

[dunx]

That's a tidy idea.... I can't find my Lego as I put it in the loft in the 70's ! ! !

A SKY+ PC sounds like fun though ?

dunx

[dancingbear84]

I do have some old sky boxes kicking around and an old p4 in the loft, I've been toying with combining for a while, trouble is that the heat sink is a massive dell thing.

[GeorgeStorm]

This is awesome, what kinda stuff can it cope with?
I've just inherited an older sempron pc, and was wondering how it would cope with HTPC duties

[Vo0Ds]

Originally Posted by GeorgeStorm

This is awesome, what kinda stuff can it cope with?
I've just inherited an older sempron pc, and was wondering how it would cope with HTPC duties

It's been able to handle anything I've played on it, plays HD stuff happily and zooms through menus and large-ish libraries.

If you're worried about your hardware running XBMCBuntu, OpenElec is an even lighter distro of XBMC.

UPDATE ON PROGRESS

...Nothing much to be honest, but I've updated the software to the final 11.0 Eden version. Good few bugs squashed and feels more stable.

The machine has just been happily working away, no bad smells or melted coloured plastic (touch wood)

[GeorgeStorm]

1080p no problamo?
And whats the network like? (if you're streaming from a file server or whatever?)

[Mankz]

This is awesomesauce.

[Vo0Ds]

Yep will play 1080p, though admittedly I mostly watch TV episodes which are 720p & lower. I'm using homeplugs (can't remember their capacity) to stream media from my gaming PC to the HTPC. (it still blows my mind to stream Game of Thrones through my electrical socket )

I'd love to get a low power file server / torrent box sorted; leaving stuff to download overnight on my gaming rig causes expensive electricity bills. Setting this up on the HTPC would be a bit better, but don't know by how much. Maybe when my RaspberryPi arrives I'll experiment with downloading / streaming with an external USB HDD

I may need an extension to the Lego case to house it, hmm...

[GeorgeStorm]

Fair enough, I was wondering because I watched Avatar the other night, and my p8600 in the laptop we were using was at 60% cpu usage, and we were getting stuttering every now and again, possible due to the network, although I would have thought 100mbps would have been fine for that :/ (was a 22gbish rip)

Edit:
Had an average bitrate of 16MBit, so maybe that's why it wasn't ok, considering 1000mbps is around 12mbit :P