Canada
I originally started my HTPC project 6 months ago. I wanted a single home entertainment "solution" that was truly converged. To start with I had
200 DVD movies
40 HDDVD
2000 jpeg pictues
50 GB of recorded HD based video
2500 CDs
50 DVD Audio discs
30 SACD discs
25 DTS audio discs
Satellite feeds from on motorized and 2 fixed dishes
I had all the equipment and the zillion remote to do it but it was a real pain to manage and switch between entertainment sources. No one other than someone very familiar with it would get everything running. I had a real desite to collapse my digital sources down onto a HTPC. I've been through tons of HW and have included notes on some gotchas I ran into. I guess I have somewhere between 200 and 300 hours invested not counting media conversion.
SOUND
JMLABs 946 electra 5 speaker surround
Velodyne subwoofer
Toshiba A35 HD player (this will soon be a boat anchor but HD discs are now dirt cheap!)
Denon 3910 Universal disc player
Bryston SP 2 digital preamp processor
Bryston 9SST (300Wx2) driving main speakers
Bryston 9B (150Wx5) driving centre and surrounds - 2 channels vacant - may use with 7.1
Bryston XLR interconnects
SATELLITE
39" dish with Invacom LNB driven by STAB motor
2 fixed dishes - 1 point at Echostar 110/119 - 1 at Nimiq 82/91
Viewsat 9000 HD DVB receiver - with 500 GB USB drive for PVR
TV
Toshiba Cinema Series 1080I - I'd like to upgrade but I like neither LCD or plasma for various reasons except teh Pioneer Plasma line
PC
Chenbro 45200 with 3 hot swappable bays
OCX 750 W PS
Intel Dual Core 2.8 GHz processor
2 GB RAM
1 160 GB HD - windows and apps only
1 Raid 0 drive array - 2x1TB
1 750 GB SATA drive for recording and general usage with media.
Hauppauge PVR 150 PCI PVR card
Genpix Skywalker 1 USB DVB satellite
ATI Radeon 2650 HD pro
El Cheapo LG 16:9 LCD monitor
Logitech Webcam for security purposes
All mounted in an industrial grade 19" rackmount cabinet on wheels
I-ROCKS RF keyboard and mouse
REMOTES
Way too many - I finally found a solution
I am at about the 60% mark in the project.
Step 1 - integrating TV to HTPC
i originally had a Hauppage Nexus satellite DVB card with TV out. It worked great with HW MPEG decoding but was SD only. I needed HD. I chose the Radeon 2600 HD card because it is a good price and will easily drive a 1080 P monitor. It has DVI out and this works well. I avoided HDMI because some solutions use HDCP which is a real annoyance with copy protection. A real annoyance was that the PC monitor was different resolution than the TV so I bought a 16:9 LCD monitor that will do 1080 P ( as cheap as possible since it is only for control purposes). Next step was to find a replacement for the Nexus PCI DVB card. The best solution by far is the Skywalker 1 from Genpix electronics. It is a USB box. I run it with Mytheater (MYT) and Emunation. MYT supports USALS and supports the motorized dish to a tee. Next up was MPEG decoding. The CoreAVC H.264 is flawless and has a low CPU hit. At this point I had SD and HD TV on my HTCP and installed MP. At one point I tried to get the HTPC to control my FTA satellite receiver but this was a waste of many hours of time and the Genpix solution is much better. MP doesn’t do a great job at controlling other pieces of equipment via IR blaster (and it seems this problem is prevalent in all HTPC SW).
HINT: - Go with a rock solid PC and disable all HW not being used. Reliability is the MOST important piece in a HTPC, far more important than speed or features. Start with a clean drive and install ONLY the bare minimum of SW needed.
Step 2 - getting my media onto the HTPC. Pictures were straightforward JPEGs. I realized I needed more storage so I want with 3 IDENTICAL 1TB drives (2 of which are in a drive array). Once a month or so I pull one of the RAID drives and sync up the spare (an excelle nt and cheap way to do a backup). I went with a front loading 3 in 2 hot swap SATA drive bay. You simply slide in ANY SATA drive and away you go. The drive array stores my locked down and perfect music decodes which took a month. I ripped 2500 CDs using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and FLAC. FLAC is a completely lossless format which on playback is bit for bit a copy of the original CD. A nagging problem I noticed was that even though my FLAC files were perfect (other than about 40 discs I have to resolve) the playback sounded different and I didn’t like it. I discovered that the onboard soundcard resamples the 44.1 K CD audio at 48K. Even though I was using SPDIF the output was not the same as from the original CD. What I needed was a sound card with digital pass through. I chose the Auzentech x-Fi Prelude 7.1 which is an excellent build and top quality. There is a gotcha with this and call cards based one the Creation X-Fi chip – they support bit matched output but you have to manually configure the clock rate, they don’t autoclock! This is fine if all you have is redbook audio but is a real pain with other format such as DVD audio and DVD DTS. The reason I want digital out is that my Bryston digital processor has an excellent decoder. Next up was DVD audio and DTS. I was able to cut through CPPM to get my DVD audio onto the HD. I used DVD Fab decrypter. Turns out the same freeware program does DVD DTS and straight Video DVDs as well. It also allows you to remove annoying warnings at the beginnings of movies and PGC rating nag screens. A gotcha with DVD Audio is that no receiver/processor I am aware of will decode 5.1 channel DVDA audio. Since it is CPPM protected it is never output on disc players in multichannel mode. I am however able to get great 2 channel DVDA at 88.1, 96 and 192 KHz but because of the Creation X-Fi limitation one needs to know to the clock rate to set correctly for each track or recoding. I am currently bugging Creation to add autoclocking bit matched output. I never did find a solution for ripping SACD and I doubt there will ever be one. At least now I don’t have to play my CDs anymore, they are all on the HTPC.
HINT: Store Video on a separate drive from audio. Video does much better on a drive with 64K cluster size. Defrag regularly when manipulating digital media. It would be nice if MS would simply build in background defrag (Novell did this years ago).
Step 3 – REMOTES
I spent a lot of time in remote control hell (months in fact). I tried the Haupaugge IR blaster, a harmony universal remote, Winlirc and UIRT amongst others. None were 100%, about as close as I got was maybe ¾ of the functionality I wanted. The best solution I found was a I-ROCKS RF keyboard and mouse which works perfectly. I tried the Logitech MX3200 which is complete crap, it had poor range (less than 10 feet) and required continual resyncs. I can now watch satellite TV, listen to my CDs, view pictures and watch movies all without having to leave my chair.
Next Steps – not in any particular order (and any help here is appreciated)
Get satellite decoding with EPG and PVR working within MP with my Skywalker (DAVE and BEV). Has anyone done this? Mytheater is currently being used and works well.
Setup foobar plugin for audio playback – I get an error that Foobar is not installed when I try to do this.
Movie playback is erratic in MP. Just started to work through this. If I could use a plugin player (Intervideo) this would be great.
Download album art
Convert DVDA multichannel audio into a format that I can feed through the SPDIF port and will be decoded by my receiver (I really don’t want to run 6 more interconnects for analog 5.1).
Get a Webcam that has better motion sensing capabilities – especially in the dark. I have this at my front door and would like to integrate into MP. I use it for security and to see whose at the door.
Get a wireless headset and mic to use with Skype. Hell for that matter I would like to integrate all of my phone into the HTPC.
Work through FLAC playback bugs in MP.
Buy a new TV – I don’t like plasmas as once they get bad pixel(s) you can not keep you eye off them. LCD really doesn’t cut the mustard, they are not very good with low light level high speed action. I work in the electronics manufacturing industry and I believe that a few years down the road a lot of plasma TV buyers are going to regret their purchase.
I have to get my music collection and library listings in a more usable format. Right now it’s hard to find things. An advanced search function in MP would be nice for the music collection.
Media Player has been great, still needs some polish and bug fixes but IMO it was ahead of anything out there. I tried Sage and it as terrible. My trial expired before it was hardly functional. I sure hope they treat their paying customers better than those on trials. The support I get for MP is 10X what I got from Sage. To all those that work on MP, this is a real cool product!!!
200 DVD movies
40 HDDVD
2000 jpeg pictues
50 GB of recorded HD based video
2500 CDs
50 DVD Audio discs
30 SACD discs
25 DTS audio discs
Satellite feeds from on motorized and 2 fixed dishes
I had all the equipment and the zillion remote to do it but it was a real pain to manage and switch between entertainment sources. No one other than someone very familiar with it would get everything running. I had a real desite to collapse my digital sources down onto a HTPC. I've been through tons of HW and have included notes on some gotchas I ran into. I guess I have somewhere between 200 and 300 hours invested not counting media conversion.
SOUND
JMLABs 946 electra 5 speaker surround
Velodyne subwoofer
Toshiba A35 HD player (this will soon be a boat anchor but HD discs are now dirt cheap!)
Denon 3910 Universal disc player
Bryston SP 2 digital preamp processor
Bryston 9SST (300Wx2) driving main speakers
Bryston 9B (150Wx5) driving centre and surrounds - 2 channels vacant - may use with 7.1
Bryston XLR interconnects
SATELLITE
39" dish with Invacom LNB driven by STAB motor
2 fixed dishes - 1 point at Echostar 110/119 - 1 at Nimiq 82/91
Viewsat 9000 HD DVB receiver - with 500 GB USB drive for PVR
TV
Toshiba Cinema Series 1080I - I'd like to upgrade but I like neither LCD or plasma for various reasons except teh Pioneer Plasma line
PC
Chenbro 45200 with 3 hot swappable bays
OCX 750 W PS
Intel Dual Core 2.8 GHz processor
2 GB RAM
1 160 GB HD - windows and apps only
1 Raid 0 drive array - 2x1TB
1 750 GB SATA drive for recording and general usage with media.
Hauppauge PVR 150 PCI PVR card
Genpix Skywalker 1 USB DVB satellite
ATI Radeon 2650 HD pro
El Cheapo LG 16:9 LCD monitor
Logitech Webcam for security purposes
All mounted in an industrial grade 19" rackmount cabinet on wheels
I-ROCKS RF keyboard and mouse
REMOTES
Way too many - I finally found a solution
I am at about the 60% mark in the project.
Step 1 - integrating TV to HTPC
i originally had a Hauppage Nexus satellite DVB card with TV out. It worked great with HW MPEG decoding but was SD only. I needed HD. I chose the Radeon 2600 HD card because it is a good price and will easily drive a 1080 P monitor. It has DVI out and this works well. I avoided HDMI because some solutions use HDCP which is a real annoyance with copy protection. A real annoyance was that the PC monitor was different resolution than the TV so I bought a 16:9 LCD monitor that will do 1080 P ( as cheap as possible since it is only for control purposes). Next step was to find a replacement for the Nexus PCI DVB card. The best solution by far is the Skywalker 1 from Genpix electronics. It is a USB box. I run it with Mytheater (MYT) and Emunation. MYT supports USALS and supports the motorized dish to a tee. Next up was MPEG decoding. The CoreAVC H.264 is flawless and has a low CPU hit. At this point I had SD and HD TV on my HTCP and installed MP. At one point I tried to get the HTPC to control my FTA satellite receiver but this was a waste of many hours of time and the Genpix solution is much better. MP doesn’t do a great job at controlling other pieces of equipment via IR blaster (and it seems this problem is prevalent in all HTPC SW).
HINT: - Go with a rock solid PC and disable all HW not being used. Reliability is the MOST important piece in a HTPC, far more important than speed or features. Start with a clean drive and install ONLY the bare minimum of SW needed.
Step 2 - getting my media onto the HTPC. Pictures were straightforward JPEGs. I realized I needed more storage so I want with 3 IDENTICAL 1TB drives (2 of which are in a drive array). Once a month or so I pull one of the RAID drives and sync up the spare (an excelle nt and cheap way to do a backup). I went with a front loading 3 in 2 hot swap SATA drive bay. You simply slide in ANY SATA drive and away you go. The drive array stores my locked down and perfect music decodes which took a month. I ripped 2500 CDs using Exact Audio Copy (EAC) and FLAC. FLAC is a completely lossless format which on playback is bit for bit a copy of the original CD. A nagging problem I noticed was that even though my FLAC files were perfect (other than about 40 discs I have to resolve) the playback sounded different and I didn’t like it. I discovered that the onboard soundcard resamples the 44.1 K CD audio at 48K. Even though I was using SPDIF the output was not the same as from the original CD. What I needed was a sound card with digital pass through. I chose the Auzentech x-Fi Prelude 7.1 which is an excellent build and top quality. There is a gotcha with this and call cards based one the Creation X-Fi chip – they support bit matched output but you have to manually configure the clock rate, they don’t autoclock! This is fine if all you have is redbook audio but is a real pain with other format such as DVD audio and DVD DTS. The reason I want digital out is that my Bryston digital processor has an excellent decoder. Next up was DVD audio and DTS. I was able to cut through CPPM to get my DVD audio onto the HD. I used DVD Fab decrypter. Turns out the same freeware program does DVD DTS and straight Video DVDs as well. It also allows you to remove annoying warnings at the beginnings of movies and PGC rating nag screens. A gotcha with DVD Audio is that no receiver/processor I am aware of will decode 5.1 channel DVDA audio. Since it is CPPM protected it is never output on disc players in multichannel mode. I am however able to get great 2 channel DVDA at 88.1, 96 and 192 KHz but because of the Creation X-Fi limitation one needs to know to the clock rate to set correctly for each track or recoding. I am currently bugging Creation to add autoclocking bit matched output. I never did find a solution for ripping SACD and I doubt there will ever be one. At least now I don’t have to play my CDs anymore, they are all on the HTPC.
HINT: Store Video on a separate drive from audio. Video does much better on a drive with 64K cluster size. Defrag regularly when manipulating digital media. It would be nice if MS would simply build in background defrag (Novell did this years ago).
Step 3 – REMOTES
I spent a lot of time in remote control hell (months in fact). I tried the Haupaugge IR blaster, a harmony universal remote, Winlirc and UIRT amongst others. None were 100%, about as close as I got was maybe ¾ of the functionality I wanted. The best solution I found was a I-ROCKS RF keyboard and mouse which works perfectly. I tried the Logitech MX3200 which is complete crap, it had poor range (less than 10 feet) and required continual resyncs. I can now watch satellite TV, listen to my CDs, view pictures and watch movies all without having to leave my chair.
Next Steps – not in any particular order (and any help here is appreciated)
Get satellite decoding with EPG and PVR working within MP with my Skywalker (DAVE and BEV). Has anyone done this? Mytheater is currently being used and works well.
Setup foobar plugin for audio playback – I get an error that Foobar is not installed when I try to do this.
Movie playback is erratic in MP. Just started to work through this. If I could use a plugin player (Intervideo) this would be great.
Download album art
Convert DVDA multichannel audio into a format that I can feed through the SPDIF port and will be decoded by my receiver (I really don’t want to run 6 more interconnects for analog 5.1).
Get a Webcam that has better motion sensing capabilities – especially in the dark. I have this at my front door and would like to integrate into MP. I use it for security and to see whose at the door.
Get a wireless headset and mic to use with Skype. Hell for that matter I would like to integrate all of my phone into the HTPC.
Work through FLAC playback bugs in MP.
Buy a new TV – I don’t like plasmas as once they get bad pixel(s) you can not keep you eye off them. LCD really doesn’t cut the mustard, they are not very good with low light level high speed action. I work in the electronics manufacturing industry and I believe that a few years down the road a lot of plasma TV buyers are going to regret their purchase.
I have to get my music collection and library listings in a more usable format. Right now it’s hard to find things. An advanced search function in MP would be nice for the music collection.
Media Player has been great, still needs some polish and bug fixes but IMO it was ahead of anything out there. I tried Sage and it as terrible. My trial expired before it was hardly functional. I sure hope they treat their paying customers better than those on trials. The support I get for MP is 10X what I got from Sage. To all those that work on MP, this is a real cool product!!!
