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
Choosing a Case
The second HTPC build was far more serious than my initial attempt. I ordered an Omaura TF11 case from Dell back in March, unfortunately there have been tremendous issues with shipping and I've yet to receive the case. The worst part of it all is that Dell continues to list the shipping time as 5 - 7 days on all of the Omaura products, which to my knowledge is still not correct.
The Omaura TF11, which I still don't have
It looks pretty cool at least from the pictures
Omaura is a smaller case manufacturer, but the products are very HT-oriented and thus look great.
My goal was to have the main HTPC housed in a TF11 and then put the drives in TF-HDD cases; each TF-HDD can hold 5 drives, so I'd need two. The beauty of keeping the hard drives out of the main HTPC case is that I can manage thermals a lot better.
Now that's a pretty sweet drive enclosure
With my Omaura order severely delayed I turned to Silverstone, more specifically the Crown CW03. The CW03 features an integrated touchscreen LCD with an 800 x 480 native resolution, but it will allow resolutions of up to 1920 x 1200 to be scaled down to fit on it.
The case itself looks pretty cool but the build quality is horrible, and for a $700 price tag it isn't something I would honestly recommend. There are tons of sharp edges, the screws that ship with the case don't actually properly fit the standoffs that ship with it, the optical drive cover wasn't seated properly from the factory, the drive cage doesn't pull out smoothly and despite what the specs say, only ATX motherboards are supported - there were no holes to screw in the left side of a microATX board.
There are no standoffs under this edge of the microATX 780G board in the CW03 case. Wonderful.
The latter is a problem for me since I'm actually going to be using a microATX board, the only reason I want a large case is so I can go with a full sized heatsink/fan for the CPU to keep it silent. I've got a 35U rack going into the theater so I have more than enough vertical space for it.
This is harder than it looks thanks to a not-very-well built case.
Since I had the CW03 around I figured I'd try building the HTPC in it and see how well it would work.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
52 Comments
View All Comments
allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I looked at the article again and still am not sure if you are doing a client/server?Also here is the link to myTV plugin
allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
http://mytv.senseitweb.com/">http://mytv.senseitweb.com/lwatcdr - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Why have any drive at all? Why not just boot over you network? No drives, so less heat and less power needed.You could probably get away with a much smaller case as well.
I love the idea of using an IPhone/IPod touch as a super remote. Seems like a great idea for home automation in general.
puffpio - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Since your content is in a NAS and not in the HTPC itself, why use a hdd at all?I simple 4-8GB usb key or CF/SD/... would suffice for the boot drive and draw less power too
access times and transfer speeds shouldn't matter too much because you dont need to boot it up too often
najames - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I have enough hardware to get started on this same project. I have 2 different AMD mATX systems, one with a 3600 one with a 5000 CPU. I also just bought a Q6600 when Frys had them for $180, received an Asus G35 board last night. I also purchased a Saphire 3470 on Egg-sale for $40 if needed. I have several WD 640GB drives available. I have spent a lot of time testing with networking equipment and have achieved a 109MBytes/sec throughput to the WD drives. I have all the hardware necessary, but am not sure yet how to configure the system as a whole for the best setup. My current thinking is using an AMD box for the front end, use the Intel Quad horsepower for recoding and processing. I am not sure how much processing the HTPC box can do, yet still play flawless video. I'm sure I want the Intel as a 24/7 server or just a batch processing unit as needed either. Obviously, I don't want to run any more equipment 24/7 than necessary.It would be nice to split your articles into 2 distinct groups. Group 1 would be hardware that works, or doesn't work, like you've mentioned here already, failures are great to see too. List PC and server hardware, and requirements for single and multiroom processing. Group2 would be all the software combinations tried, then accepted or rejected. The earlier post by Havor, trying many different media centers is a great idea.
A diagram of the configurations would be helpful too, both hardware and software to show how it all fits together.
How many CatX and coax cables have you run to handle this? Are you recoding DVDs into AVI? What about ISO or some other format? We haven't even mentioned the satellite/cable control yet. So many things to consider, so little time. I'm itching to fire Scumcast.
Havor - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Hi Anand its starting to look really great (and i am bit jealous of your theater :-))But have you decided on what Media Center software are you going to use ?
There are 5 main options on the moment
MCE Vista/XP
MediaPortal
Myth-Buntu
SageTV
BeyondTV
You properly have done some research on it, of withs will fit you the best but it would be interesting if you would make a article of all the pro's and con's of the various options they have to deliver.
BigLan - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
BeyondTV is really only useful for TV, the media component (BeyondMedia) is lacking in features and is very poorly supported.I've used MCE (both WinXP and Vista) and it's very slick but isn't as configurable as other options. Like Anand, I didn't like the default viewer for MyMovies, maybe I'll look into the one he's using.
I haven't used Sage, MediaPortal or Myth in a long while but from what I hear MP has made a lot of good progress over the last year or so since I played with it.
I'm still running meedio on my HTPC, and even though the developer sold it to yahoo there's a decent community at meedios.com keeping it going. I prefer Meedio's way of handling browsing movies - give me a list of films (I have dvd covers) to choose from, show me some brief info (plot summary, run time, lead actors and rating) and then play it. I don't need all the imdb info, and browsing by letter is a pain. It looks like the video browser anand linked might fit the bill.
nolisi - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I've got my own little ongoing HTPC project- so far I've personally had experience with MCE, BeyondTV and MediaPortal. My personal opinion is that MediaPortal has the best blend of extensibility, functionality, lowest resource footprint, and stability- especially since it is now finally @ RC1. It definitely surpases BTV and MCE in terms of functionality- but that's what happens when you're an opensource project and everyone contributes their own plugins. MediaPortal never had the same issues that BTV had. They've made MP TV-Server installation mandatory with RC1, which mildly complicates the install- but if you're setting up your own HTPC you can deal with it. My current rig is an Athlon X2 3800, sitting on an nVidia 6150 platform, 2 GB of ram, a TV-Wonder 650 (ATSC) and an AIW 2006 PCI-E. Once I find the right 780G board, I'm moving over to that so I can finally start pushing HDMI to my receiver. The only problem is, there's no decent setup yet for EPG in the US without paying for it.I haven't forayed into the Linux world on my little project yet mainly because I haven't properly researched support for my hardware.
I highly recommend MediaPortal for a Windows platform, but I would love to see Anand do a review of the Linux based software. I'm considering Myth-TV, and will probably be testing it in another month on my current rig.
elfy6x - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I totally have to agree with you on the MediaPortal option. I just recently discovered it after having Vista's MCE for the past year. The best part about it, you can design and build your own skins for it! I'm currently finishing my MFA, so after schools out, I intend to build a really nice skin for MediaPortal and use that setup for my HTPC.neogodless - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I didn't see mention of what you plan to use for an optical drive, so I assume you won't have one in the final build. Will you rip movies on a separate machine and transfer them over the network? And if someone brings a Blu-ray movie over, will you be able to watch it right away, or will you have to rip it first? How long would that take?