Ongoing Newbie needs you! To help me choose the best setup. (1 Viewer)

[SleepyD]

After a miserable experience with Vista MCE and a Linksys DMA 2200 Media Extender
I have decided to purchase a PC dedicated to media. I have a great
high speed connection and wireless network. I could not get the Linksys
to work well at all wired or wireless. I also have the Netflix ROKU box and
it works perfectly. Blah Blah

What I am asking of this forum is to recommend what I should install with the latest
Media Portal build. I bought a PC that I will dedicate to the living room.
I want to take it out of the box, load it up with software, and start watching TV
(37" Westinghouse LCD HDTV). I have read a lot of the forums and I believe the
contributors are people I want helping me make this as painless as possible. I just
don't have the time to mess around with things like I used to. That Linksys about got
thrown out the window. Drove me nuts.

OK here is what I have bought and would like to make my media center.
I will also be connecting a Pinnacle PCTV HD pro stick.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE. I thinks this will be fun.

Brand Acer
Model AL5100-UD4400B
Form Factor Ultra Slimline
Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+(2.3GHz)
Processor Main Features 64 bit Dual Core Processor
Cache Per Processor 2 x 512KB L2 Cache
Memory 3GB DDR2
Hard Drive 320GB SATA 7200RPM
Optical Drive 1 Slot In DVD SuperMulti drive (DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RAM)
Graphics ATI Radeon X1250 IGP
Audio Sound card - Integrated

 

[joystick]

Hi!

to be honest I don't understand the question, because you already bought the system, right? what should you install relating to MP Software? Well, I think should absolutely install MP + TV server, works great in my setup. Personally i would also sty with XP, but that's just my opinion...

If you want a hint about the hardware specs of your system then...
here are my thoughts:

Hard Drive 320GB SATA 7200RPM
Optical Drive 1 Slot In DVD SuperMulti drive (DVD+R, DVD-R, DVD-RAM)
Graphics ATI Radeon X1250 IGP

I would definitely go for 2 HDDs, one (2 -3 partitions) for system an MP, the other one for Recordings and timeshifting, also I would recommend to use more memory, at least 500gb per HDD, also because you want to record HD content, right?

I would definitely us a better grafics card, preferably a ATI 38xx or something in that area , because those cards reduce CPU usage while watching HD content(with the correct codec, btw) and therefor reduce heat in the the system, thus you get a much quiter htpc.

hope that helps...


cheers

joystick

 

[SleepyD]

Thanks

I will upgrade the HDD to 500gb and run an external 500gb HDD as well.
I plan to leave the system alone otherwise internally. I would like to
watch HD content of course. What codecs should I install?

 

[joystick]

If you want to achieve HW-acceleration of the grafics card you should install PowerDVD 7 Ultra or 8 Ultra

The point is that your X1250 card will not be enought to do the job (does not provide HW-decodeing) , however, your CPU still should have the power to decode HD.
So, not changing the card will leave you with CPU decoding, and higher cpu load, but then again you can also use another codec like ffdshow, or coreavc, because you'd not need a codec that supports HW-decoding....

hope you can follow my thoughts....

cheers


joystick

 

[SleepyD]

Thanks, I understand you perfectly. I am familiar with ffdshow and I will check out coreavc.
PowerDVD is good, I have a copy of it bundled with a DVD burner I bought a year ago.
I think the CPU will be able to handle the load. I plan on using it strictly for media and
nothing else. Now I am just waiting until it comes in the mail.
Thanks again joystick.

 

[dlisalde]

ATI x1250 is onboard with chipset 690G of AMD?

If de answer is yes, you can added ATI 3000 HD Series for HD files.

This combination is great, i've chipset 690G in motherboard and ATI 3450 and can play BD disc without problem