Media centre advice

AHarvey

AHarvey

AHarvey

Soldato
Joined
6 Mar 2008
Posts
10,092
Location
Stoke area
Hi all,

I have been looking at a running a 360 downstairs to connect to the PC upstairs in order to steam the films i've ripped from my DVDs. However, no matter what I try I can't get the 360 to read from it via wifi. :(

So, I am going to look at building a media PC and running win 7 on it.

I've a couple of questions about it. I've been playing with media centre for the last couple of days and it seems pretty good, I've been looking about and managed to find YAMMM to give synopsis info and IMDB ratings. However, i'd like the ability to create custom synopsis and add our own rating system to the films. Is this possible and if so, how?

Also, I've been compressing movies down to make them more manageable, however, I want to create a surround sound system either internally or externally from the media PC. Will surround sound work with compressed video or will I really need to look at just copying the DVDs straight over unaltered?

Any good sites for media pc's/media centre?
 
Hi There,

I can't really help on the synopsis info etc as although I've got 2 media centres at home we don't really use that information.

On the networking front though I would be very careful about using wifi as your connection. If at all possible try and run some cat5e or cat6 cable, otherwise might be worth looking into the mains electric networking stuff.

From my experience wifi can be a little inconsistent unless the machine is very close to your wifi router, and when you're streaming quite large files where you don't want any frame lag a bit of copper is considerably more reliable.

On the surround sound front, you can just rip your DVDs to a format that has digital surround sound. MKVs are often used for this, but there is surround sound capability in in all sorts of video formats.

E-I
 
thanks for the info.

Yeah ideally I'd like to cable the house, but the cheap option was to use the existing 360 wifi and my router, but it appears that won't work.

I am going to, at some point be building myself an office/media room in the garden once funds allow. I want networking fitted throughout the house then, it's just a cost issue.
 
If you're using MediaCenter, then you want two things:

Shark007 codecs
MediaBrowser

I'm using MetaBrowser (1.something beta, not v2) to download/change my media info.

And, you will definitely want a cabled network - my wireless used to struggle with anything larger than a 700mb movie rip.

Even just a single wire between your HTPC and your router (if located next to the "server" that's hosting your media) will be sufficient - but everything on wireless will struggle a lot.
 
It might well be that your 360 not working is just a sign that the wifi just isn't stable/ fast enough for what you are trying to do, have you tried your 360 in the same room as you wireless router to prove it?

Wiring a house for CAt5/6 is a bit of a pain, but is far from expensive. You should be able to get 300m of CAT5e for £50 or less and that should give you masses unless you have a mansion with thirty bedrooms :-) then it's just a case of lifting the odd floorboard etc to run it in. I've recently bought a new house and the first thing we did (before carpets etc went down) was to run CAT6 everywhere. All in all, including all the CAT6 cable (which wasn't cheap, or probably worth the premium over Cat5e to be honest) a 16 port patch panel and all the wall sockets came to about £250. If you use CAt5e and just terminate with RJ45 rather than fit wall sockets or patch panel should cost you a fifth of that.

Anyway, whatever you do, good luck!

E-I
 
yeah, 3 of the 6 360's are now working, all work correctly when connected to the router via cable when upstairs, wifi fails everytime, even in the same room. Think it may be a router issue.

My plan is to go wired throughout, just to keep speeds up etc when I am working down at the bottom of the garden. But i've just laid the dining room floor :( Got to do the hall way soon so may start in there and travel outwards. Our lower floor is raised so it shouldn't be too much of a pita.

I'll be going with Cat6 just for future proofing as well as wall sockets as it will look neater :)

think I may have to go and start a thread over in networking now :D

And thanks confused, i'll check it out :)
 
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