Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H

[shwan]

Hi all, wanted to report to you on my progress with my latest purpose built HTPC.
My previous HTPC was an old IBM small form factor 2.8Ghz P4 with 2GB DDR400 Ram, running Ubuntu 7.04 and Freevo 1.7.x - it was okay until I started trying to play the latest blueray/hddvd rips etc, which is when I decided to look for something to replace it - but I didn't want to pay the earth.
What I ended up with:
Colors IT 2003-C34 Black/Silver Desktop Micro ATX Case with 450W Power supply
Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H Motherboard, I chose this for several reasons
1) HDMI which supports HDCP, but also VGA and DVI Video output onboard
2) SP/DIF TOSLINK Audio Output + 7.1 onboard
3) supports 1333FSB, SATA2 and PC6400
Intel Pentium E2180 (2x2.0Ghz) 1MB Cache
2x 1GB Samsung DDR2 800Mhz PC6400
An old 200GB SATA disk I had lying around
An old x16 DVD-R/W
Total cost was around £150

Put it all together in an evening and installed Windows XP SP2, updated with Windows Update until it was happy...
Now has Media Player 11 etc.

At first I had the PC connected with HDMI cable, but wasn't happy with the output on my Samsung 40" LCD, you see the TV's native resolution is 1360x768, however when connected with the the HDMI the PC was trying to output either 720p or 1080i, both of which looked awful and stretched. If my TV supported 1080P then it might have looked a lot better, but for the moment I'm using VGA cable and it looks great.

Next I installed Media Portal, as I said I'd only ever used linux in the past, but I figured I'd give this a go - and if I wasn't happy I could make it dual boot and still use freevo or mythtv.
Some of the movies etc that I had didn't work when I clicked on them, I messed around installing codecs - and then nearly all were working apart from a few .mkv files - which I soon resolved when I looked on this forum.
I was impressed straight away with the quality and speed of MP - it could have well been the hardware upgrades that made it so much better, but the overall time I'd spent setting it up compared to how many weeks I'd messed around with linux and other things made it seem so much easier.
I was happy with it - and was looking at what else I could do with my HTPC to maximise it's usefullness...Looking at gaming frontends for emulators etc when I stumbled upon something about freesat - I think just before it launched.
I looked into it, as I liked the idea of being able to view and record some HD stuff and even normal SD stuff, if it was reliable etc.
For ages I've had a dbox, so not had much interest in PVR - I only used my HTPC for watching movies and series that I'd downloaded or ripped.

Anyways, after I found out that all I needed as a TV card capable of getting a DVB-S signal off a satelite dish already pointing at Sky's satelites, I ordered a Pinnacle 7010i Dual DVB-T/DVB-S card from Play for £35, and it arrived on Tuesday.

I installed it on Tuesday, and just used it with the pinnacle software to see if I could receive anything...I'd never used the dish - it was there when we moved in 2 years ago, and hasn't had a use until now.
Picture didn't seem as good as the dbox that I'd gotten used to all this time, but it was ok, one thing I noticed with the pinnacle software was no BBC HD, I found out that this was because the software was only looking for MPEG2 channels - I think you can maybe add it manually, but I wanted to get it working in MP.

Removed the version of MP that I had, and installed the new version last night...
Set up everything okay - seemed to go well.
Set up the DVB-S tuner, and it scanned and found BBC HD - but only getting audio.
After looking on forums again found that you needed codecs, either powerdvd or CoreAVC...
I installed CoreAVC trial - and lo and behold there was video!

The recording seems to work, although once I'd started recording something I found it hard finding out how to stop it...

Only 2 things remain for the DVB-S thing to have been a success...

EPG - as I seemed to only have now and next last night...

ITV HD - seems MP doesn't support the H222 codec yet, but I'm still reading up about this.

I would highly recommend the board that I've used above, I had perfect BBC HD broadcast at full speed, no glitches or stalling at all.

Well done to the guys who have created MP, it's really nice to find such a nice application - with good documentation!
Thanks to everyone on forum for your help and support, and I'm ready to help if I can =)

Shwan