Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
The First Try: AMD 780G
Last month AMD launched its 780G chipset and a new Athlon X2 processor, the 4850e. The Athlon X2 4850e is a 45W energy efficient part, it runs at 2.5GHz with a 512KB L2 per core - it's basically a cooler running Athlon X2 4800+. The chip is also dirt cheap at $87. Seeing as how the 780G has full hardware decode acceleration for H.264/VC1/MPEG-2 I could actually go with a slower CPU but there are benefits to having something a little more reasonable than the bare minimum requirements.
I didn't even attempt cable management in this first build, I was just happy to get everything in there without bleeding out.
I started with the 780G/4850e combo, the motherboard I used was Gigabyte's GA-MA78GM-S2H and honestly the board has been flawless. I'm using the 385W Enermax Pro82+ we reviewed to power the system.
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JarredWalton - Friday, May 2, 2008 - link
Or rather than ripping at full bitrate, you could reencode to something smaller, so you can get 5-10GB per movie and still have a good quality 1080P output. AutoMKV is the new tool for stuff like that.legoman666 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I rip all of my movies to h264 + ac3 in a mkv container. Just because you illegally download movies in mkv format does not mean that everyone else does also.kevon27 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I only do bluray... DVD's are for the peasants. I not going to subject myself to that low quality bit torrent stuff you commoners are use to.Pip-pip!
Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
You know, you can rip bluray, bluray rips are also available online.... In fact I think anand specificall discussed ripping "high deffinition content" in mkv format... what do you think he means?Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Ok, so how does that iPhone web interface work? I was thinking of developing somethign for PPC that would allow roughly the same kind of access, but I guess if there's stuff in the works I'll just check that out.crimson117 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
It's just a web interface that happens to work in the iPhone browser. You could also access it from a laptop or desktop on your network.I'd love to see a developer come up with a native iPhone app for controlling media setups, though I expect there'd need to be some special software running on your media pc.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Exactly, the options are two-fold:1) Develop an iPhone optimized website (ala digg.com/iphone or iphone.facebook.com), or
2) Create an iPhone application that triggers web services running on the HTPC itself.
With the SDK due out this summer, I'm hoping the latter will be a possibility.
Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Perhaps I'll see what can be done on PPC and put it out there then so non-GSM/apple folks can enjoy that kind of fun ;)cghebert - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Anand,sweet setup! Will you guys be doing any of your HTPC stuff with windows xp for those of us who haven't yet "upgraded" to Vista?
allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Check out myTV plugin for media center for managing your tv shows. It works much better the video brower or mymovies because it uses a full database and downloads all the episode and show information from the web. I use it to manage all my recorded and downloaded shows.Also are you going to install a ATSC tuner? This is one of the best things about media center. I have dish too but the offair recoreded shows look much better on media center than on dish.
If I were you I would move the storage for the dvds and media to a fileserver dedicated for this purpose. You can then not have to worry so much about noise because you can hide it away from the rest of the rack. I run a gigabit network and have no problem playing recored HD shows or ripped dvds on 3 differant computers at a time. The only storage I have in my media center pcs is for recording show off the offair antenna. This is only because some nights I am recording up to 3 hd shows at a time and I am afraid that that and the playback may be a little to much for the network to handle.
Also myMovies and myTV both work great in a client/server setup you can put the database servers on the media server and then any changes you make on one computer will be reflected on all.
I have also tested a htpc with the same chipset that you are using and to me it seems to be really slow compared to my other intel/nvidia based htpc. It even has some trouble decoding recoreded hd shows fast enough to not to get skips and audio sync issues. I would stay away from it.