New HTPC from zero (1 Viewer)

[S_Behn]

Hi there,

I could now sit down and google another couple of hours but instead I prefer to get some valuable opinions from people who really have a clue and dont want to sell.

My situation: I used to have an Antec Fusion Case with some AMD motherboard and onboard ATI HD 3200 if I remember correctly. Running Mediaportal 1.1.0 with Live-TV but mainly Full HD .MKV playback. I went abroad and eventually left the whole thing in Panama

Now that I am back in Germany since a year and it looks like there wont be a Jailbreak for my Apple TV 3 in the forseeable future I decided to head back to a proper selfmade HTPC.

What I want?

• Nice looking small and quiet case (Apple Fan, so thinking Mac MINI style); Without display; optional MCE IR receiver would be great; Not so sure if the iPhone Apps are already good enough to take the whole control or if I will end up buying a Harmony once again
• No big internal capacity; I will put the hard disks in some Synology NAS; the HTPC itself should have only some minor Flash storage/SSD for the OS
• Bluray/Optical Drive (Slot it?)
• Enough power fully enjoy a fluent interaction with the nicest skins and obviously FULL-HD and possibly 1080i Live-TV

What I came up with so far?

• I started looking for Cases, because I for me (Design driven), this is the starting point of all HTPCs. I first found read about Wesena (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Wesena-ITX2-B-Black-Aluminum-chassis/dp/B0058HLEBE) and then stumbled over some Thread where people were saying that the successor company is called Streacom (http://www.streacom.com/products/fc8-evo-fanless-chassis/).
• Those kind of cases obviously limit to mini ITX and I have no single experience with those.
• Additionally I honestly have no clue of current proper CPU/Chipset preferences; Onboard GPUs and so on; I simply remember, back then the choice mattered big time with one GPU working great and another possibly even never didnt work flawless at all.
• I am not religious, no matter if Intel or AMD, Nvidia or ATI, I take what you guys tell me its best

Any thoughts, recommendations, best practices? I am not at all narrow minded regarding the mentioned case; Its just an idea and a design direction I am looking for. Also, are there any known problems with having the Live-TV buffer HD on a NAS? I remember it definitely worked better if it was on another HD but over Network on a NAS?

Many thanks ahead for every hint you give me.
Cheers,
Steffen

 

[S_Behn]

Comment: This thread should probably have been posted in the "General" Hardware board; Any mod cares to move it? Sorry!

 

[S_Behn]

Thanks for moving!

 

[kiwijunglist]

If your going for a mini HTPC you are going to be using an onboard GPU. I recently updated our wiki pages.
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/4_HTPC/HTPC_Hardware/Video_Cards_(GPUs)/AMD_-_Onboard_GPUs
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/4_HTPC/HTPC_Hardware/Video_Cards_(GPUs)/Intel_-_Onboard_GPUs

Ram is cheap so you can allocate between 1GB and 4GB of ram to a ramdrive for timeshifting
http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/1_MEDIAPORTAL_1/15_Customization/TV-Server/Ramdisk_for_Timeshifting

You don't need expensive RAM, so you could pick up 8GB of cheap Kingston value ram or similar.

Lots of miniITX builds here
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/forums/ongoing-htpc-projects.60/
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/forums/completed-htpc-projects.61/

 

[S_Behn]

Thanks! That helped me putting a stop to the research I now finally received all components last week and assembled my new HTPC. Its so great to have a HTPC without any single moving part. No moving harddisk, no fan no nothing!

Great stuff. Here is what I finally got: