A little help setting up my HTPC for best performance possible.

Kanifee

Kanifee

Kanifee

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On the wagon, sorta
Ok, had my Htpc for around 4-5 month now but its never really been up and running properly, it was more of a case of just a pc hooked to the telly for a while and none of it was set as a dedicated media center.

The other day i decided to strip it down, spend some time on cable managemant and get the software running the way it should, i formatted the lot and started fresh with a little more direction and purpose this time.



Ok specs are pretty important so here it is,

Mediaportal front end with streamedMP, moving pictures and my tv series.
C2D E5300 @ stock
2GB DDRII
asus P5N7A-Vm, Nvidia GF9300 ic with 256mb shared memmory
80GB laptop sata HDD with vista 32 Os
1tb seagate lp 5900Rpm drive for storage
no blu-ray yet though it will be coming in a month or so.
Onkyo 507 reciever

cable managemant was a bit of a pig!
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Codecs:
FFDshow
Ac3filter
MPcHc

I have spdif passthrough for dts over hdmi working though this took a bit of tweaking ffdshow and Ac3, ive set all the relavant codecs in Mp.
Now i have seen mention of coreAvc though this isnt free would this be a better codec to have for H.264? how much is it and is it worth the money on my set-up, could i take full advantage?
Also is thre any settings/tweaks i can use for software to improve performance and PQ aswell?
Is there any other software i should get to have a more complete Htpc as this is a pretty much standerd instalation at the minute, just what you see above really and lastly any pointers ?

Thanks for looking in and any help/tips you have.
 
Do you watch DVDs on your HTPC? You can use ffdshow to sharpen and upscale DVDs. There is a sticky at avsforum by forum user 8:13.

Also there are frame doubling scripts for ffdshow and you could also apply a bit of sharpening to high def mkvs using ffdshow.

I am trying out the MadVR renderer at the moment. Do a search over at doom9.org.
 
No optical drive yet, im just gonna invest in the bluray drive, didnt see the point paying for a dvd rom when i wasnt going to keep it long. ill have a look over at doom9 see what it throws up.
 
get xbmc.
The latest version seems to play everything and is the best and easiest HTPC software I have used so far and I have tried media portal ect
 
Win 7 has to be the OS of choice for blu ray, and media center does a great job of almost anything else. Team it up with something like metabrowser and it's perfect. You'll just need some blu ray software. PDVD will integrate into media center somewhat now.
 
alexhull24 said:
Win 7 has to be the OS of choice for blu ray, and media center does a great job of almost anything else. Team it up with something like metabrowser and it's perfect. You'll just need some blu ray software. PDVD will integrate into media center somewhat now.
Click to expand...

Total Media theatre 3 is better for blu-ray I've found
 
Im a big supporter of xbmc, i had my xbox running it for a long time and it became my staple for media very quuickly.
Prior to my fresh start on the htpc i had win7 installed and i must say when i installed xbmc i encountered nothing but problems, random crashes, lock-ups of the media player etc; as for 7mc its not what i like in a media front end, something about it doesnt feel comfortable and i love the customization and tweaking that it just lacks even with editors.

Media portal seems to work well on all fronts and not great on some and not so great on others like i find with other solutions.

madvr looks very promising though it cant be intergrated into mediaportal yet so ill hold off on that.
 
Kanifee said:
Im a big supporter of xbmc, i had my xbox running it for a long time and it became my staple for media very quuickly.
Prior to my fresh start on the htpc i had win7 installed and i must say when i installed xbmc i encountered nothing but problems, random crashes, lock-ups of the media player etc; as for 7mc its not what i like in a media front end, something about it doesnt feel comfortable and i love the customization and tweaking that it just lacks even with editors.

Media portal seems to work well on all fronts and not great on some and not so great on others like i find with other solutions.

madvr looks very promising though it cant be intergrated into mediaportal yet so ill hold off on that.
Click to expand...

Ive not had many problems even playing hi-def videos. The only problem I have is when I send the HTPC to sleep when it wakes up then xbmc seems to lock up most of the time but a quick reset does the trick.
I love the iphone app as well. Makes browsing media a lot easier
 
That looks pretty cool, i take it this doesnt function so that xbmc is displayed on the iphone and you can touch your wy throgh the interface. would be pretty cool if ya could
 
Last edited:
Kanifee said:
That looks pretty cool, i take it this doesnt function so that xbmc is displayed on the iphone and you can touch your wy throgh the interface. would be pretty cool if ya could
Click to expand...

no it doesn't but I find it easier to browse through all the videos I have which wont add to the library
 
That's a nice case, is it the Silverstone ML02? Around £140-£160 I believe? Is it compatible with M-ITX? Is it noisy?
 
Yep the silverstone ML02, i payed £150 for it around 6 months ago and its worth every penny. the board residing in it currently is matx so no problems there, as for noise the psu is fanless and no case fans to speak of though there are several mounting places for ?40mm?; I didnt bother with these as there gonna be noisy. cpu cooler is a silverstone
Nt07 wich is pretty quiet and keeps some nice temps, dont have them to hand but i can get you them if youd like?

All in all great case, a little pricy but its really a Mobile on desktop and there limited in choices, handles my desktop gear no bother and the 120w psu is rock solid.
Had an el-cheapo cupid case with 300w psu running a itx atom server 24/7, it lasted 3 weeks solid then the psu went bye bye, the silverstones 120w itx psu has been solid for 6 months, total draw of the itx server had to be under load 40-50w max. my htpc will be drawing close to 100w and the psu hasnt missed a beat.

highly recommended
 
Sweet, sounds like a perfect setup!

The case is well expensive. I was considering building a low-power HTPC/file server for my room with an el cheapo mitx case, but this is definitely interesting.

Don't worry about getting the exact figures, but are your temps generally decent?
 
there excellent, helps that heavy decoding of h264 is offloaded to to the gpu but even at its peak im sure its only around 38-42 under load or rather as much load as the machine see's.

Your right it is expensive, that why i didnt go for the one with a vfd disp[lay and remote, think they push £190 and i couldnt justify that, my lian li desktop case was only £65 and thats full ally build, made me cringe a little pressing the buy button, total build cost was £400 bearing in mind i had bought 4gb of ram and ended up removing 2gb for my server as 2gb in the htpc was more than ample.
 
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