HTPC solution sought... tips/experience/thoughts appreciated

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PARANOiA

Veteran
My PC has always been next to my TV and amp ever since I've moved out of home, so I've never had a real issue with with connectivity of my media to my home theatre. However I'm finding it a little more impractical in my new house and I'd like the freedom to dump my PC anywhere I like without worry about missing my PC files.

My ultimate solution would be something like:

  • Quiet
  • Sleek-looking so it could sit with my amp/DVD player/consoles
  • Remote-control based so I don't need to have a mouse/KB constantly hooked up
  • Wireless so I can stream data from my desktop PC at another location
  • Able to play HD movies (MKV) and MP3's without hassle

My options as I see them are:

  • Build a low-cost media PC from scratch - advice here would be nice on how well this works practically, particularly if I'm looking at not having a mouse/KB
  • Buy a "stand-alone" media box device - a few friends have them and like them but I've never personally used one. A PS3 or 360 would be an idea but neither work too well as media centres
  • Buy one of the new-ish media PC's designed for this purpose - I'm thinking the Asus Ion-based box or similar
So what do you think? What are current B3Ders using?
 
Im leaning towards the Popcorn or the WM HD media players personally.. hooks to hdtv via hdmi (1.2 on the WD) and able to pass through DTS to receiver. I will finally be able to get rid of the comput.. err I mean the "home media cente" in the bedroom.
 
I would not get an ion yet, before they could not do fullscreen flash like hulu etc... Unless of course they fixed it. You could get the equivalent with a real CPU though from AMD or Nvidia now and should be quite happy. The IGPs should be plenty fast and you could get a low power CPU that is still far more capable than an atom.
 
The latest Realtek chipset based media boxes have very good support for video formats.

The Xtreamer can use an USB WiFi antenna, but I've heard bad things about fan noise (there is a very active online community though, complete with lots of threads about fan mods, so that's a plus). Don't know if the Asus O'Play also supports WLAN over USB, but you can always use a wireless router. The WD one doesn't even have Ethernet, silly device.

PS. no experience with it, but they say you can use this for stuff like Hulu with these boxes http://tversity.com/pro/

PPS. if you get one of the higher HTPC cases like the Crown CW02 you can just build a gaming PC with quiet parts (with an Accelero S1 and a good towercooler you can easily cool a 4770/4850 and a C2D with 600 RPM fans).
 
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I have a htpc with a lower power amd x2 so its silent. Its not fast enough to do 1080p but you could easily get a cheap and silent cpu today that can do that. If you buy a windows media remote and install Media Portal you can acces all your music and movies by using a remote only and it will play every file out there as it just looks at whatever codec you got installed so no worries there. As far as im concened a pc based system is the only real way to go because it will allow you to do anything you want and not limit you which one day will make you say shit why cant I play this single file? Its more expensive and probably larger than a dedicated box but the advantages are alot bigger I think.
 
TOC - do you have any specific hardware recommendations when building a HTPC? Case, GPU, and whatnot? Are there any good HTPC-dedicated sites that recommend and review hardware and systems? I'm thining something equivalent of SilentPCReview.com for HTPC.

I do know what you mean in terms of wanting a machine that will painlessly play *everything*. Nothing worse than not being able to just hit "go" on a file.
 
I have an Aspire X1700 with 4GB RAM, 750GB HDD, quad-core and an ATI Radeon 4350. It has all the important ports including HDMI, DVI, VGA, optical out through TOSlin etc. It looks pretty good and has lots of ports on the front and the back (five USB, firewire and memory card slots on the front alone). Although I'm actually using it as a desktop (which I often do in silence so quiet is even more important for me, less tiring) but I think it would suit your needs pretty well. So far I'm very happy with it. I paid 499 euros for it, in a local store with good service (though online prices don't seem to be much lower).

In the U.S. this one is also sold, though I haven't seen it with the ATI card there yet, usually seems to have the NVidia G100.

Oh and before I forget, there are various much more humble versions on offer as well. I think it starts at 269 euros over here.
 
I have a 4850e x2 machine that's uber silent running Ubuntu, but I like my Mac Mini (c2d/9400) better.
 
You can get away with almost anything from the CPU department if you get a big cooler and don't overclock so you can run the fan slow.

The sleek looking requirement is actually something you need to look into first IMO. The type of case you get will determine airflow, and space. This will help determine the other components you need to use.
 
I've used an "efficient" PC for roughly a year, and there's one particular set of figures I'd like to throw out here before someone does something they're going to regret later:

boat 2.0: Asus M4N78Pro, Phenom II X4 920, 2GB PC2-5300, Gefore 8300IGP, 1x2.5" S-ATA HDD, Seasonic 350W PSU
*51W idling at login prompt
*118W under full CPU load (4 threads)

less: Atom 330 (dual-core + SMT), 1GB PC2-4200, i945 IGP, 1x2.5" S-ATA HDD, Morex Cubid external brick => DC-DC board
*29W idling at login prompt
*35W under full CPU load (4 threads)

Measured at the wall.

It's not worth it from a power perspective at all. Having 3x+ the performance headroom on standby is so worth the extra 20W in idle consumption. I moved back. I feel nothing but regret when I think about the time and money spent on building the small PC.

And I'm sure you could achieve an even clearer victory with a dual-core instead of quad, or with a lower-clocked IGP (8200 instead of 8300), or with something on the Intel side of the fence.

The Atom is a slow, slow, sloooooow CPU. It's no fun working with at all.
Don't do it.
 
Agree witih rolf, but the 4850e x2 is plenty fast compared to an Atom. Also the Mac Minis are C2D 2.0 GHz...just fine for 1080p.
 
What's the attraction in the Mac Mini? It's slightly smaller than something you could build with mini-itx, but it doesn't integrate with normal A/V equipment so that's a bit of a wash ... and OSX has zero advantage for media center software.

Why pay the apple tax for that?
 
If you can wait until they're out, the PopcornHour C200 model looks to be an all-around winner if you add a BluRay drive to it.
 
The appeal of the mac mini is a great implementation of Boxee, much tighter packaging and dB than a mini-itx with a C2D and a 9400. Yes, there's an apple tax, but, having built multiple htpcs, it's a pretty package that works out of the box and is very, very quiet. If you're on a budget then not so much. I'm not.'

That said, a PS3 running YDL 6.2 would be pretty sweet...
 
I also looked at the Mac Mini briefly (only because I was considering iPhone development), but the cheapest here is 599, and it compared very badly with the Acer Aspire X1700 quad core 4GB with 750GB hdd and ATI 4350 with 512GB that I ended up buying for just 499.
 
Sounds like a nice box Arwin. Is it pretty quiet? I like that Boxee integrates with the osx media server (frontrow) and remote, but I do have the dinova...
 
MfA said:
Which is made by some extremely scummy people ...
Click to expand...

illuminate me.

Call me busy or whatever, but I hadn't heard this before. I only use it for a common remote/interface to my library, netflix and hulu. As a general rule I don't support scum and don't want to start.

Thanks in advance and sorry for any thread derailment.
 
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