HTPC or Media streamer

Bubba

Bubba

Bubba

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27 May 2010
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362
Hey everyone, In a bit of a dilema here on what to use in my living room setup.

I am currently using a PS3 with gigabit ethernet to my server which runs PS3 Media Server for all my movies and music, music is flac so has to be transcoded, most movies are 1080p mkv files which play fine usually but seeking can be a bit slow as well, I want the absolute best quality and I feel I am loosing some by transcoding everything so this is why I want to change.

I have looked into some network players like the WD tv live and some other ones but they seem to lack gigabit lan or be noisey and overpriced sometimes too.

So I have thought of setting of a HTPC using one of the nT-330i as I can get them for £115 which I think is very reasonable, then just chuck in some old ram I have kicking about then I was wanting to do a network boot using PXE instead of booting from the likes of a flash drive (Want to keep price down also) I would imagine network boot would be quicker as it is all gigabit.

I did a quick look about pxe boot as I have never done it before but it seems pretty involved and changing a good bit of my home network so I want to know if it is going to be worth all the hassle? I can do some trials with my laptop with the pxe boot thing as it also has gigabit ethernet with HDMI and spdif outputs to connect to my amps, dac TV.

So what I want to know is should I use a basic network streamer or will building a HTPC offer better picture/sound quality and format compatibility and if so will doing a PXE network boot be worth the hassle?

Cheers.
David
 
Why not just bung a 2.5" hdd (or CF card with adapter) in the nt-330i and forget about pxe boot?

An HTPC is always going to be more flexible than something like the WD TV but are more hassle to get working right.
 
The reason for doing pxe boot is so I dont have to buy a hard drive as it will add another £60 to the price for a SSD drive, there are reports with a normal hard drive they produce too much heat and cause the cpu fan to go all the time but running without a hard drive keeps the machine nice and cool, also I already have all the equipment for doing pxe boot, its just about configuring it etc and I reckon it should be pretty fast as I will run it off my servers raptor hard drive which is seperate to all the storage and with the gigabit link it should be pretty quick but will have to see.

I also have an old ati remote wonder up stairs in the spare room, this should come in handy to start with but will need to be replaced with something better at some point.
 
HTPC are a wiser choice from what you said in your original post. If you do not want to cut down on quality and want the full experiance a dedicated HTPC is the option.

I built myself a HTPC for my lounge and does everything it should do. When I watch any film that gets switched on and the wireless takes care of everything. It can stream 1080 content over the Wifi-N and even handles DTS-HD and TrueHD over the network.

Getting a HTPC over a media streamer means the flexibility to upgrade. If there are new video formats out there with better compressions then the PC will handle it. Where as if the media stream will require a firmware update (when they get to do it)
 
I'm looking at either a media streamer or a HTPC myself but from what i can see it's pretty expensive to build a HTPC ( bitstreaming DTS-MA) when you could get a XtreamerPRO for £160 then just add some hard drive.

This is unless I've missed something here?
 
Bubba said:
Hey everyone, In a bit of a dilema here on what to use in my living room setup.

I am currently using a PS3 with gigabit ethernet to my server which runs PS3 Media Server for all my movies and music, music is flac so has to be transcoded, most movies are 1080p mkv files which play fine usually but seeking can be a bit slow as well, I want the absolute best quality and I feel I am loosing some by transcoding everything so this is why I want to change.

I have looked into some network players like the WD tv live and some other ones but they seem to lack gigabit lan or be noisey and overpriced sometimes too.

So I have thought of setting of a HTPC using one of the nT-330i as I can get them for £115 which I think is very reasonable, then just chuck in some old ram I have kicking about then I was wanting to do a network boot using PXE instead of booting from the likes of a flash drive (Want to keep price down also) I would imagine network boot would be quicker as it is all gigabit.

I did a quick look about pxe boot as I have never done it before but it seems pretty involved and changing a good bit of my home network so I want to know if it is going to be worth all the hassle? I can do some trials with my laptop with the pxe boot thing as it also has gigabit ethernet with HDMI and spdif outputs to connect to my amps, dac TV.

So what I want to know is should I use a basic network streamer or will building a HTPC offer better picture/sound quality and format compatibility and if so will doing a PXE network boot be worth the hassle?

Cheers.
David
Click to expand...

Hi David,

I had a HTPC in my cinema room (see link in sig) but ditiched it because it was a pain in the backside. It crashed was laggy and I was forever updating drivers and faffing with it. Seeking was dreadful and I had audio sync issues and all manor of niggles

I ditched it and wanted a setup where I could dump my video files over to a network share and just watch them.

I use WHS and a Stream to my PS3 in my cinema room. And its the centre of my digital world. Never looked back

Why not just batch encode your Video Directory overnight using MKV2VOB ?

I did this from my video share on my WHS takes about 5 mins per movie with no loss of quality.

Whenever I have a new MKV I just pass it through MKV2VOB directly outputting it to the video share on WHS and watch it via the PS3

This is what I have done. Its seeks very fast and is flawless in all honesty.

This will then cost you nothing. As for FLAC transcoding on the fly is no biggy is it?
 
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Hey, thanks for the replies.

Most of the stuff I watch is new so I just want to be able to download it and play it straight away without having to convert.

The problem with transcoding the flac files is that there is a slightly delay before the next track, its maybe only 3 or 4 seconds but its annoying all the same, I also feel like I am losing quality as the music sounds a lot better played directly from my laptop, both using digital outputs to my dac. This setup is mainly for music so I want the best quality I can get from it.

Your home cinema looks good, seen the pictures before, your using the same(or similar) speakers that I am using bar the sub.


I can get the foxconn nt-330i through work for £115 and then just some ram thrown into it which I will have kicking about somewhere.
 
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