HTPC - I think this is what I want

Spammeh

Spammeh

Spammeh

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I currently have a very cheap high street brand Freeview HD box that I bought a year or so ago and despite wanting Sky / Virgin I cannot justify £50 a month.

What I want is the following:

- The ability to watch 1 programme, whilst recording at least 1 other channel
- Able to stream movies from my laptop / pc
- Access pictures / music from my laptop - or even get music library on the actual box (have about 50gb of music)
- Ability to put in a dvd / bluray into it to watch off that
- Full HD 1080p output and ability to connect future purchases of hifi equipment (amp, etc)
- DLNA supported (if possible)

From having a quick read of these forums people are discussing XMBC and Mediaportal and building your own HTPC and installing these on them? What is the rough cost of doing something like this? Do any remotes work with them?

I'm just toying with this idea as I'd like something that does everyone that TIVO does and more - is this possible?
 
A fairly modestly specced PC running XBMC (there are various ways of doing this) will do exactly what you need.

A budget limit would help to give us an idea of what you can get but as an example my HTPC config is as follows:

Gigabyte S2-78H Mobo (780g Chipset)
AMD 4850e 2.5ghz CPU
4gb DDR2 PC6400 RAM
Blu-Ray Drive
64gb SSD
Desktop M-ATX case with a built in M-ATX 120w PSU
Keysonic RF Wireless Keyboard with built in touchpad
Emprex RF Wireless Media Centre Remote
Windows 7 HP 64bit
XBMC

I then have a 4tb external NAS box connected to my router that stores all my media.

Its not the fastest or newest config by any standard but it plays what I need it to play and I can rip my Blu-Rays at a fairly high bitrate without any playback issues.

All you would need to add to the above is a TV card and you would be good to go.

You could also save cash by using XBMC Live which doesn't need an OS but I've never used it so couldn't advise any further.

You could also obviously have more internal storage than an SSD but with my NAS I don't need it.
 
If you were looking at a small htpc which you can stream media to, then this would be the kind of thing which would be fine:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 AMD Hudson - mini ITX £99.98
1 x Lian Li PC-Q09FB Mini-ITX HTPC Chassis - Black £84.98
1 x OCZ Vertex 2 50GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (OCZSSD2-2VTX50G) ** NEW LOWER PRICE ** £59.99
1 x Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT25664BA1339) £24.98
Total : £281.34 (includes shipping : £9.50).



The case comes with a flex 150W PSU and it can sort out 1080p no problem.
SSD will be for booting into your program of choice and will also hold artwork and other media info.
Both xbmc and medial portal both support the use of remotes and can be configued easily to do the users bidding.

If you want it to store media as well then you'll need to look into something a little bigger. More of a media server than a htpc.
As above, XBMC Live runs off a linux Ubuntu distro. So no additional licenses need to be bought.
 
Seems pretty reasonable really. So do people tend to advise having their main storage separately in a NAS etc or on a laptop as opposed to in the HTPC directly? Is XBMC what everyone is using then?

What about recording tv, would I need to have a dual tuner or something along those lines? and what about remote wise - is everything compatible? Will I need a AV reciever or are all the remotes blutooth?
 
You'd need a dual tuner if you want to watch something different to what youre recording.

You can get a usb remote or something similar.
 
because your htpc will be plugged into your tv directly then most people like it to be small and compact. when you start adding lots of 2tb drives its hard to keep the whole thing small.

What I've done, and quite a few others is to build a low spec, low power media server which is out the way and can hold as much storage as you like.

EG my server runs:
e4600, 2GB RAM and 4 x Samsung SpinPoint F4 HDDs. I used to just run linux on it but have swapped to Windows Home Server 2011 for backups etc.

But there are other options like FreeNAS etc..

no monitor or anything. just sits there.

As platypus said, USB IR6 or Bluetooth remotes can be picked up easily.
 
Fair enough, that seems simple enough. Makes sense, I assume the low power boxes barely use anything as it doesnt have a lot of hardware in it really?

Silly question, if your going to have a dual tv tuner do you need to have 2x aerial inputs from the wall, and if so can you just split it?
 
I'd say my server drawers somewhere between 30 and 45 watts. As such using a simple websites calculations its

36w x 720hours per month at 8p per KWH (estimation) = £2.07 per month in electricity

Thats running 4gb ram and using a Picopsu with an AMD fusion board.
 
Fair enough, will need a way round this then, as I would like to be able to record things whilst I'm watching another channel. Sounds good with the power output though
 
Spammeh said:
Silly question, if your going to have a dual tv tuner do you need to have 2x aerial inputs from the wall, and if so can you just split it?
Click to expand...

no you don't need dual inputs. I never did on my compro e700 card and I could record and watch different channels at the same time.
 
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