Media PC

Xire · 4 Oct 2011 at 12:48

So basically I have been toying with the idea of selling my blu ray collection (200+ movies) and converting to a media/hometheatre PC. How much would I be looking at spending? I would probably want it to have a blu ray player and have a large ammount of HD space.

Any build suggestions? I assume its no harder than building a normal rig. Anyone have any experience with building one and willing to provide any tips?

95thrifles · 4 Oct 2011 at 15:04

Its just the same yes, though you need to keep in mind focus on quiet components, if you dont want any game play, circa £600 will get you a top HTPC

Buchanan0204 · 4 Oct 2011 at 15:19

Maybe look into the Acer Revo 3700. It's £190 and will play 1080P content flawlessly. It's extremely small (about the size of a Nintendo Wii) and virtually silent.

The downside is the lack of bluray drive and HDD space. However that's overcome by ripping your blurays and storing them on an external HDD. The whole point of a media PC is to have the content stored and not on disc. otherwise you might as well just buy a standalone bluray player.

You can get a decent 2TB of storage for 70 quid or so. You could also look into storing the movies on internal drives in your PC and accessing them via the home network (it's what I do)

NAS's are stupidly expensive. I'm personally looking into building a low powered PC to store 4-5 2TB drives and store it away in a little unit. Then I'll install freenas onto it and it will be the home of all my blurays and backups.

There's something to think about anyway.

Xelene · 4 Oct 2011 at 18:44

You got a good PC to rip your movies?

Buchanan0204 · 4 Oct 2011 at 19:24

sldsmkd said:
You got a good PC to rip your movies?

You don't actually need a good PC. All you need is any computer with a bluray drive.

Buchanan0204 · 7 Oct 2011 at 05:13

Decided yet?

andy_mk3 · 7 Oct 2011 at 11:48

You don't need a high spec PC for a HTPC, mine is an Athlon64 2GHz, 2GB Ram, HD6450, 2tb drive and a tv tuner. Cost me around £200, this was for the TV tuner (£120), plus the hard drive, graphics card, and wireless remote. The PC itself was given to me by a family member.

Jay794 · 7 Oct 2011 at 16:27

Buchanan0204 said:
You don't actually need a good PC. All you need is any computer with a bluray drive.

And a decent processor, otherwise it takes days to rip a blu ray lol

Takes me about an hour and thats on a quad core

Buchanan0204 · 7 Oct 2011 at 17:23

Jay794 said:
And a decent processor, otherwise it takes days to rip a blu ray lol

Takes me about an hour and thats on a quad core

You only need a good processor if you are encoding. If you simply rip it to an .MKV which is only a container... using for e.g. MakeMKV... then it doesn't matter what CPU you have... the speed of the rip is dependant on the read speed of your optical drive.

If of course you plan on ripping through a program which also encodes it for you and makes the file size smaller (which also reduces quality) then yes it helps to have a good CPU.

For ripping though... It makes no difference what spec the PC is.