Your HTPC...

Antec Fusion micro remote case with 350w psu
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000 Am2 stock cooler
Abit A-S78H HDMi 780g motherboard
4gb DDR 2
1TB Sata Hdd, 250gb Sata Hdd
Lg Blu ray & Hd Dvd Drive
Wireless 54g card
Vista Media centre with a few pluggins
Cyberlink Media centre remote and Keysonic keyboard with touchpad
Plumbed into a panasonic PZ80 Plasma

Plays Everything flawlessly in 1080p, and nice and quite. all in cost £385.

P1000468.jpg
 
Last edited:
Mine is
Silverstone LC16MR.
Q6600.
Gigabyte P35-DS4
2gig 6400DDR2.
Sapphire HD4670 with Zalman GC cooler.
Seasonic S12 430.
LG GGC-H20L.
WD 250GB
Sycthe Mini Ninja.
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-4000.

Now you folks are thinking overkill for a HTPC, but the CPU was left over from a PC build & at some point I plan on sorting out the cable for HD satellite goodness.
 
Silverstone GD01 MXR in Black
Vista HP 64bit MCE with MyMovies and MyTV
Gigabyte P35C DS3R
E6400 @ 3ghz
6Gb PC6400 DDR2
8800GTS 320mb
Hauppauge NovaT 500
320gb HDD

Toshiba 37AV505DB
Onkyo TX-SR674E
Wharfedale Diamond 9.1, Wharfedale Diamond 9 CS, Wharfedale DFS-18 and Paradigm PS1000.
@3.5Tb Fileserver with all my movies ripped etc

Spec is overboard as its my gaming pc and HTPC. When I get my own place I plan to massively downgrade it (dual core atom maybe), but keep the case etc.

Have used mediaportal in the past, and though some parts are awesome and far better than the MCE equivalent (ie MyTVSeries is absolutely fantastic) I can't get past the TV side being sucky.

I will go back to MediaPortal and give it a go once it's sorted out though to try TV3.
 
Last edited:
I am soon to have three HTPCs

Livingroom HTPC(bit overboard for a HTPC but the CPU/MB were from my main PC when I upgraded it)

E6600
Asus PH5W-Deluxe motherboard
Silverstone LC14 case
4 gig Corsair ram
Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T-500 freeview card
Hauppauge NOVA-HD-S2 High Definition Satellite card
3TB of HDs
ATI 2600XTX passive graphics card
Pioneer blu-ray & Toshiba HD-DVD drive
Running Vista Media Centre with TV pack (been trying Media Portal recently)
All my DVDs are stored on HDs and accessed via DVD libary enabled in the registry.


Bedroom HTPC

This is a great HTPC silent and plays anything I have flung at it

AMD X2 4850e
Abit A-N78HD motherboard
Silverstone Sugo SG01B
2gig Corsair ram
500gig Samsung drive
Pioneer DVD drive.
Vista Media Centre with TV pack

Home Cinema HTPC (my main pc fed via HDMI through some walls to the room to save me building another HTPC)

Q6600 running at 3.6ghz
Asus P5Q Premium
Antec P180 case
4gig RAM
2TBs of HDs
currently running a 1800XTX after a GTX280 dieing not sure what I am going to replace it with.
M audio sound card
LG GGC-H20L Blu-Ray Reader & HD-DVD ROM to go in
Vista Media Centre with TV pack (may run media portal on this one)

DVDs/Music/Recorded TV etc are all accessed from the living room HTPC to the other ones, I also have a few Blu-ray/HD-DVDs online that can be accessed from any PC however I do not have enough storage space to put them all on as each movie is 40gig.

I have the house wired with gigabit LAN and have set up wake on lan so the livingroom HTPC wakes up when needed and so on. Long term plan is to build a server and move all the HDs to this upping the storage to around 10tb so I can store all my Blu-ray/HD-DVDs online. I will then run the Home Cinema room feed off the low powered server rather than my main PC.
 
My HTPC:

Silverstone LC17 (Black)
Nova T-500 TV Card
Abit IP35 PRO With E2200 CPU @ stock
Enermax 620w PSU
WD 320GB Hd
Akasa Ext drive.
MSI 7600GT GPU
4 gig Corsair RAM
Blu-Ray Drive (Pioneer I think)
 
My HTPC is feeling a bit inadequate after seeing Dangerous Dave's set up!! :eek:

Great to see everyone's HTPC's. :cool:

Anyway tis;
Silverstone LC03 case, modded
Asus P5KE mobo
2gb Geil ULL
E7200 (3.8ghz)..........under water! :cool:
2 x WD black 640gb (RAID 0)
1 x Samsung F1 500gb
8800GTS 512mb
LG blu-ray/HD-DVD drive
Asus Xonar HDAV1.3 deluxe
Hauppauge HVR-4000
Enermax PSU
Muliti Card reader
Fan controller
Vista Media Centre + Total Media Theatre

Connected to Denon AVR-1909 and Optoma HD800X. :)

Just bought Wall-E and I Am Legend on blu-ray but can't watch them till the weekend as I'm working in Germany all week. :(
 
wilsky said:
Just a heads up for all the Windows Vista MCE users.

DVD Library Manager for MCE. Allows easy editing of the XML metadata (including pictures). You can also populate the metadata from IMDB or even Amazon

http://www.taranu.net/download/DVDLibMan01.zip
Click to expand...

Also try My Movies (www.mymovies.dk) for cataloging all your DVD's, auto downloads from web all of the actors, titles, covers etc and best of all it's free and fully integrates into Media Centre.

Taff
 
Silverstone LC17 (Black)
Intel E2200 + Scythe Mini Ninja
Gigabyte P35-DS3L
ATI/Sapphire 2400XT
120GB system + 500GB data drives
Corsair Modular HX520 (probably overkill but the modular plugs were a life saver)
1x120mm fan + CPU fan. Room for more but not needed.

I was using XBMC but the damn thing refuses to work with my remotes, so it had to go. Currently using Vista Media Centre until I can be bothered to configure Media Portal.

XBMC does look damn fine though:

92055688rt4.jpg


14342018ct0.jpg


94174059cd8.jpg
 
Last edited:
Do you guys have to do a lot of fiddling to get those packshots/backgrounds for films/tv shows?

If so, how long does it take you to source them and set them up? Or is done automatically? Sorry for slightly OT post!
 
I can only speak for XBMC, but basically as long as your files follow a certain pattern it catalogues into a library all of the TV shows and uses external sources for the packshots, background etc.

For example lets say I had a directory full of episodes for a show labelled 'Show Name - S01E01 - Blah' etc, it would scan this, translate it into the correct episode and pull the data of the net for the pictures, synopsis etc.

XBMC uses (by default) this site to get its data: http://www.thetvdb.com/
 
there are a couple of plugins that you can use. the my tv series for media portal is very good. it pulls data from the tv db website - you just point it at the folder where all your stuff is stored and so long as the filenames match the filters (or your prepared to write a filter that matches what you have called your files) it will pull the necessary metadata down. there is something similar for movies, i think it is called movingpictures - this works on a similar principle and pulls from the imdb. then, there are various skins that you can use, and some of these have further customisations for the plugins which allow you to use fanart which can also be downloaded. takes a bit of playing with, but not that much - and you can make it look really slick.
 
Last edited:
That sounds awesome. Why didn't I get an HTPC sooner?!?!

One more quick question as I don't want to derail the thread, does anyone have any good resources for learning about HTPC hardware, software, setups, how to's etc?
 
they are very handy.

i suspect the trickiest part (only going on the fact that i haven't done it yet!) is getting the tv side of things working.

if all your doing is file based playback then it's very straightforward. os + patches + codecs + htpc frontend + basic configuration = win.

the only other side of things that you are likely to want to spend a bit of time on is making sure you get a nice case if it's going in the lounge, and then any bits and pieces you might need to make it as quiet as you want it to be.

if you have other questions then just google and/or start threads appropriately.

to get you started though, check out photoshops thread on here about his. he also did one on the avforums (which are worth checking out) which was very very good.
 
ScarySquirrel said:
That sounds awesome. Why didn't I get an HTPC sooner?!?!

One more quick question as I don't want to derail the thread, does anyone have any good resources for learning about HTPC hardware, software, setups, how to's etc?
Click to expand...

I have mentioned this loads of times, but the AVS forums are a very good resource.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972&page=85 <- Guide to building a HTPC (really long, but will be invaluable in deciding on spec)

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1092168 <- Media Portal install guide (makes it very easy)
 
atomiser said:
i suspect the trickiest part (only going on the fact that i haven't done it yet!) is getting the tv side of things working.
Click to expand...

If you use MCE (Vista or XP), or Media Portal, + a few others, then this really is very simple :)
 
MOOGLEYS said:
Antec Fusion micro remote case with 350w psu
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000 Am2 stock cooler
Abit A-S78H HDMi 780g motherboard
4gb DDR 2
1TB Sata Hdd, 250gb Sata Hdd
Lg Blu ray & Hd Dvd Drive
Wireless 54g card
Vista Media centre with a few pluggins
Cyberlink Media centre remote and Keysonic keyboard with touchpad
Plumbed into a panasonic PZ80 Plasma

Plays Everything flawlessly in 1080p, and nice and quite. all in cost £385.
Click to expand...
Virgin and Sky?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom