Looking for help in setting up a Media House (1 Viewer)

[sinin]

Hi all,

I've been nearing the completion of my house build and am looking at get the media controlled house sorted.

I've been looking at various solution in terms of software for a while including Media Portal, MythTV, BeyondTV, Sage TV and Media Centre (JRiver, not MS). The latter, whilst has some excellent music of off-line media options capabilities, lacks TV control options. I would like some pointers as to the benefits and drawbacks of each, or if anyone has experience of any of these systems. A review of each against each other would be ideal. Does Media Player support Blu-ray playback?

My system will centre around an high(ish) end HTPC (capable of games playing) hooked into a Pioneer 42" plasma, Yamaha AV Receiver and 5.1 surround. I'm just in the throws of buying the last components of the HTPC now, but want to get some unorthodox components such as more powerful graphics card (Nivida 275 or Radeon 4870/4890) but want to keep the thing as quiet as possible. I know Nvida cars have issues with PCM sound over HDMI, however the receiver has both HDMI and SPDIF inputs so I don't think this will be a problem. I have read though that the Nivida cards are better at showing Blu-ray 24fps content better than the Radeon cards - is there any truth to this?

I also currently run a separate server with SBS 2003 on an Athlon x2 with a smallish RAID 5 array. I'm not sure whether to put TV cards (probably 2x Technotrend DVB-C 1501) in this server, or straight into the HTPC, and use that for Media Serving duties. I was even thinking of running this server with Hypervisor and MythBuntu, but I am obviously also looking at TV Server as well. I also run a DBox, so wondered if there was a plug-in with media portal that allows use and control of the DBox as an additional tuner?

The big idea is that everyone in the house (kids, but more importantly the wife!!) should be able to access all media via a real simple interface. I will probably hook up some small PCs next to the other TVs in the house in order to achieve this.

Any thoughts and suggestions on any of this would be welcome.

 

[etheesdad]

I think in terms of power and flexibility you will find MP and MythTV the two strongest contenders.

Yes you can play BluRay with MP, using modifications like this

I acknowledge your bravery in talking openly about using a heretically fan-cooled video card in an HTPC build and warn that ridicule and derision may result

I havent heard of the nVidia vs ATI @ 24p thing, but I can tell you that MP has the rather interesting feature of an internal refresh-rate changer which is designed to tackle this type of issue.

 

[sinin]

I acknowledge your bravery in talking openly about using a heretically fan-cooled video card in an HTPC build and warn that ridicule and derision may result

Nothing new there then! I simply want to be able to utilise this fantastic screen it its full potential. A PS3 will also be hooked up to it (and possibly somehow hooked into MP if that is possible), so I don't see why I can't utilse the HTPC for gaming. It would be great if there were utilities to underclock fast graphic cards (a bit like which can be done with CPUs) to that for low end work (such as media playing), the graphics cards will not produce as much heat and so fan noise can be reduced to next to nothing.

I havent heard of the nVidia vs ATI @ 24p thing, but I can tell you that MP has the rather interesting feature of an internal refresh-rate changer which is designed to tackle this type of issue.

This is actually something I asked to be implement into Media Player Classic. Is there something similar to alter the display resolution? Sometimes the TV is the best thing to use to rescale the picture rather than the PC.

The TV is more than capable fo showing 24fps BluRay content smoothly, I just simply wanted to know if were issue in the Radeon cards sending this content.

I'm looking through the rest of the forums to see if the answers are there.....