blog.durdle.com

Part one of a series of posts where I record how I built my 1080p capable Home Theatre PC.

Having ditched the increasingly expensive and irrelevant SkyHD last year, we’ve been watching what little broadcast TV we see via a Windows Media Centre machine upstairs connected to an Xbox 360 front end. This was fine for the odd episode of Doctor Who or the Apprentice, but we wanted an interface that gave us access to all our music, archived TV, ripped DVDs along with live TV. Since the old XBMC can do neither live TV nor HD content and since the Xbox 360 in Media Centre Extender mode can not play back the more esoteric formats (such as MKV or XVid) it was necessary to build a true Home Theatre PC.

The requirements of this machine:

• record at least two TV channels at once
• allow playback of any recorded or archived content
• indexed access to our music, TV and movie library
• playback of any format up to full 1080p content in MKV containers
• small enough to fit into the AV rack
• quiet enough that we wouldn’t notice it

I’ve now completed the build and configuration of the HTPC, and I’m very pleased with the result. The compents I used for our system are:

• Antec NSK2480-UK V2 Media Case (Scan)
• Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Motherboard (Tekheads)
• AMD AM2 Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Windsor CPU (Scan) with Scythe Mini Ninja CPU Cooler (using Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound) (Overclockers)
• 4GB of RAM (Crucial)
• 2x Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-HD-S2 satellite cards
• 2x Western Digital 750GB SATA-II GreenPower HDD (QuietPC)
• 1x 16x DVDR (bog standard from PC World!)
• Logitech Dinovo Edge Keyboard (eBuyer)

I originally installed the low power AMD 4850e CPU which worked fine for MPEG2 content (standard TV/DVDs) and could even drive a 720p picture with DTS surround sound, but it wasn’t quite up to the task of decoding 1080p MKV files - a task which the onboard Radeon is unable to hardware accelerate.

The system runs quite happily with no CPU fan, only needing the large slow moving fans in the Antec case running on medium to generate enough airflow. I was concerned that the faster AMD would run too hot but the Ninja Mini heatsink is performing admirably. Fan noise is minimal; you can hear it in an empty room but it is far far quieter than having the Xbox 360 running, and any noise virtually disappears once we’re listening to some content.

The system has two harddrives which the Antec case cleverly mounts against small rubber grommets which absorb any vibration. This stops the noise you would otherwise get when vibrations travel through the chassis. I’ve opted for lower power, variable speed drives from QuietPC; these spin from 5400 to 7200 rpm depending on what the system is doing.

I’ll talk about the decision to use Hauppauge’s satellite cards in a later post.

Video and audio output is via DVI to HDMI and optical out into my Pioneer A/V receiver. All of my devices are controlled by a Logitech Harmony 895 RF remote. For the few occasions where we need to type at the HTPC, I have a stylish looking Logitech Dinovo keyboard.

More detail on the software later, but in summary the software running on the system comprises:

• Vista Ultimate
  I know that Vista gets a lot of bad press, but I am convinced that the Vista Media Centre component is its killer app. It is without doubt the best reason for upgrading to Vista and running as a dedicated HTPC I have had no issues with it. The interface is fast and attractive, and with a few extra plugins does everything we need.
• Out of the box Vista won’t decode High Definition content, and doesn’t know how to display Divx or MKV files in the Media Centre inferface. To achieve flawless 1080p playback I had to install and configure a few extra apps and codecs - I’ll detail this in a later post.
• MyMovies plugin
  This gives me an indexed view on my movie collection which I can also manage from an app on any machine on my network. It contains information on all my movies be they DVD rips, Divx or full 1080p MKV containers. I can search by actor, director, genre, format etc, and can even publish the information in my database for others to search.
• MyTV plugin
  Using thetvdb.com as source, this pulls down series information including episode summaries and screencaps. It means I can browse TV series season by season, episode by episode with a far better idea of what each episode is about.

  Both MyMovies and MyTV make use of a SQL Express database I have hosted on my main server - this means that multiple Media Centre machines are able to make use of the data, and reduces the resource use on the HTPC machine.

• Autologon
  The old SysInternals (now Microsoft) tool is handy to ensure the system logs on automatically, and starts the Media Centre interface without me doing anything.

It’s very handy knowing that we can watch or listen to any of our content via one slick interface, and having full 1080p video with surround sound is something to behold. It’s made us very picky about the content we view though, and terribly snobby about going to the movies. After all, when the video and audio at home are so good, why bother visiting the cinema?