Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
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I've spent the past few months documenting much of the physical construction of my home theater, but now I'm finally able to get to the AnandTech tie-in: building the HTPC.
The theater needs a computer
You don't have to guess that I view the PC as the center of the digital home, it's the best home for media in my opinion and it continues to deliver the most responsive user experience. While the idea of a PC (or PC-like device) in every room of your house isn't quite as fleshed out as I'd like it to be, a Home Theater PC (HTPC) is easily a reality today.
I decided early on in the theater project that I didn't want to fumble with discs, I wanted all of my movie content stored on a computer and I wanted to be able to browse it via any internet enabled device. Many high end home theaters feature a large touchscreen to control all aspects of the theater and automation, but rather than spending tons of money on a crappy touch interface I wanted to have the whole thing controlled via an iPhone (or optionally, any other web enabled device). The vision is that you'll be able to be anywhere in the house, go to a webpage, browse my listing of movies and hit a button that will prepare the theater for you (lights dim to the appropriate level, masking system/lens adjust to the aspect ratio of the movie, etc...), then all you have to do is walk in and start watching. The software side will take quite a while to implement, mostly because it requires a working theater which I don't have at this point. The other thing it does require is a HTPC, and that's what I've been tinkering with for the past few weeks.
I half heartedly built a HTPC to play around with several weeks ago. I had a Thermaltake Armor case leftover from the AMD Quad FX launch and I threw a Gigabyte X38 board in there, along with an early Yorkfield (45nm, quad core, Penryn) and a Radeon HD 3870. The case was big enough that I could toss in 6 of the 8 1TB drives I'd planned on using for the final build; I'm not sure exactly why I even bothered, I guess I just wanted to see such a huge array under Vista.
The first HTPC, it wasn't very good.
Needless to say the first HTPC build was far from a HTPC, it was simply a PC that I put next to my TV. I watched two movies on it, it worked as expected, but it was far too loud since I hadn't done anything to ensure silence.
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allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I looked at the article again and still am not sure if you are doing a client/server?Also here is the link to myTV plugin
allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
http://mytv.senseitweb.com/">http://mytv.senseitweb.com/lwatcdr - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Why have any drive at all? Why not just boot over you network? No drives, so less heat and less power needed.You could probably get away with a much smaller case as well.
I love the idea of using an IPhone/IPod touch as a super remote. Seems like a great idea for home automation in general.
puffpio - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Since your content is in a NAS and not in the HTPC itself, why use a hdd at all?I simple 4-8GB usb key or CF/SD/... would suffice for the boot drive and draw less power too
access times and transfer speeds shouldn't matter too much because you dont need to boot it up too often
najames - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I have enough hardware to get started on this same project. I have 2 different AMD mATX systems, one with a 3600 one with a 5000 CPU. I also just bought a Q6600 when Frys had them for $180, received an Asus G35 board last night. I also purchased a Saphire 3470 on Egg-sale for $40 if needed. I have several WD 640GB drives available. I have spent a lot of time testing with networking equipment and have achieved a 109MBytes/sec throughput to the WD drives. I have all the hardware necessary, but am not sure yet how to configure the system as a whole for the best setup. My current thinking is using an AMD box for the front end, use the Intel Quad horsepower for recoding and processing. I am not sure how much processing the HTPC box can do, yet still play flawless video. I'm sure I want the Intel as a 24/7 server or just a batch processing unit as needed either. Obviously, I don't want to run any more equipment 24/7 than necessary.It would be nice to split your articles into 2 distinct groups. Group 1 would be hardware that works, or doesn't work, like you've mentioned here already, failures are great to see too. List PC and server hardware, and requirements for single and multiroom processing. Group2 would be all the software combinations tried, then accepted or rejected. The earlier post by Havor, trying many different media centers is a great idea.
A diagram of the configurations would be helpful too, both hardware and software to show how it all fits together.
How many CatX and coax cables have you run to handle this? Are you recoding DVDs into AVI? What about ISO or some other format? We haven't even mentioned the satellite/cable control yet. So many things to consider, so little time. I'm itching to fire Scumcast.
Havor - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Hi Anand its starting to look really great (and i am bit jealous of your theater :-))But have you decided on what Media Center software are you going to use ?
There are 5 main options on the moment
MCE Vista/XP
MediaPortal
Myth-Buntu
SageTV
BeyondTV
You properly have done some research on it, of withs will fit you the best but it would be interesting if you would make a article of all the pro's and con's of the various options they have to deliver.
BigLan - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
BeyondTV is really only useful for TV, the media component (BeyondMedia) is lacking in features and is very poorly supported.I've used MCE (both WinXP and Vista) and it's very slick but isn't as configurable as other options. Like Anand, I didn't like the default viewer for MyMovies, maybe I'll look into the one he's using.
I haven't used Sage, MediaPortal or Myth in a long while but from what I hear MP has made a lot of good progress over the last year or so since I played with it.
I'm still running meedio on my HTPC, and even though the developer sold it to yahoo there's a decent community at meedios.com keeping it going. I prefer Meedio's way of handling browsing movies - give me a list of films (I have dvd covers) to choose from, show me some brief info (plot summary, run time, lead actors and rating) and then play it. I don't need all the imdb info, and browsing by letter is a pain. It looks like the video browser anand linked might fit the bill.
nolisi - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I've got my own little ongoing HTPC project- so far I've personally had experience with MCE, BeyondTV and MediaPortal. My personal opinion is that MediaPortal has the best blend of extensibility, functionality, lowest resource footprint, and stability- especially since it is now finally @ RC1. It definitely surpases BTV and MCE in terms of functionality- but that's what happens when you're an opensource project and everyone contributes their own plugins. MediaPortal never had the same issues that BTV had. They've made MP TV-Server installation mandatory with RC1, which mildly complicates the install- but if you're setting up your own HTPC you can deal with it. My current rig is an Athlon X2 3800, sitting on an nVidia 6150 platform, 2 GB of ram, a TV-Wonder 650 (ATSC) and an AIW 2006 PCI-E. Once I find the right 780G board, I'm moving over to that so I can finally start pushing HDMI to my receiver. The only problem is, there's no decent setup yet for EPG in the US without paying for it.I haven't forayed into the Linux world on my little project yet mainly because I haven't properly researched support for my hardware.
I highly recommend MediaPortal for a Windows platform, but I would love to see Anand do a review of the Linux based software. I'm considering Myth-TV, and will probably be testing it in another month on my current rig.
elfy6x - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I totally have to agree with you on the MediaPortal option. I just recently discovered it after having Vista's MCE for the past year. The best part about it, you can design and build your own skins for it! I'm currently finishing my MFA, so after schools out, I intend to build a really nice skin for MediaPortal and use that setup for my HTPC.neogodless - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I didn't see mention of what you plan to use for an optical drive, so I assume you won't have one in the final build. Will you rip movies on a separate machine and transfer them over the network? And if someone brings a Blu-ray movie over, will you be able to watch it right away, or will you have to rip it first? How long would that take?