HTPC

[To0]

or Home Theater PC.

I have a case, PSU, screen (TV) network. What I don't have is a mobo, cpu or memory.

Budget of no more than £100 (because really I should be able to get those 3 for less than that). What's the cheapest/best system we can get for that. Ideally it would be able to handle decoding 1080p BluRay/rips.

Cheers

[Hex]

You'll never get mobo/cpu/ram that can handle decoding 1080p rips smoothly on a large TV for £100. My C2D E6600/4 Gb RAM setup sometimes grumbles a bit about decoding 1080p rips on a 32" TV. Not sure about performance when reading from BD discs but decoding rips is surprisingly CPU intensive.

[To0]

Hardware decoder on inbuilt GPUs ftw.

[Hex]

Hardware decoder on inbuilt GPUs ftw.

Would that work with encoded rip files?

[To0]

Ja

[To0]

Ok so this was made easier with the donation of an E2160, mobo and 4gb of ram. The onboard intel chip is ok but offers no hardware accleration so I can play 720p youtube but nothing more.

So that means I'm in the market for an HDMI out, passively cooled media accelerator capable graphics card. Has anyone got one, used one etc?

From the tech specs it is pretty clear that spending between 30 and 50 should get what I need but as with all things I'd much rather buy something someone has seen first hand to work.

[To0]

So I forked out for a new graphics card but I couldn't get reliable answers from any camp so I did the sensible thing and bought the cheapest I could, little ventured nothing gained. The ATI 5450 is actually worse than the onboard Intel GMA3000 for video processing. I have better picture quality at the cost of worse framerate. I'm assuming I can tweak it but clearly £30 gets you nothing. Having resurrected my graphics card I'm going to try Gigas old 7950GT in this machine and see if it has the grunt for HD and if not I'll try my graphics card (3870). In other news Windows Home Server 2011, currently £40 at Kustom (http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_6658.html) is running well and other than being a new nightmare to configure seems like it is working well.

[GigaFuzz]

So I forked out for a new graphics card but I couldn't get reliable answers from any camp so I did the sensible thing and bought the cheapest I could, little ventured nothing gained. The ATI 5450 is actually worse than the onboard Intel GMA3000 for video processing. I have better picture quality at the cost of worse framerate. I'm assuming I can tweak it but clearly £30 gets you nothing. Having resurrected my graphics card I'm going to try Gigas old 7950GT in this machine and see if it has the grunt for HD and if not I'll try my graphics card (3870). In other news Windows Home Server 2011, currently £40 at Kustom (http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/info_6658.html) is running well and other than being a new nightmare to configure seems like it is working well.

Windows Home Server always seemed pretty cool, though it's a shame they removed one of the awesome features of the last version, Drive Extender (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server#Drive_Extender). We have or are about to have enough spare components around that I might have another crack at a home server/HTPC style thing.

[To0]

Drive extender was only cool on paper the reason it was removed was M$ recognised that they couldn't keep it stable enough. If they are going to go on record as saying it is unstable then I'm glad we don't have it. It is also suggested that you don't use RAID with WHS and the tools it has for dynamically managing your data are good enough that you'll not need it. Essentially the server holds the logical folders that might point to several physical locations. Slap in a new HDD, assign it to the folder group and the folder size appears to grow for everyone involved. The only bit that is missing is that as far as I can tell your file must exist in 1 physical location so you can't span disks but with 1tb drives being so cheap and noone I know having 1tb+ files that is not an issue.

[To0]

So, much faffing later and I'm closer on my quest to true geek heaven.

First off I now have the 5450 working with GPU rendering at full FPS and HQ 1080p rips. MPC plays using one CPU core @ 70% and VLC plays at ~10% load spread across both cores. Unfortunately for some of the really big files it is still a touch choppy in VLC.

So, if you are looking to build an HTPC I'd say you are safe with this generation or above but it would probably be better to check here:

http://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding

Before buying.

[To0]

Anyone looking to build an HTPC could do worse than get this:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/270940875625?item=270940875625

[neogramps]

On the theme of HTPC's, can anyone recommend a cheapish wifi/bluetooth kb/mouse for living room laziness?

Going to hookup my old netbook to the telly and use it to stream online tv etc - it works fine for the job so far, and I can rdp from my pandora, but that's not practical all the time.

[To0]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handheld-Bluetooth-Wireless-Chicklet-Keyboard/dp/B004407A32/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1335970300&sr=8-11

is what I got, but I got it for about £10-15 it works with my phone, PS3 and computer. it is cheap build and laptop feel keyboard but it does fine.

I also tried several wifi keyboard/mouse remotes from my phone.ems phone and ems ipod touch. They work surprisingly well for media centre stuff and basic web browsing.

[neogramps]

I looked at that one, and ended up going for this (http://www.ebuyer.com/250233-xenta-wireless-mini-keyboard-with-touchpad-and-multimedia-keys-usb-pkb-1720)

Just got it today - slightly smaller than an xbox pad which makes it nice to hold - shoulder mounted mouse buttons and a well placed trackpad as well as plenty of media shortcut keys. Keyboard is small, but the buttons are chunky and responsive making it ok to use for urls and commands.

edit - oh and it has a rumble pak for no reason

[To0]

Yeah, that requires a separate USB stick so was out because of the phones for me. Forcefeed back for web browsing sounds fun.

[brialzebub]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handheld-Bluetooth-Wireless-Chicklet-Keyboard/dp/B004407A32/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&qid=1335970300&sr=8-11

is what I got.

I ordered myself one of these too. The controller style one looks harder to write things quickly, and I can use this with my phone tablet thing. We shall see what fun/hassle I have getting it to work with my desktop when it arrives. :) My previous forays into getting bluetooth dongles to work on desktop machines have usually resulted in me resorting to cables/usb solution.