Picking hardware for Media Center

overall cost?

and can you recommend a cheaper alternative PSU?

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typo?

no extra drivers?

 

Yay, me boss let me have the mobo cpu and ram outta a teacher laptop that I was stripping for spares. The Vga conecter needs resoldering somewhere but thats the only prob I found, and tbh il use s-video.

It was a HP - xe4100 :

1130mhz celeron (maybe replace it with a mobile p4 of higher speed from ebay)

256mb ram, get another 256 or get 2x 512.

add 20gb hardrive

add wifi using mini pci (from ebay)

and some other bits, like remote etc

Wack it all in a low profile case

 

duh!

I just finished my HTPC a few days ago (almost)
I'm going to change the haupauge pvr150mce for a TwinHan DTV Ter-CI Check here And a CI module for Conax encryption that is used for my DVB-T topbox (dutch KPN digitenne)

the reason i want this, is that going from digital (topbox) to analogue (pvr150mce) to digital (LG plasma DVI->HDMI) is making a mess of the signal conversions. It will set me back 240 euro (129 for TwinHan and 100 euro for CI card reader) but it is al digital domain so i have absolutly no loss.

My HTPC:
Case: Greenpower HTPC ( See here )
Mainboard: Asus A8n-sli
Proc: AMD64 3000+
Mem: Kingston value pc3200 2x512mb
Video: Club 3D 6600GT
HD: 200gb wd
tv-tun: Hauppauge pvr150mce
Softw: winxp mce 2005 + ms remote

TV: LG 42PX3RV Plasma
Audio: Harman Kardon AVR335/S
Speakers: Left + right + RRear + LRear : B&W DM601
Center: B&W LCR600 (Center-front and Center-back)
Sub: B&W AWS650

 

Da_dego - In defence of the epia board, it was never designed to run hi-def especially with the onboard graphics. In fact I think you'll struggle to find any mobo with on-board graphics which could handle hi-def.

The epia board has a couple of options which make it a nice alternative for a current media pc. Its small so can sit quite nice next to your 32" lcd or plasma screen.

They are extremely quiet. For instance mine is at 4db. You just cant hear it. I used to water cool my pcs 2 years ago, and I know my epia is quieter than the eheim pump i had in that kit.

The epia handles MCE fine. I have zero problems with TV, playing divx movies, mp3s and dvd's. I can surf the web and do email. That is pretty much all I do on it.

From those using the linux htpc combinations Ive heard good reports of using epia's and you can now use the MCE remote (best hardware microsoft ever made) with myhtpc.

If you need a htpc to handle hi-def or have multiple tuners or be able to play games on too, the epia isnt the board, but it will be the quietest, and in your living room that is what counts.

 

What about ATI's RS400/RS480 chipsets?

 

I'm not totally clued on all the current mobo's but I did some digging. I havent found any review which included running hi-def on the mobo, but the review of the EQS(?) board on here seemed to show the 480 still suffered on Doom 3 and Far Cry on low detail which I believe would mean stuttery playback when trying to do hi def at 720p.

Though on the plus it did get Doom 3 runnable which is more than the epia will.

Epia boards are not about powerfull performance. Though I imagine they will be looking to get hi-def playback possible on later boards as its quite a big market for them.

I have a 32" LCD and when I plug my main PC into it, its great to watch hi-def, its amazing. But the noise from my shuttle and the nvidia 6800GT card is just too much to actually want to keep it in the living room. The epia is more than acceptably quiet, and for recording freeview etc it meets the need.

My take on this is, you cant exclude kit, just because its not mainstream or meet future requirements. By the time hi-def broadcasts are mainstream and the pc tv cards are available, you'd probably be looking to replace everything in the pc anyway.

 

Okay.. I've got a few "beefs" with the article, and a few things that just seem to be flat-out wrong.

First: hardware requirements being high... I call ********. I'm running MCE2005 on an xp2500+ and 768MB of ram, A Geforce FX5700LE, and 4x250GB running off an Adaptec 2410SA to a 750GB raid array, on an NF7-S mobo using the soundstorm in and out. Nice, yeah. High, no. She runs like a champ, no stuttering, no performance issues at all.

Second: I've got 3 Emuzed Maui III capture cards running in this box, purchased from ebay. I'm able to handle 3 simultaneous records while watching previously recorded TV w\o issue. I can also do 2 records while watching 1 live TV (football,mmm...) again, w\o issue.

I can play back WMVHD w\ no stutters. Nothing is overclocked.

 

It seems living room pcs are becoming more popular, even to the general public - i sold this one with a 37" lcd to a bloke (who knew nothing about pcs whatsoever) on sunday (i particularly like they keyboard, which has a mouse trackball built in the right hand side and the mouse buttons on the left)

 

Ok, a couple replies here:

@JonDixon,
I wrote a reply earlier, and unfortunately the website was down...but it was in reference to the earlier post on Epias. They DO make nice HTPC, as long as you're using a caputure card with both encoding AND decoding, such as the Hauppage 250. This takes tremendous strain off of the processor, and epias appreciate the breathing room. However, a 250 is far from an impossible-to-find item, making epias a viable option. They are silent, and for current requirements work quite nicely. Actually, they just recently released 1.2ghz models, which helps.

@starbuck, keep reading...more of this will apply as I go. in reference to your three tuners, though, I have heard of MCE working with up to 4, but the only thing I've found documented is 2, and apparently Wil read similarly. Glad to hear you got more running without problems, though. Did that require extra software?

@everyone who says "this system is absolutely gratuitous excess and is bull****!":
This is a spewing of thought, so please bear that in mind...thoughts aren't well formed at this hour.

As stated earlier in the thread, HTPCs can be built with one of a few goals in mind...the major ones are cheap, or powerful. The cheap works just fine for modern systems, and no one is arguing that point. For current technology, there are some great software options. Aware of this, we are working on reviews for these. Some of them don't require such high system specs, which is evidenced by quite a few of the posts in this thread. We are aware of this also, but we ask you to bear with us and read into the intent of the article...

We are on the brink of a whole new set of OSs, including MCE06 and Vista. Now, anyone who is looking to get into an HTPC at this point, who is researching it from now, will be looking at MCE06, Linux, or Vista. Vista will be a while in the making, but MCE06 is coming around the corner. If you're looking at building just now, you don't want to re-upgrade in a year. And when things go to all digital or all HD broadcast, you don't want to have to buy more than you need...that means your cheapest option would be buying only new capture cards.

Because of that, we're looking at bringing you a system that can handle whatever you WILL throw at it. MCE06 has higher requirements than MCE05 did, along with a few (hopefully functional) improvements. Also, as more people come into HTPC, substituting that for a console system will become more of a priority...that means the system has to be able to run decent games at a decent resolution.

We have chosen this system based on the idea that if it runs all of these goals, by its nature it can run lower programs. This system will run MCE06 (easily), while watching TV, burning a DVD, and recording video. So, is it higher than one NEEDS for an HTPC at this moment? Absolutely. Is it a bit more beef than the system that I currently play my games on? Yep. But, it's a realistic expectation of where we plan to go with this section, and where we think HTPCs are headed.

So before you knock us for not having a clue at how cheaply you can build an HTPC, and shame us for over-speccing, give us a couple months to show you where we're going. Some of it you'll have seen before, but some of it we don't think you have yet. Because you're going to see us doing some things that will hopefully expand the way most people think about a computer kicking it in their living room, and maybe other places. And I hope you won't be disappointed.

 

Just to further Da Degos post..

(He is going to be writing much of the new HTPC content on the site. Hence the 'we', if you were wondering!)

If you read through thoroughly, I've mentioned things like you can run on a Celeron or a Sempron. I specifically put that in there. I've told you what I've chosen and what I think is best, but I've also listed the reasoning and the thoughts behind the hardware choices so that you can make them yourself.

Starbuck... great that you're running HD on your system. But with a 5700 you're not getting PureVideo, and I think that's a great thing to have. You're doing it with a 2500+ - awesome, but Microsoft do recommend 3GHz, and I have seen systems under 3GHz struggle.

Read the article again and see if it says anywhere that you 'must' have something, or instead if it gives you reasons and invites you to make your own choices.

The major exclusion from that article was Epia. I do intent to write a separate article on Epia, based on the fact it's such a unique case.

 

Fair enough mrhaz, I do like the fact that you've got an eye towards the future. My barton is actually a mobile part which I'm running for silence's sake. I suspect that if MCE06 bogs the machine, I'll just loose some silence and overclock it to a 3200+ or higher if I throw watercooling on it.

As for the 3 tuner cards, no additional software needed, just install the MCE drivers (I forget where I got them, I think emuzes' new site had them for the gateway XP MCE machine for which these cards were originally intended. The Maui does do hardware MPEG2 compression, but I'm not so sure about the decompression part. The T2 WMVHD is the only HD I've thrown at it. The FX5700LE was a 'freebie' if you will, I just kinda had it laying around. I can see going to an AGP based gefarce-6600 in the near future if need be. Terrestrial HD reception is non existent where I live, and I refuse to pay the exorbitant amount for HD cable... that and I don't have an HDTV set... just my regular 32" TV and an XGA DLP projector on occaison.

 

One of the points to cover in future articles would be how to silence higher spec kit for specific living room use. If you check out some of the AV forums, you'll see a lot of complaints in regards a number of new model plasma and lcd's which seem to have loud fans inside them.

Now if the fan noise from the plasma is annoying (and is leading to returns), imagine what sort of noise your HSF on your AMD64 plus the noise from your nVidia 7800.

My concern with this convergence of technologies, is you'll end up with something that technically can handle everything, but does not meet its real world use.

Having kit which can play Half Life 2 at full detail in the living room is great, and at that point I'd except some noise for cooling, but when all I'm doing is watching TV or playing a divx movie the last thing most people will want to hear is the whirring of fans.

Also looking at future articles, it would be great to cover the linux possibilities, especially as some now can use the MS remote. I have started to become tempted by MythTV as its free and records TV into a standard mpeg file rather than windows own file format.

Also as mentioned, you're looking at people replacing from also having a console. NOw you could cover the mame plugin for MCE, but maybe you can discover if games makers are going to support it. For MCE to become a dominant system in the living room, it will have to allow games to be run through it.

It would be great in MCE if it had a 'My Games' folder which would then show the icons of the games you've got installed. Its not going to work if you get the same mess you get in XP with each game wanting to add its company name as a folder before you get into the game subfolder.

I definately look forward to the next article.

 

fortunately with stuff like Cool n quiet you can have your cpu and gfx clock down and reduce fan speed when not under load like a laptop does

 

Hehe, Jon, you are dead on target.

We will very much be looking into silencing the rig, and will go over the best possibilities for this. First of all, my wife is a silence freak. If it's too noisy, she'd be returning it. So you can bet that it'll be part of my reviews, along with some other things. I don't want to give too much away just yet, but it sounds like you won't be disappointed with where we're taking things.

Oh, and as for linux? All I'll say is, you've already got your wish.

 

Excellent then. If only my MS keyboard for MCE had turned up today I would have had a great day.

 

The GeForce 7800 GTX cooler is quiet

I nearly took my ear off checking whether I could hear it or not when I first turned it on.

 

ohhh.... dont trust msi guys...
they suck, imo
back at i22 or i21, we (micrologic) got our hands on a 6800 ultra (something that no1 had that time) and it was poor. the plastic cut out for the gfx fan housing/ casing wasnt 100% cut properly so it didnt let the fan spin at all, so u no, i neva checked 2 c if it was working (y wud u, wen it was brand new) and after a while (of it being benchmarked), though id jus check on it, see how fast it was spinning coz it was really quiet, when i looked at it, it wasnt spinning.

so i S**T my load, switched off the pc, burnt my hands taking it out and touched the plastic and it was sooo soft that i left my finger print on it. good thing we had 2x120mm fans on display, worked out nice cooling down the gfx
oh and not to forget the 3rd msi 845pe board that im on now atm... all m/b's blown (no vis display after 9 months-ish)
so msi = bg

 

manvadher, though that post has a lot of very interesting information in it, I had to read it 4 times to translate all that.

 

re-read it and made some changes... this is the reason y i dont post much

 

My Wife would KILL me to bring the computer in the Living Room

except to watch a movie. That I already do with cabling on my system which is a very modest system - a DELL 2400 Dimension w/384 memory - a TV Card with built-in MPEG2 Chip - and a onboard i845 Chip.

I am thinking this Media Center thing is for folks not married - as my wife does not care about Computers - does not want to learn computers - and only lives to watch her Soap Operas on TV.

If I made my TV so it could handle the PC - which I can do now as I have a Scan Converter - the wife would revolt. Baseball and American Football is enough she would say - the computer needs to leave our TV alone.

Yes she likes me recording things - but she will not tolerate me surfing the Net on the TV.

Beyond that - Media Center PC is an interesting concept - but Microsoft came to the table too late to be a serious player. Check out www.intervideo.com for their version of a media center pc that uses any tv-card they support.

I have a fondness for intervideo I must admit as it was bundled with my TV-card eons ago - and now they are fighting against Microsoft. Wonderful.

Microsoft does nothing well - they are a bundler of software packages. As an OS it is great - but for specific roles - why tell new folks how to create a Microsoft Media Center using bundled software from 3rd party sources that leave a sour taste in folks mouths when compared to a lean and mean system available off the shelf with just a bit of instruction? And running XP Pro as the base!!

Best let you go - but you are way off target in giving people good info on this.


thanx.