Build a HTPC

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Build a HTPC

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

7 posts

Wannabe Geek

#106850 26-Jan-2008 10:04

Thanks for all the replies. I'm trying out decrypter now and will see how I go.

Have just invested in a couple of 500 GB HDD as they're so cheap at the moment......next thing is to buy a media centre case etc. Yeasterday I was looking at mac mini but have now become convinced that windows media centre is the way to go......

thanks again for all the help....cheers

sbiddle

30853 posts

Uber Geek

Retired Mod

Trusted

Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

#106852 26-Jan-2008 10:17

shaana: Yeasterday I was looking at mac mini but have now become convinced that windows media centre is the way to go......

If you've followed the thread you'd realise the advantages and limitations of Vista MCE. If you're mainly into playing music and watching DVD's or your movie collection it's great. When it comes to acting as a PVR for recording TV, particularly from multiple sources, it is useless in this part of the world. You need to weight these up because there is a rather significant price difference between a basic XP or Vista system and a Vista Ultimate setup to get the MCE software.

lchiu7

6477 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#106855 26-Jan-2008 11:23

I've neve done MCE but I have heard the big issue is trying to locate and integrate a EPG. Also my understanding is the MCE comes with any version of Vista - certainly it's on my Home Premiun edition.

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79301 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#106863 26-Jan-2008 11:44

shaana: Have just invested in a couple of 500 GB HDD as they're so cheap at the moment......next thing is to buy a media centre case etc. Yeasterday I was looking at mac mini but have now become convinced that windows media centre is the way to go.

I bought a Mac mini - and installed Windows Vista Ultimate using Bootcamp. It is not plugged to my Sony Bravia in the lounge. Much smaller than any other media center case you could find around...

lchiu7

6477 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#106864 26-Jan-2008 12:00

Trouble is, there's not space in them to slot in those 500G drives you can get cheap so each one is going to require a USB cage or stick in their server or NAS box!

Staying in Wellington. Check out my AirBnB in the Wellington CBD. https://www.airbnb.co.nz/h/wellycbd PM me and mention GZ to get a 15% discount and no AirBnB charges.

freitasm

BDFL - Memuneh
79301 posts

Uber Geek

Administrator

ID Verified

Trusted

Geekzone

Lifetime subscriber

#106865 26-Jan-2008 12:02

I have 2.3 TB of nice Seagate FreeAgent Desktop USB 2.0 drives (four 500 GB and one 320 GB) all in the office. I don't use any storage on the Mac mini except for the OS and Media Center plugins. Everything comes over wireless LAN - soon to have a gigabit connection to the lounge when we finish moving the speaker cables around.

I am soon adding another one of those 500 GB drive to the server. They are really good stuff.

BarTender

3606 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#106968 26-Jan-2008 22:46

Hey my media centre (Dreambox 600PVR) is the size of 3 DVD cases ontop of each other. And that does the Satellite (and soon to be cable TV when the tuner turns up!) + EPG + PVR + Streaming DVD's, MP3's off the local drive or network + Streaming TV to my computer over the network and it has a 2.5" 250GB disk in it.... now that IS the smallest PVR + Satellite or Cable receiver on the market. Beat that ;)

Quic Broadband

Move to New Zealand's best fibre broadband service (affiliate link). Free setup code: R587125ERQ6VE. Note that to use Quic Broadband you must be comfortable with configuring your own router.

Mattnzl

281 posts

Ultimate Geek

#106984 27-Jan-2008 07:44

If Dreambox made one with Xvid decoding I'd be all over it

BarTender

3606 posts

Uber Geek

ID Verified

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#106995 27-Jan-2008 09:00

Mattnzl: If Dreambox made one with Xvid decoding I'd be all over it

You can use VLC to transcode from XVID to MPEG2 over the network from your PC, there is a good post on the pli site about this.. Plus the DM8000 will do H.264 and I would expect will support all the new formats & video / audio compression formats....

For me it's no biggie to have everytning in MPEG2, most of my stuff is for my kids is off the DVD.

shaana

7 posts

Wannabe Geek

#109416 9-Feb-2008 09:22

Well on a whim I bought myself a mac mini to use as my HTPC. I love it but it is taking some adjusting. I have a couple of issues though being:

1. My DVDs or other video when played through the mac mini dvd player or front row are about half the screen height size they normally are. I'm thinking it's a specific setting that needs to be changed but I cannot work it out. It's driving me crazy.

2. I cannot get sound to play through my tv from the mac mini.....I have a Toshiba 37A300 LCD which is okay (would rather have a Sony V or D series). I don't have a separate home theatre sound system so just want to play through the tv. I have an RCA cable (1 connector to the mac mini earphone jack and 2 to sound jacks on the tv. I have tried all the connections on the back.

Can anyone help.

BTW I have been decrypting and converting to Xvid my Battlestar galactica disks and it's working great. It's going to take me a very long time to do all my dvd's but it will be worth it in the end.

Lastly I am working on networking my pc and mac mini so that will be fun I'm sure.

eXDee

4032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#109456 9-Feb-2008 12:03

If space is an issue with the DVD rips, i'd suggest encoding them to xvid or h264 using Handbrake. If space isnt an issue then leave them as VOB's, however with 8gb direct copies as opposed to a 1-2gb avi space will disappear very quickly. Ive found 1.4gb is a nice spot for xvid.

However they take a fairly long time to encode - my Opteron 165 does 2hr xvid 2 pass in i think 3-6 hours (using both cores). Im not sure, however h264 takes at least 3 times as long.

richms

28191 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#109504 9-Feb-2008 15:30

When I am ripping for myself I usually take the main movie, DTS soundtrack (dolby 5.1 if its not a DTS disc) and then 2 pass it to make it just under 2 gigs (otherwise its a pain with external drives having to rar it up when taking it places for the "offsite backup" - I dont get the "scenes" insistace of still using 350, 700 and 2x700 meg files - thats like making an album with a gap in the middle for people to flip the tape over or something.

The issue you may have is that you rip to a quality that you are happy with now, only to get a better display sometime later and the see all the problems with the rips you have done now.

Richard rich.ms

eXDee

4032 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#109564 9-Feb-2008 23:41

Yeah i suppose i'll regret not adding the 5.1 dolby sound, but as for picture quality DVD isnt very high in the first place. I encode at the full resolution xvid 2 pass with anamorphic PAR. When viewing both the avi and the original DVD the difference is mostly unnoticeable, especially from a distance.
I'm probably going to go for h264 in the future or 1.6gb xvid instead.

As for the 'scene' 700mb's, i think its to fit on one/two cds, however no one uses cds anymore pretty much. However an xvid encode of 700mb looks better than sky digital on my Sony 40"D, which i suppose isn't hard.

richms

28191 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

Lifetime subscriber

#109581 10-Feb-2008 02:33

Keep in mind that rental release dvds are often crap compared to the retail release - single layers in lots of cases when they really could do with more bits. Get the rental and a superbit of the same title and its like night and day.

When I encode I usually crop the black bars off, but keep the horizontal resolution the same. Does end up with that annoying thing when playing sometimes where the remaining black in picture is a different shade to the black where there is no picture being output by the software. Never got why that happens myself. I also dont get why people resize to strange horizontal resolutions or stretch the image to have square pixels, but that happens all the time.

Actually, yeah, I think I do know why they do the square pixel thing. Its that broken POS called quicktime that cant handle anamorphic mp4 files...

Richard rich.ms

Virgil

Dangerous Chocolate
206 posts

Master Geek

ID Verified

Lifetime subscriber

#110118 12-Feb-2008 17:46

Hey Bartender, hows your HTPC coming along?

Just wondering what power supply you chose to go with the setup, I'm trying to build something very similar.

Cheers.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8