Ongoing New HTPC - New Zealand Freeview (1 Viewer)

[Bleazle]

Hey dave, we will have to so sort out a visit to your place to see it all working.... One thing for sure is that I'll bring along my new HTPC for you guys to help me out with a few things...

No worries, of course it will all turn to cr@p if you guys turn up to check it out! lol But I reckon after a few beers we could break out my toolbox, dust off the hammer and coal chisel and sort your HTPC woes out (those were always my #1 "go to" tools when I was a kid )

 

[TommySharp]

Had only put a 30GB solid state drive in the machine and it was whisper quiet with only the CPU going, couldn't even tell if the thing was on without looking at the lights.....

Have since put a 500GB drive in for timeshifting and recording.... Man that thing sounds like an aircraft when it starts up and is pretty loud while it's running.

Has anyone had any thoughts on using ram or a USB3 stick for timeshifting and then maybe recording directly to a NAS box which is else where in the house? Might see if I can find some way to move recording to the NAS after so many days thus keeping the drive space requirements down which might let me get away with a slightly larger SSD and get rid of the 500GB HDD.

 

[porky996t]

Hi Tommy,

I use RAM for timeshifting and it does make a difference with the speed of pausing, rewinding etc. In my case rewind is 'instant'. I currently have 10Gb RAM installed and whilst Win7 x86 recognises the lot, it only uses the max of 4Gb and the rest is used as a RAM disk. I use DataRAM RAM Disk software which, once set up, just works away without interruption in the background.


HTH,


M.

 

[Owlsroost]

+1 for a ramdisk (provided you can live with the limited pause/rewind time available).

I think you would find a modern 'green' 5400/5900 rpm mechanical drive (for bulk storage) much quieter than an old 7200rpm drive - I have a WD 2TB 'green' drive in my system and it's pretty quiet (certainly compared to the 500GB 7200rpm Seagate it replaced).

Tony

 

[Jay_UK]

Limited pause/rewind time?

Get a 12GB RAM disk...should give you enough time

J.

 

[porky996t]

Just as a point of reference, I think I can do 45mins rewind on full HD with a 6Gb RAMdisk

HTH,


M

 

[kiwijunglist]

Well I ended up getting the following internals....

Motherboard - Intel DH67BL - Great little board with USB3, Sata3, HDMI and eSata
CPU - i3 2120
RAM - 2GB
HDD System - Patriot Torqx 2 32GB SATA SSD
DVD Writer

So far the system is running pretty well on the test bench. Freeview HD is fantastic compared to my old system with all it's dropped frames. The internal HD2000 in the i3 seems to handle it no problem and I didn't even load any codecs.... Just went with the MP defaults and didn't change anything....

I do get some error about memory exceptions if I flick about the channels a bit so need to look into that and also if I stop and start tv a few times I'll start getting errors about codecs like MP has forgotten how to play things even though it played them fine two seconds ago.

Am having a few headaches trying to get the case's internal IR receiver to play nice with MP. Works great with Media Centre so must just be a software issue somewhere.

What OS are you using, I don't think the MP default codecs support hardware decoding of Freeview HD, so you are not using the HD2000 IGP, instead you are using the CPU, and ie-21000 ia plenty fast enough to software decode all streams.

 

[TommySharp]

I'm running windows 7 and just assumed that the standard MP codecs would use hardware decoding. Might have to try some other codecs.

Anyone know how to check signal strength from within MP?

 

[johns11]

Hey Tommy. During playback of live TV, hit the "i" button on the remote twice and then go to "tuning parameters" to see a bunch of information including signal strength and signal quality. Some skins also show more information. "Frames" skin, for example shows the number of dropped frames which I think is really useful... I don't fully trust the signal strength value though since mine never goes above zero... although I must admit that's about the quality of my picture these days Really got to figure that one out!!

Codecs wise the Windows 7 default codec seems to leave the processor alone quite nicely.

 

[TommySharp]

Thanks John, the CPU doesn't appear to be used much when watching HDTV hence my assumption that the onboard graphics was being used to decode. It's working fine so won't mess with it.

I'm having huge problems with pixelated video and breakups so am suspecting signal issues, however if I plug the aerial into the TV there are no issue watching using the TV's internal HDTV tuner. And occasionally while watching TV I'll get a windows error about MP encountering a problem and it just exits... I'm also guessing this might also be signal related because nothing shows up in the logs...