A Budget Home Theater & PC Setup: 4K, HDR, UHD Blu-ray, and More
by Ganesh T S on December 26, 2017 8:30 AM EST
The days of bulky HTPCs with built-in optical drives, massive internal storage arrays, and integrated TV tuners are long gone. The advent of over the top (OTT) online streaming services has moved a lot of functionality to the cloud. As NAS units become more powerful, it has made sense to move local media files to a central repository. All these have enabled the TV-connected PC to become more compact. Unless the consumer has specific requirements (like, say, high quality gaming), even ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) machines such as the Intel NUCs can fit the bill.
Home Theater Components: Keeping up with the Times
The primary functionality of HTPCs has evolved to become one of a powerful and versatile media player. However, recent advances such as 4K and high dynamic range (HDR) videos, as well as stricter DRM requirements such as HDCP 2.2 for premium content have made the perfect HTPC platform difficult to achieve. Before delving deeper into these new advances, it is helpful to have some insight into how the landscape has changed over the last decade or so. The advancements in that timeframe have meant that next attractive home theater feature was always around the corner. In the initial days of 720p televisions and other home theater equipment, it was Full HD (1080p). As 1080p became widespread, it was HD audio bitstreaming. After that, 3D support was sought after. A brief lull ensued before the market started slowly getting ready for 4K.
Over the last year or so, we have seen the appearance of displays and audio/video receivers (AVRs) supporting HDMI 2.0 / HDCP 2.2 along with HDR / Dolby Vision. Despite the announcement of HDMI 2.1, I believe that we have reached a point where it is possible to purchase a relatively inexpensive home theater and HTPC configuration without worrying about it getting obsolete within the the next 3 to 5 years.
On the media side, OTT streaming services have become popular to the extent that Netflix and YouTube moved to offer 4K videos to consumers ahead of Blu-rays. Fortunately, many modern PCs are capable of 4K Netflix playback, though HDR is available only on a subset of those configurations. UHD Blu-ray playback support is available through CyberLink PowerDVD 17. However, the hardware requirements are a lot more specific compared to premium OTT services. UHD Blu-ray playback with HDR requires that the home theater components fulfill additional requirements.
Building a Home Theater on a Budget
I started work on this home theater piece back in June 2017. The aim was to present a setup (TV, AVR, and HTPC) with all the bells and whistles, yet light on the wallet. While the TV (TCL 55P607) and the AVR (Denon AVR X3400H) were easy to narrow down based on the feature requirements and budget, the PC side proved to be more challenging. Our core requirements (compact form factor, 4K Netflix support, and HDR capability) narrowed down the choices to a NVIDIA Pascal GPU-equipped PC or a Kaby Lake PC with HDCP 2.2 capabilities. UHD Blu-ray support further narrowed this down to certain Kaby Lake PCs with a HDMI 2.0 / HDCP 2.2 display output.
In the course of our evaluation, we found that consumer electronic (CE) equipment almost always received features ahead of HTPC platforms. Keeping this in mind, we ended up evaluating a number of options for the fulfillment of HTPC duties
- Roku Smart TV platform in the TCL 55P607
- NVIDIA SHIELD Android TV (SATV)
- Zotac ZBOX MAGNUS EN1080K
- ASRock Beebox-S 7200U
- Intel NUC7i7BNHX
Prior to looking at the performance of these options, it will be of interest to readers to delve deeper into our choice for the other home theater components. Earlier this year, I happened to embark on a house remodel, and I took that opportunity to revamp the HTPC test components used in our system reviews. Our choice of components is geared towards a typical family room (15' x 15') home theater.
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rapster - Sunday, December 31, 2017 - link
Definitely. My media cabinet alone was $3k and is the budget option compared to the built-in at my last house. I really don’t get the budget complaints unless we’re dealing with kids, and thought the piece addressed quite a few things that caused me grief. Wish I read it before my last build.ganeshts - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Most speakers were re-used from my previous setup, and as such, not a part of the initial purchase list. I assume most users who upgrade can reuse existing speakers. I provided a suggestion in the concluding section.NeatOman - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
I'm still content with my current setup of a plasma connected via HDMI 4:4:4 and true 8-bit to a Pentium G6950/H57/4GB w/60GB SSD that's as quiet as a cat fart. The sound IMO hasn't improved much at all unless you are going full ATMOS, my 10+ year old setup is "limited" by 5.1 96k/24-bit audio :-/ (limited by the human ear as well lol) and the speakers (that cost under a few hundred dollars) haven't really gotten any better in the last 10+ years despite what people claim (marginal at best).Plasma still has better colors than the newest quantum/nando/hyper whatever LCD/LED TV's, although due to light/color bleed either from the panel itself or just having the lights on it's blacks aren't as good on my 6+ year old Plasma. And since i only use it for movies there still isn't any noticable burn in.
But I'm definitely going to replace the PC with something Intel powered that can handle HDR10 and 4K streaming (DRM) that i believe is anything iX-7xxx and up when i get a proper OLED TV.
beisat - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Netflix on PC is never 24p - neither on Edge nor UWP App...just keep that in mind if you ever consider using a htpc on a tv...Orange14 - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
I agree with others as to some of these setups not qualifying as budget HTPCs. In addition, the major fault is to assume that nobody runs cablecard tuners anymore. In my case, I still watch a fair amount of sports that requires such a set up. I've been building my own HTPCs for over five years now in a variety of different configurations. Unless one really needs the setup for gaming, the hardware requirements are modest.euskalzabe - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
I'm so surprised to not even see a mention of Windows 10's horrendous HDR support. I use a HDR10 supporting TV as a monitor, with a GTX 1060, and the second I enable HDR on the desktop everything looks awfully washed out. Many have commented on this problem online forums. Sadly HDR on Windows 10 is, currently, unusable.Aikouka - Wednesday, December 27, 2017 - link
If you enable HDR in the resolution options in Windows, it will leave HDR on *at all times*. The problem is that it makes *no attempts* to adjust the content. So, it will effectively display SDR content in HDR, which doesn't turn out well. Although, I didn't notice nearly as many issues on my Sony TV as I did on my TCL TV (the Best Buy variant of the one in the this article, the P605). I wonder if that's due to the Sony TV's features including adjusting SDR content to try to make it look more like HDR?reiggin - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Not to pile on for the sake of piling on, but as others have said, this article just doesn't meet the stated objective of the headline. It's not a budget setup. It actually fails on two points -- it's neither "budget" nor "setup." To imply that it is a setup would imply that it's fully baked out. It's missing several crucial pieces of info on the speakers/audio quality (only noting the receiver and a set of surrounds is missing so much detail). And it's also missing basic details on how the whole system is configured, intended use, impressions other than technical ones, etc.All in all, this article really disappoints. It's subpar on the quality I've come to expect from Anandtech. There are glaring typos throughout that should be caught with a basic spell check. The structure of the article itself seems to bounce around. Heck, even the introductory first page just seems to be a hot mess.
I think in the end the best (admittedly unsolicited) advice that I could give is to just leave the home theater reviews to AVSForums or some other more experienced site and instead stick to reviews of individual hardware components.
Chyll2 - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
Subpar article. I rather see this in a personal blog not in this site. One of the worst "budget" article I saw in a whilemr_tawan - Tuesday, December 26, 2017 - link
On the HTPC front, I guess you went for Core i5 HTPC just for SGX that's required by PowerDVD. It looks like all 7th gen Core CPU supports SGX (unlike Skylake which the lower bound is Core i5), so maybe Core i3 NUC works as well in this regard?