Recommendations for Home Theatre PC Operating System / Remote Control Combo

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BaronGrivet

66 posts

Master Geek

#1016319 1-Apr-2014 08:14

Thank you for the excellent feedback and information everyone.

I ordered a second hand HTPC off TradeMe this morning:
4GB RAM
3.2GHZ Athlon CPU
ATI Radeon HD 4650 graphics card
500 GB hard drive
Windows 7
Haupauge Tuner Card
Mouse, Keyboard, Remote (some budget remote)

Will let you know how it goes.

jonathan18

7413 posts

Uber Geek

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#1016324 1-Apr-2014 08:40

BaronGrivet: Thank you for the excellent feedback and information everyone.

I ordered a second hand HTPC off TradeMe this morning...

What did you pay for this, if you don't mind me asking? Are you planning on running XBMC or Plex? Good luck with it all.

BaronGrivet

66 posts

Master Geek

#1016342 1-Apr-2014 08:58

jonathan18:
BaronGrivet: Thank you for the excellent feedback and information everyone.

I ordered a second hand HTPC off TradeMe this morning...

What did you pay for this, if you don't mind me asking? Are you planning on running XBMC or Plex? Good luck with it all.

$399 - here's the listing: http://www.trademe.co.nz/computers/desktops/no-monitor/auction-711549067.htm

If it's too noisy I'm going to put it in a cupboard and run a boosted HDMI extension lead to it.

Probably go XBMC - it seems to support almost all of the stuff we want to use (except Spotify).

If anyone's got any reasons to use Plex over XBMC let me know.

gedc

355 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1016347 1-Apr-2014 09:06

That looks spot on. Good luck with the kit.

jonathan18

7413 posts

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#1016348 1-Apr-2014 09:12

gedc: That looks spot on. Good luck with the kit.

Yeah, that's a lot of bang for your buck! While limited local storage (especially with the ability to record TV programmes), nothing an external HD or NAS won't fix. An SSD in replacement of the internal drive may be an option later I guess... (boot-up time etc is just so much faster on our Mac Mini with an SSD compared to the other one).

BaronGrivet

66 posts

Master Geek

#1016349 1-Apr-2014 09:15

jonathan18:
gedc: That looks spot on. Good luck with the kit.

Yeah, that's a lot of bang for your buck! While limited local storage (especially with the ability to record TV programmes), nothing an external HD or NAS won't fix. An SSD in replacement of the internal drive may be an option later I guess... (boot-up time etc is just so much faster on our Mac Mini with an SSD compared to the other one).

After converting all our older gear (PS3, laptops etc.) to SSD it's going to be hard to go back to spinning platter. But I figure I'll wait and see what the boot up time is like.

We've got a ReadyNas Duo with 2TB, so storage is taken care of. Unfortunately it's the old SPARC based model so pretty slow and won't accept a lot of the more modern apps (Plex etc.)

jonathan18

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#1016378 1-Apr-2014 09:42

BaronGrivet: We've got a ReadyNas Duo with 2TB, so storage is taken care of. Unfortunately it's the old SPARC based model so pretty slow and won't accept a lot of the more modern apps (Plex etc.)

We're running a similar NAS, though it's the ARM-based Duo 2; while this one allows it to run Plex on the NAS (unlike the SPARC model), it's just not fast enough to do re-encoding on the fly etc. We've always just run XBMC on each device in the house (two Minis and a laptop), and this has worked wonderfully - bar me thus far unable to get the database set up to ensure all are in sync. I wish I'd spent a bit more on the NAS and got something faster. I tried Plex out again when we bought the last Mac, but fell back to XBMC - the devil one knows, I guess...

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BaronGrivet

66 posts

Master Geek

#1016430 1-Apr-2014 11:01

jonathan18:
BaronGrivet: We've got a ReadyNas Duo with 2TB, so storage is taken care of. Unfortunately it's the old SPARC based model so pretty slow and won't accept a lot of the more modern apps (Plex etc.)

We're running a similar NAS, though it's the ARM-based Duo 2; while this one allows it to run Plex on the NAS (unlike the SPARC model), it's just not fast enough to do re-encoding on the fly etc. We've always just run XBMC on each device in the house (two Minis and a laptop), and this has worked wonderfully - bar me thus far unable to get the database set up to ensure all are in sync. I wish I'd spent a bit more on the NAS and got something faster. I tried Plex out again when we bought the last Mac, but fell back to XBMC - the devil one knows, I guess...

I had thought about syncing across machines in the future and had wondered if Dropbox will do the trick. A quick Google turned up this guy using Dropbox to sync his XBMC files: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=67064

jonathan18

7413 posts

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#1016462 1-Apr-2014 11:59

BaronGrivet: I had thought about syncing across machines in the future and had wondered if Dropbox will do the trick. A quick Google turned up this guy using Dropbox to sync his XBMC files: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=67064

That sounds an interesting solution, though not one without its risks! That said, we're in the same position as rarely if ever running XBMC on more than one device at the same time, so I'll take a decent look at this option.

The usual approach is via a MySQL database (http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Share_libraries_using_MySQL) - I've had no luck getting to the point of having MySQL starting on boot on the main Mac Mini, so had to give up at that hurdle!

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