Getting rid of my HTPC

spudbynight · 25 Mar 2010 at 08:04

I currently have an HTPC which is based around a low power Athlon with a 780g mobo (onboard HD3200) and several hard drives. It runs Windows 7.

I am going to upgrade this soon and I am torn between building a nice all singing / all dancing HTPC OR dumping that and buying a Ion based nettop, installing XBMC Live on it and buying a PS3 for BluRay playback. I would also setup a media server in another room.

What should I do? At the moment I use my HTPC for media playback with XBMC, as a PVR with Windows Media Centre and for watching iPlayer. I was thinking of getting the PS3 PVR thing as well.

crinkleshoes · 25 Mar 2010 at 08:53

I would get the all signing, all dancing piece of kit... hehe...

Did that about a year and a half ago & it's still running very strong, for everything I throw at it (a lot of 1080P content). It'll keep running happilly until 4K content comes out I expect - might start to struggle then... just depends on how good the gpu acceleration will be!

It's specced as:
Core 2 E8400
4GB RAM
DFI P45 mobo (have always found intel board to have cooler chipsets & more stable than nvidia...)
8800GT

You could probably pick up a similar specced computer for maybe 300 quid now? It would do the job perfectly & keep going for quite a while too...

I spent a bit more making it silent... was worth the extra imo for my HTPC...

spudbynight · 25 Mar 2010 at 09:08

I keep thinking of moving to Linux for the PVR for pure stability reasons....

crinkleshoes · 25 Mar 2010 at 09:24

So... you never ever ever ever want to play HD material properly... ever ever?

lol...

I tried XBMC on Ubuntu a while back (ok, it may have improved by now)... but there was no GPU acceleration to it, so even running on a quad core it just couldn't play decent quality videos!

If you set the computer up properly (don't install lots of random crap, keep it simple and as basic as you possibly can)... then you will never have any stability trouble... heck, my htpc is still running vista! And I'm using vista media centre... I keep meaning to update to win7, but just never get round to it... it runs perfectly.

One piece of advice... be sure to use 32bit windows... 64bit codecs are still a bit dodgy, although they have improved significantly.

Once you have that... all you need to install is ffd-show tryouts & haali media splitter... windows & those two codecs & media centre will play any video format you could want

There are a few other media centres available too... some of them are incredibly pretty & work quite well... worth looking in to

Morfik · 25 Mar 2010 at 12:51

spudbynight said:
I currently have an HTPC which is based around a low power Athlon with a 780g mobo (onboard HD3200) and several hard drives.

I'm using a similar setup (~2 years old) it still works fine though, I've not seen the need to replace it at all.

errata · 25 Mar 2010 at 13:54

Make the HTPC the media server and get the PS3 for games

if you dont need the console but want blu ray, a blu ray rom drives for the PC is only £45

At the moment your not really needing an all singing dancing PC to do media stuff unless you editing HD movies or really like to transcode video quickly.

The future will definatly be very small cheap Atom type boxes with enough hardware support to do all the basics.