Hi Peter,
On 06 January 2013 at 21:19 Peter Salisbury
<peterthevicar@???> wrote:
> Hi there, I'm looking for help selecting hardware for an HTPC and I
> know there are a few experts on this list.
>
I don't consider myself an expert in HTPCs but I work in TV, I have a home
cinema system and I just built my own HTPC over the holidays (havinf finally
given up on my raspberry Pi as not man enough for the job) and I'm happy to
share my experiences.
[SNIP]
>
> What hardware spec would be sufficient to be an HD PVR (I assume
> that's the most demanding HTPC task?) and is there a quiet little box
> available with the right specs for a reasonable price? Is Blu-ray
> possible yet with Linux?
I bought the following:
* Maplin Micro ATX motherboard, CPU and RAM upgrade kit.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/msi-high-definition-pc-upgrade-kit-with-amd-e350-apu-and-4gb-ddr3-memory-682490
(I think there are a few B-Grade ones left)
* Novatech NOV-VISION HTPC case (£50)
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/cases/cases/nov-vision.html
* Sandisk 64GB SSD to boot the system off (I keep my media on a consumer NAS
drive) (£43)
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/upto128gb/sdssdp-064g-g25.html
* 2.5" to 2.3" drive bay adaptor to mount the SSD (£7)
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/harddrives-internal/solidstate/upto128gb/bracket25.html
* A random SATA DVD drive I had laying around. (free)
The whole lot came to under £200.The Motherboard has HDMI out so it can drive an
HD TV or cinema amp directly. The board above is an AMD Fusion chipset (E350 CPU
with an HD Radeon 6-series on board). It's a dual-core 1.6 GHz and is quite
spritely. it's certainly capable of playing 1080p video. Its format support is
very good but a few (about 6 out several hundred) of the "questionable" files I
have do cause it to hang up. I believe these files are defective, rather than
the playback software. The case looks like a piece of media equipment and comes
with an IR remote control and built-in receiver so you can use it like an
appliance once installed. You can even turn it on from power off with the
remote, I chose AMD Fusion build of the 3.0 RC1 Beta version of OpenELEC as it
is a build of XBMC with a one step install on an ultralight Linux distro and
leaves as many of those precious processor cycles free for doing the task at
hand. Download it, Run the install stick maker, plug the stick into the HTPC,
boot off it, Select "quick install" and job done, OS, XBMC and all.
http://openelec.tv/get-openelec
What's bad about it? The fan in the case is noisy (I will be voiding my warranty
and replacing mine with a ball bearing fan for a quiet life). If I'm
nit-picking, it has a green LED for power and read for SSD access (I intend to
take a soldering iron to it and put blue LEDs in so it looks cool and modern)
There is no legal way to read BluRay on OSS in the UK and I don't think there is
ever likely to be. Since the content industry won't license the decryption code
on Linux because they fear OSS being able to be modded to enable content
"theft", playing BluRay would involve circumventing the copy protection, an act
obligingly made illegal by the last government at the request of the content
industry. I would never recommend breaking the law but if one lived in a
country where circumventing copy protection was legal, one might consider buying
a copy of MakeMKV for Linux. It costs about £50. That would allow the lucky
owner to rip the content of the BluRay to their hard drive as an unencrypted MKV
file. Such a file could then me transcoded to a more reasonable format that a
modest HTPC could handle with Handbrake. With the right settings (no crop,
strict anamorphic) Handbrake would turn any unencrypted file into a lovely M4V
file that OpenELEC would lap up and would be well within the capacity of that
hardware to play. If one used Handbrake's DTS or Dolby passthrough options, the
full surround sound could be retained for playback on a home cinema system (at
the expense of a larger file size)
I keep all my media on an off-the-shelf network hard drive I bought at the
computer shop. That way I can change the software on the HTPC as often as I like
without losing any media. OpenELEC can be installed and booted off a USB stick
if you want to try it as an experiment or if you want to save money on the SSD.
If you have local drives, it makes them available as shares for on/off-loading
of content.
>
> A secondary question: is it better to go with Myth or XBMC?
>
I've never used Myth so I can't comment on that but OpenELEC seems to work well
for me. I believe OpenELEC can function as a PVR; It seems to offer PR
functionality in the menus but I don't have a tuner attached so I've not tried
it.
Both should run on the hardware. Why not put each on a USB stick so you can
switch quickly and give them both a test drive until you decide? If I need to
rebuild the index database on a fresh install, my complete collection of video
and music takes under an hour to index. So it's no real drama.
Good Luck,
Paul.
--
Please post to: Hampshire@???
Web Interface:
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
LUG URL:
http://www.hantslug.org.uk
--------------------------------------------------------------
