I've never dealt with SFF pcs or HTPCs but I want one. Problem is, beyond that I dont really know what I want or need. Shuttles seem to be high on everyones list so I'm kinda leaning towards one of those. Spare parts I have now are a 2100TBredB (this cpu runs at 2700 speeds no prob, 166x13, but it may go faster), 2x512MB stick of generic pc2700, R9100 128MB, and a 60GB and 40GB HDD. So I guess I'll be looking at a Skt A setup. I dont plan on playing games, just the usual home entertainment unit stuff like: -cd player -dvd player -video recorder, you kow watch one channel record another -mp3 player -surf the net -play movies from HDD, like mpeg & avi -radio tuner (I'm told radio stations are broadcast on my cable but I havent confirmed this) Is a system built around the parts I have going to be enough power to handle what I'm looking for? What additional hardware do i need and would you recommend to make all this happen? Also, being able to run all of it off a single remote would be a big bonus, almost a neccesity. I dont know if this is common place with HTPCs or just a pipe dream though. As an aside, I live in Canada and have rogers digital cable. Apparently I can run down to future shop and pickup a tuner box and have it decode all the extra digital channels. If any one is familiar with this system, is there a PCI card or something that can do this rather than having to have another box to deal with? Any help, advice, suggestion or links would be greatly appreciated. BTW is this the forum for HTPC stuff? I just took a guess so feel free to move this thread if need be.
well, it really depends on how picky you are about hardware. There are about a zillion motherboard options, and much to my frustration, none of them have the exact combination of specs that I want. Each component can affect the usability of another, so you have to make sure that you can balance what you want it to do with what you can actually assemble. my biggest hurdle was the case. beige was right out. had to be black, and had to look "component-ish" to fit in the home theater stack. at first i tried a mATX full height case, and all the components fit fairly well, but looked sinfully ugly in a hi-fi stack. I checked out some of the silverstone and coolermaster cases, but they were out of my price range, and i don't like the appearance of the optical drives way off on the side. ahanix/D-vine make some really sharp cases, but you need deep pockets. I've currently settled on the silverstone LC-02 because it can hold a full ATX board, but at the sacrifice of using 90' riser cards, limiting me to only two agp/pci cards. so basically be prepared to do a lot of research on cases to figure out what will hold the hardware you have and plan to add. as far as the video capture card isconcerned, the hauppauge PVR series are top of the line. They've got onboard hardware encoders, which offloads the grunt work of converting video to mpg from your cpu to the card itself. If your basic cable channels are not scrambled (i.e. you can watch them on a "cable-ready" tv) then the capture/tuner card will be able to record it. if not, then you need to work around it with either a controlable cable box (serial port) or get an IR Blaster to change channels on the box. umm, i don't remember the names of the forums elsewhere, but when in doubt, google it. hth!
My suggestion would be to go m-atx, maybe the nforce 2 version so that you have capeable one board graphics and ditch the graphics card. This will allow you to get a really nice case that will sit arround your tv, and blend in, it will also to use the 1/2 slot riser card for something more useful as an HTPC, such as capture card, digitv card or even a high quality sound card. As opposed to some ATX cases that although nice look out of place around a TV because they are overly large. A full ATX case takes up good bit of room. The sped of your cpu isn't terribly important as you wont see any real benfit from overclocking. You may even want to downclock so as to reduce heat and in return noise. A big harddisk will be useful but since you can get 400 gig harddisks for around 100 pounds it wont be a major problem. I'd suggest you stay away from shuttles. They are great machines (i have one myself) but they wont fit in as an HTPC.
If it helps you at all, biff, I run my htpc on a p3 850 with 512mb of 133 dimms. Hauppage WinTV PVR card does the major work!
I've done some digging on what's going on with my cable (info is hard to find). My higher cable channels arent scrambled theyre encoded. Basically they encode it to digital to compress it and the cable box decodes the digital and puts the signal out on s-video or whatever, it also handles the channel guide and the on-demand stuff. The first 70 channels are regular analog but beyond that is the digital. This I think is my biggest hurdle. I'd really like to find a tv tuner card that can handle digital to eliminate one more thing I have to get, both for cost and clutter. I'll probably start laying this thing out from the peripherals backwards, as this digital cable thing as well as remote control are the most deciding factors. I'm pretty much open at this point to anything case wise, as if all goes well it will be the only box i need and wont need to match anything. Besides its going in my bedroom, not in and actual home theatre setup.
i think you may be hard pressed to find a digital format decoder with hardware encoding. check out hauppage.com and see what their lineup has to offer. you can use pretty much any tv card, but i recommend the hauppage line because they have hardware encoding. not a big deal if you have time to let the box run all night long crunching away at video files, but keep in mind that more CPU use = more heat = more fan noise. I have my XP mobile 2200+ underclocked at 1200MHz to keep the temps in the low 40's under load. The biggest heat source aside from the CPU and PSU is the twin HDDs. In the future I plan to migrate to 7200RPM laptop drives to keep the heat down and open up a lot more space. The Samsung Spinpoint series are wonderfully quiet when mounted properly. My current case uses the bottom screw holes to mount them to a large tray that also holds the DVD ROM, which helps reduce vibratoin noise. I have two more running in a standard case with conventional drive cages and the noise is much more noticeable.
I've been on a few more local forums to do with the digital cable service here and its a no go. What i'll do is control the STB with an IR blaster (pretty fluent in HTPC lingo now eh? ). I'm still thinking about the Shuttle SN45G V.2, one of the smallest and best built boxes I've came across that still allows me to use real hardware, as opposed to an epia or such. Plus it will fit nicely in my bedroom I think, as it wont have to look in place with the STB's as they'll be hidden away somewhere thanks to the ir blasters. Right now I'm thinking of the Hauppage 500MCE and the MCE2005 bundle to run the whole show. It has the OS, all media software, an ir remote, and two ir blasters for $200CDN, I'm not a big fan of M$ but this sounds like a pretty good deal. Nothing is carved in stone yet so let me know if you have better suggestions.
If you go for the pvr500 look at gb pvr or mediaportal before you shell out for mce2005, both products are free and rather good. If you get a usb uirt you can have upto 3 blasters if you want to control upto 3 set top boxes. For help on media or pvr stuff check out www.tv-cards.com (you will see me there ), www.byopvr.com, www.htpcnews.com.
Just what I need! More reading material! Seriously though, thanks for the links.... I'll go check them out for sure. If I'm to go the route you're suggesting then I'm open to any remote I want. Can you suggest a remote, and also a usb-uirt? Or at least what I should be looking for? One thing that puzzles me though, I'm going to need a remote/ir blaster combo (can you call it a combo?) that will be able to control my digital STB. The chain of commands as I see it, would be remote (assuming RF) to receiver to HTPC to IR blaster to STB. What software orchestrates all this and if I need to teach this software the IR codes for my STB how do I do that? Do IR blasters have a reciever in them as well to perform this task? or is this yet another peice of hardware. Sorry if all these questions seem like nonsense, but its hard to ask inteligent questions on a topic i know hardly anything about.
The usb uirt is a ir reciever and ir emitter (blaster) here http://www.usbuirt.com/ and gbpvr, media portal and few others have native support for the product.
