Hello. I'm pondering the cost/benefit ratio of slapping something of an HTPC on the back of my TV. Right now I have a stack of DVD player and DVB-T decoder, meaning that iplayer and youtube are purely at-the-desk pursuits. Clearly this is an intolerably mid-90s way to live - I'm terribly late to the party. So, I'll need a little mini-ITX motherboard, presumably a dual decoder board, SSD, RAM. That's easy enough. What are we doing about software? Does Windows Media Centre still exist? Is the software that comes with a DVB -T PCIe card likely to not suck? And are there any mini-ITX boards that might tolerate a bit of basic gaming, along the World of Tanks/War Thunder sort of line? This isn't an area I'm familiar with; I usually build big video edit workstations, so thanks for any advice. P
Well, I have the ability to watch one channel and record another now, and I don't want to lose it. Not that I ever actually watch TV, these days...
You are not wrong, even what you are newly suggesting is increasingly 2000 and late. Smart TVs and Smart Boxes with internet catch up services are on the verge of killing off the media pc with tv tuners, unless you crave total control like me they seem to be the most accessible way to do this kind of thing nowadays. Windows Media Center exists, it comes as standard with Windows 7 and is a paid add in Windows 8.x, most tv cards would be recognised in this environment and you can forgo installing their mostly woeful software. Free options like XBMC exist but I have not used. There are a stack of mini-itx boards that support proper processors and graphics cards. Casual gaming on the PC and telly is possible, I would recommend an AMD APU which features a decent integrated cpu/gpu solution.
The problem I perceive with any sort of set top box is that while it's possible to find one that supports (say) iplayer, netflix, and amazon prime right now, who the hell knows what service is going to pop up next week. And yeah, games, and email, and stuff. It might as well be a PC. Thanks for the responses, folks. P
Something like an Asus EB1037 would likely be perfect... just need to swap out the mini pci-e wifi card for a tv tuner card.
In regards to software. I use a mixture of XBMC and windows media centre (win 7 x64). I use Media Centre purely for the TV guide and recording TV. The only downside of using Media Centre, is at least as far as I could figure out it refuses to save content anywhere but on the actual machine doing the recording. If you are like me and have / are planning a low spec build and want your server (not that you have one living in the 90's ) to handle re-encoding and storage of content then you'll have to write some bat files to move the content and clean up the local storage. This does also mean that your SSD will take a thrashing. I use XBMC for watching back all content and find the picture actually much better than vlc which is what I was using before. If you have digitalised or are planning to digitalise your entire movie / tv collection and want XBMC to remember what you have watched there is a great add on called "WatchedList" which creates a snapshot of what you have and haven't watched. Means that if you have to format etc you don't lose what you have watched. For reference I run my media PC on Athlon 64 x2 with 2gb ram, a 256gb Samsung 830 SSD and onboard 8600 gtx. With these specs XBMC plays back HD content without stuttering. So it seems to have good GPU offloading.
