The quick and dirty Home Theater PC fred

[Artemis]

To break it down to it's simplest terms a home theater PC these days is simply a Graphics card capable of decoding HD/Blu Ray content with an HDMI + HDMI audio output and at least 5.1 if not 7.1 DTS audio. The PC should have a decent amount of RAM (at least 2MB or more) and at least a dual core processor. But that is about it. The actual CPU speed is irrelevant a fairly low speed one will do.
Like anything else faster is better but a perfectly serviceable HTPC can be had running a 2.0Ghz dual core AMD or Intel PC (preferably Intel, they are better at decoding) with 2-4GB of DDR2 800 RAM, an NVidia 210 1GB graphics card, DVD-Rom and your HD's in whatever case tickles your fancy. By this I am saying you can retask an old desktop, or pickup a working PC off craigslist for a song and put it into a nice case with an upgraded graphics card for very little cost.

The second part of the equation is the ever ubiquitous XBMC or rather XBMCBuntu. This is a Linux distribution specifically designed as an 'appliance' distribution. In other words it boots the PC straight into the XBMC home theater application the same way a hard drive recorder boots to a menu. The Linux distro has been designed to install and configure itself in the background. You can log into a desktop if you know what you are doing and it has a GUI (LXDE), but if you don't want to or need to touch any advanced settings then you never will. All of the normal XBMC settings are still available to you anyway.

The one huge advantage of using XBMCbuntu is that time from boot to application start is roughly 5 seconds even on fairly lightweight hardware, it truly works like an appliance, you press the on button and it goes.

*I should clarify the specification of an NVidia card in the above paragraphs. If you are going to use Linux NVidia is more strongly supported, they update drivers more regularly and are compatible with more distributions/desktop environments.

[mjmacky]

I sometimes wonder if I should have done that. My window manager flips the fuck out sometimes. I installed my shit layered, Ubuntu --> KDM/KDE --> XBMC. The whole point was so that I could install Flash and get Hulu Desktop set up, but it never runs smoothly. The Bluecop plugin in XBMC gives the best working interface I've ever had for Hulu, that's compared to any other PC or device, truly amazing. Now I'm kind of thinking I should redo my whole setup, but then I'd have to move a shit load of files around... no want do that.

[Artemis]

LXDE is a very lightweight manager, ideal for a 'no frills' installation, while at the same time giving you the same plugin and app support as the Gnome desktop manager. In an install like this, choice of GUI is of little concern, but I like LXDE, it isn't bloated like it's overweight McDonald's eating cousins.
The one problem I've run into with Eden (XBMC 11) I can't find where to edit the sources, you have to create a new source when you add media as far as I can tell (so far, I've been burrowing but haven't found it, which is the only thing, the sneaky fuckers changed it), but apart from that it is extremely simple to configure.

I do however commiserate on having to move a whole lot of files around mj, mind you since I am rebuilding my main PC currently I can't say my heart is bleeding too hard.

[mjmacky]

I do however commiserate on having to move a whole lot of files around mj, mind you since I am rebuilding my main PC currently I can't say my heart is bleeding too hard.

No sympathy then? Fine, I hope your heart stops beating altogether.

Spoiler: Show

Just long enough to scare you

[megabyteme]

I read your other post, Art. And the starting post in this thread several hours ago. I've just been playing coy.

I truly enjoy definitions like this one:

coy/koi/

Adjective:

(esp. of a woman) Making a pretense of shyness or modesty that is intended to be alluring but is often regarded as irritating.

My HTPC is Win7 32bit based. What makes it a HTPC by my definition is the case, storage, remote control, and large-ish LCD TV being used with it. It was built to be fairly quiet. All in all, I prefer my "boxes". There are some plusses. If my wife didn't use that computer for our book keeping, budgets ,photography projects, school papers, etc there wouldn't be a need for a PC in there, either. These boxes operate well across the network. I can find and play my files with ease- outputs work for all of the surround sound decodings, and typically have choices for optical or coax digital.

[Artemis]

My main Home theater PC. This is also Win7 based X64 though. The case is great well designed with a positive airflow fan design, plus additional fans in front of the hdd enclosures, space for 7 3.5" drives, card reader, 5.25" bay for the ROM drive and can take a full sized ATX motherboard.
As I previously mentioned though my current problems stem from a lack of upgradability of the motherboard re: the SATA ports and the fact that the single PCIe 1x slot on the board is buried underneath the graphics card thereby stopping the use of an addon controller. This is leading to a lack of storage capacity, there are two choices, an external NAS/PC and stream the content, or upgrade the machine, but since this is used as the central media center by other machines the easiest choice is an upgrade, rather than explain to less than technically literate people that shares have gone over here *sigh.

[bijoy]

^^ Great choice of chassis!

[Artemis]

Since I am so impressed by the quiet operation from the Antec H2o cooler in the new PC, it is virtually silent one of the upgrades to the HTPC will be the little brother of the Antec 920, the Antec Kuhler H2o 620. The difference with this Liquid cooler is there is only one cooling fan controlled by PWM and there is no USB header but in a HTPC installation this will be ideal.

I am planning to buy this motherboard, which doesn't exist according to newegg, so you will have to put up with the local link: http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=...Ivy-Bridge-Int . That plus the new i5 3450 Ivybridge CPU @ 3.1 Ghz and 8GB of 1600Mhhz DDR3 RAM.

This upgrade will give me space for 5 hard drives plus the Blu Ray BD-Rom drive, more than enough for my present purposes (hopefully) and should see the system running smoothely for quite awhile yet.

[mjmacky]

Since I am so impressed by the quiet operation from the Antec H2o cooler in the new PC, it is virtually silent one of the upgrades to the HTPC will be the little brother of the Antec 920, the Antec Kuhler H2o 620. The difference with this Liquid cooler is there is only one cooling fan controlled by PWM and there is no USB header but in a HTPC installation this will be ideal.

I am planning to buy this motherboard, which doesn't exist according to newegg, so you will have to put up with the local link: http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=...Ivy-Bridge-Int . That plus the new i5 3450 Ivybridge CPU @ 3.1 Ghz and 8GB of 1600Mhhz DDR3 RAM.

This upgrade will give me space for 5 hard drives plus the Blu Ray BD-Rom drive, more than enough for my present purposes (hopefully) and should see the system running smoothely for quite awhile yet.

I kind of like that board, not really crazy about the cost of the processors it supports though. Look at you trying to find us Newegg links, how very sweet.

I am finding that all the mATX UEFI boards for AMD are using the FM1 sockets (accelerated processors w/ discrete GPU). This combo seems to save about a $100
ASUS F1A75-M PRO FM1 AMD A75 (Hudson D3) HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS (can't find on PBtech)
AMD A8-3850 Llano 2.9GHz Socket FM1 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) with DirectX 11 Graphic AMD Radeon HD 6550D (can't find on PBtech)

[Artemis]

Since I am so impressed by the quiet operation from the Antec H2o cooler in the new PC, it is virtually silent one of the upgrades to the HTPC will be the little brother of the Antec 920, the Antec Kuhler H2o 620. The difference with this Liquid cooler is there is only one cooling fan controlled by PWM and there is no USB header but in a HTPC installation this will be ideal.

I am planning to buy this motherboard, which doesn't exist according to newegg, so you will have to put up with the local link: http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=...Ivy-Bridge-Int . That plus the new i5 3450 Ivybridge CPU @ 3.1 Ghz and 8GB of 1600Mhhz DDR3 RAM.

This upgrade will give me space for 5 hard drives plus the Blu Ray BD-Rom drive, more than enough for my present purposes (hopefully) and should see the system running smoothely for quite awhile yet.

I kind of like that board, not really crazy about the cost of the processors it supports though. Look at you trying to find us Newegg links, how very sweet.

I am finding that all the mATX UEFI boards for AMD are using the FM1 sockets (accelerated processors w/ discrete GPU). This combo seems to save about a $100
ASUS F1A75-M PRO FM1 AMD A75 (Hudson D3) HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard with UEFI BIOS (can't find on PBtech)
AMD A8-3850 Llano 2.9GHz Socket FM1 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) with DirectX 11 Graphic AMD Radeon HD 6550D (can't find on PBtech)

I was an AMD fanboi for years, but there are specific reasons why I will not use an AMD cpu in a home theater installation, and the new Ivybridge processors from Intel are even more of a nail in that particluar coffin.
The first is thermal profile, all of the AMD processors run very hot,even the the new FM1 @ 100W in a hometheater is a big thermal consideration, this is one area that AMD really needs to work on in its manufacturing process, is dissipating the heat more efficiently, they have always made pot boilers, Intel did too for a long time but only the high-end processors and have got that under raps with the lower end, AMD still haven't.

Secondly bang for your buck, the Ivybridge processors outperform the A6 & A8 Quad cores by a very wide margin. I tend try and futureproof myself by buying something that I can forget about for a few couple of years at least if not three, so there are several boxes that get ticked by going to the ivybridge technology. the 22nm fab process uses even less power a big plus for htpc use, it can use 1600mhz DDR3 RAM which weirdly is cheaper than 1333mhz atm? And they aren't exactly slow into the bargain even that bottom of the food chain 3450 @ 3.1Ghz.