Laptop into HTPC - Hardware? (1 Viewer)

[Ciruz]

Hi All,

After building a HTPC on the cheap with spares and a few new items, customizing the software to give me what i wanted, i now feel the time has come to try building an old laptop into a HTPC.

Here are the specs for you and what i want:

Hardware:

Acer Travelmate 2200 Laptop

CPU - 2.6Ghz Celeron D
RAM - 1GB (2x512) 2.5CL 333Mhz
MEM - 30Gb
GFX - ATI Radeon 9100 IGP (Shared 64Mb VRAM)

Information about compatibility problems or performance issues would be great as i intend to use all features of MP.

What i Want:

Remote via USB
Wireless Card
TV Out Method as no s-video on laptop
Tv Card (I Guess USB or PCMCIA)
Wireless Controllers 2x
A slimline Case (size of average DVD player)

Any recommendations on the above would be great. Im going to stick to another budget of around £150 for this one.

Id love some information on problems that others come across when building laptop based HTPC. Things like are there cases out there for this type of build? Cooling issues and cdrom placement issues etc etc.

Thanks in advance for replies, ill try and get back to everyone on a daily basis.

Build starts once im confident correct hardware has been selected

Mark

 

[Marcusb]

be aware that the gfx card is a little underpowered for MP and may give you sluggish performance.

USB is the best way to go for tv cards. For the remote, get an MCE European model. great value and works really well.

For TV out, you'll have issues, unless you buy an expensive VGA -> TV converter. I don't think these ever really give great quality. If you already have the laptop, why not install MP now and see for yourself how it will run, considering it's free software. that's much better than buying allt he components and not being happy with the result.

 

[Ciruz]

I have installed MP on the laptop and it works great! My main worry is adding all the hardware such as TV card and then it runs sluggish

Thanks for the info on remote, ill take a look on ebay unless you can give me a decent website to buy from

Mark

 

[Marcusb]

here's a link for the remote that may help. You'll want to buy from the UK but this will show what you need:
http://www.techflare.com.au/sales.asp?item=2393&cat=14&subcat=166
bear in mind this is the US version. The UK version has four extra buttons at the bottom (red/blue/green and yellow) and these extras are must have's.

Glad to hear MP works well for you now. The TV card shouldn't slow things down depending on what you are looking for.
Recording Digital TV should be fine, but recording analog TV places a huge strain on the PC as the CPU has to do real time conversion to MPeg or DivX or whatever format you choose. You can get analog cards that have hardware builot in for this, but I don't think USB models have this feature. Remember too that TV will take about 2-3Gb er hour, so 30Gb wont last you too long.

Cheers,
Marcus.

 

[medaust]

A friend of mine uses a laptop as a HTPC, he uses an Avermedia PC card, it is great. The issues he has are: 1. you need to open the laptop to turn it on, which is not very convinient. He is looking at other options like wake on remote or lan. 2. the laptop uses the keyboard to exhaust heat, you can not keep it cool with the lid closed. Then if the screen is on, it will be quite annoying.

 

[BillyGates]

I use a Dell E1505 for an HTPC and I'm very happy with it except for 1 thing... the noise...

Unfortunately, the noise is going to make me eventually replace it with a Chassis/Wireless keyboard/mouse solution.

 

[firemaker]

Laptop Projects

I'm waiting for a power jack for a compaq evo 800 and the thought just hit me to take apart a extra mce ir reciever I have and cram it in there while it's apart a-la-custom with a hammer and chisel I have handy for such delicate surgery. then make it a HTPC using MP.
thought I better take a look around at some spec issues and saw that I have 1.7 ghz p4 and the aver media mce cardbus says use at least 2.4. and far as I know not supported by MP either.
then I see BillyGates post and find that his Dell E1505 is a 1.6 ghz! Hows that working? share details of your setup?
anyone willing to share experiences doing MP on laptops?
maybe it would make a good extender here and still be a media player elseware.
I'm not sure why these requirements are so high. my first tv card was a software connextant(sp) on a p1 120 mhz and worked fairly well and hardware cards use much less cpu than that old software card.

 

[BillyGates]

I use Cyberlink (comes with PowerDVD) and CoreAVC video decoder and everything works fine up to 720p encodes.

I only use MP to watch videos AVI/MKV, videos... I don't have a TV card so no TV capability.

Hope that helps!