So, I'm looking at building an HDTV mediacenter.
Now I know why everyone is so into these things, makes my life so much easier. I've got a spare P4 PC laying about and I'd like to turn it into a media center.
I have Verizon FIOS right now, which they have their own little set top box. If possible, I'd like to get rid of that box, but it's no big deal if I can place this media PC in between the STB and my TV.
What I'm looking at is this for TV in:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815116010&cm_re=Hauppauge-_-15-116-010-_-Product
And this for TV out:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125336
Keyboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16879212011&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-PS3+Accessories-_-Logitech-_-79212011
I can't remember my brand of TV off the top of my head, but I believe it's a Toshiba and it can do up to 1080p and I do have an HDMI/composite ports. At the moment the verizon STB plugs into the composite ports so I'm not sure what I'll have to do to get input into coax. Any suggestions?
As for media software I'm looking at media portal. It has the basics I want, but mostly I just want to be able to watch Hulu on my TV without having to pay some software company $100 for it and then
maybe it'll work tomorrow. At least this way I can make my own plugin if the one they have stops working, or, just use a web browser right on the PC itself.
Am I missing anything? Anything else you guys can think of?
Eventually I'm going to add a blu-ray but that's far in the future, and my PS3 can suffice for there.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
Posts
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823166103
Depending on the video card (and that 8400 GS will not help you), you may get some choppy fullscreen video from Hulu or other sites with that processor and you probably won't be able to output BluRay very well. I know when I tried an 8400 GS with my AMD dual core it was choppy. Still cheap but better is the http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500143
I would think you'd be able to hook your coax from the wall into the computer without the set top. The tuner card should be able to get the signal. As far as output, HDMI is nice as long as your computer remembers that the audio is HDMI (which mine forgets sometimes after being woken up).
I agree the trackball would be much preferred there!
As for the set top box, it can actually output HDMI. Is there HDMI in cards? I didn't see any. I at least want to get the hulu piece working. I'd really like to catalog my DVDs/Blu-Rays on the system too, what should I be looking at in terms of hard drive capacity?
If I can take HDMI in I could eliminate the need to switch inputs between all the pieces of equipment I have.
I'd like to take RCA in as well, but that's not such a big deal to me. I'd just like my DVD/TV/Hulu to all be in the same input.
Okay, so let's say I want to make a really lean media box, can I do this for under $200? TV in can wait until a future point in time. I really am not liking how much noise/heat my P4 chip puts out and looking through and I'm sure my electric bill will reflect that.
http://www.amazon.com/Multimedia-Keyboard-Trackball-Wireless-GKM561R/dp/B002H0BOBA/ref=pd_cp_e_1
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103698
Mobo:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138179
RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231043
Vid:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500143
PSU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139017
Keyboard/Mouse:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823176018
I already have a case/HDD/DVD.
Does this look good? Or am I going to run into huge bottlenecks with HD output? I plan to go Blu-Ray at some point. I'm trying to keep this as low cost as possible too.
I'd go with a passively-cooled video card and try to improve the case's airflow if possible.
That motherboard uses DDR3. That ram is DDR2.
Hard drives are cheap nowadays. 2TB internal ones are around $100, and it should hold plenty of movies for now.
But I may have accidentally stuck the old ram onto that list, changed the mobo last minute.
Do I need dual core? Like I said trying to keep it as cheap as possible $15 there means $15 closer to a tv in card or blu ray drive.
That's probably what I'll be looking at for ripping it to hard disk.
http://handbrake.fr/details.php
This is what I'll be using to transcode it to make it smaller.
I have quite an extensive amount of DVDs/Blu-Rays so it'll be nice to cram as many as I can into it.
Wow, not sure why the forums don't like the second link. It's for this program: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVDFab
Does this look plausible? Looks good to me but I just want opinions on this, been a while since I entertained the thought but I may buy the video card and then buy pieces here and there (I already have an older machine).
Anything I can run inside Windows7 would be a plus.
and as for ripping dvd's I use MakeMKV it's great if you dont want the menus, just rips video in the original quality.
you might be better off looking at ion based passively cooled systems like this: Asus AT3IONT-I Deluxe it has enough power to playback HD content, saves you a bit of money, and the lack of noise from passive cooling can be very nice.
one last edit: if you go the normal computer route, pick up one of these if you want to turn on/off the htpc without having to get up http://www.simerec.com/PCS-2.html
Also FYI I believe that tuner will only give you unencrypted channels, which is only a handful. You need some cablecard shenanigans to get it all.
blue ray playback is just fine.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-ion-atom,2153-9.html
And I should be good without a remote, I've got a wireless keyboard already that I can just macro a shutdown button.
that case you listed has a power supply so you'd be set.
Just to say, Windows Media Center with the Media Browser and TunerFree MCE plugins is quite a capable and attractive piece of software. There's a bit of work to get it setup to play all .mkv's, and to get it reading subtitles, but once it's all up and running it works very well.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
So if I get that non deluxe micro board up there and XBMC I should be kosher?
xbmc will use the vid card for video rendering, so yep.
Windows Media Center worked out of the box, played just about everything I needed. I went ahead and configured it a little more with Media Control to enable multi audio and subtitled xvids and a DVD image playback tweak from Microsoft and now it does everything. I also picked up a WMC Remote so I can sit back on the couch and use it without a keyboard and mouse.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930526
http://damienbt.free.fr/
WMC also supports dvdxmlids to allow it to pull down info for stored movies on your hard drive
http://dvdxml.com/news.php
If you are not going to use Windows then you can ignore this whole post.
I KISS YOU!
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
Nifty.
How does it pull in the meta data for movies? It sees some of them but others it is getting confused and getting a movie with the same title but a totally different film.
I KISS YOU!
XBMC is very easy to configure nowadays - everything works from GUI menus, and they've got a whole interface to install addons and the like built right in. I recommend trying the Live CD - it can be used to install a machine directly and easily if you like it (it's a tweaked out Ubuntu installation that boots super-fast). There's also a ton of community support and walkthroughs out there on the net.
It also has the very notable advantage of avoiding a $100 spend on a copy of Windows 7. Also supports Windows MCE remotes out of the box, and (in my experience) is much snappier about remote control feedback.
IMO Windows is just too much OS for something like a media PC - the bottom-up approach ends up working much better, faster and cheaper.
EDIT: I'd also throw in that XBMC does all the meta-data and viewed file stuff out-of-the-box now as well. The built in interface for addons (basically like the App Store on an iPhone but free) also makes it easy to add more stuff.
Not sure, to be honest... there are ways of getting around it. If you want to do it manually, you can make sure every film and tv show is named exactly as they are on IMDB, and for films add the year of their release in brackets - for example, The Illusionist (2006) and The Illusionist (2010).
If you don't want to do it manually, which can be a real pain in the rear if you have a large collection, then you can give Media Scout a try. It's a program that looks everything up, and though I haven't downloaded even near the latest version, I remember it being a buggy, cantankerous, crashing little fecker. I told it to update my whole collection once and for some reason it gave every film it's name in Spanish. It also renamed every Miyazaki film in their original Japanese script, so they didn't show alphabetically (annoying!).
But it is handy for going through those troublesome shows or films that Media Browser has issues finding metadata with.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
was tempted to do the apple tv2 +xbmc rout but its not worth it if i can't do hulu
Otherwise be prepared for some hot machines.
This is what I'm looking for ultimately. Playing my movies is a secondary thing because I've got like 8 devices attached to my TV that can do this. Hulu is the biggest boon.
How much space to ripped DVDs/Blu-Rays take up? I'd really love to move most of my collection to disk. Probably got at least 100 or so movies.
Depends on your opinion on recompression. Compressed Blu-Ray's at 1080p are about 8 GB. Uncompressed: 40 - 80 gb. Though if you get rid of the extraneous stuff you can cut that down a little.
So you'd be looking at 4 - 8 TB. Which is totally doable. I have an 8TB fileserver on my network right now, in RAID6 redundancy. Norco sell affordable 20-bay cases, and something like OpenFiler makes it easy to manage and configure. HDDs are absurdly cheap at the moment.
EDIT: Also I haven't tried it, but there's a Hulu plugin for XBMC. The YouTube one works great, so I suspect this will as well (also you should be able to install it from the plugin's menu in XBMC - no need to manually download stuff). [note: that post is from 2008, but I can't find the live list of plugins from the XBMC website online. I'm pretty sure it's there though - I'm just in Australia and can't use it.]
the only problem with apple tv + xbmc is atm it can only do 720p, the xbmc devs aren't sure if thats a hardware limitation or not yet.
I don't know. Our media pc comprises of a Pentium Dual Core at 1.8GHz, 2GB ram and an integrated Intel chipset, all sitting in an Antec NSK2480 case. It plays 1080P files of around 10GB in size absolutely perfectly, and it's always cool inside the case.
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten