Building a Quiet Media Room PC

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech just come out with a new Media Center PC build-it project. This one takes advantage of Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Rollup 2 and uses a fanless graphics card, four tuners--two standard TV and two HDTV, the Creative Labs DTS-610, which lets you bypass some DRM, and a good-looking SilverStone LaScala chassis that fits in your media rack. The new system is way more versatile, and maybe more importantly, a lot quieter than any previous media PC DIY boxes. One drawback: We're still waiting for the cable and satellite companies to get it together on CableCard, so the system has to do without."

Comments

Nice, but...

[Mr. Maestro]

Until they add CableCard or some similar feature to Media Center PC's, I think the appeal will be limited. On that subject, I don't see why the cable company would want me to get a cable card when they could just continue charging me to use their digital box.
Maybe I'll just read a book instead.
M

Re:Nice, but...

[Seth Finklestein]

The cable company is required to provide you a CableCARD by law if you want one. For once, the FCC has mandated something useful and consumer-friendly.

The cable company doesn't promote CableCARD because they can't use it to charge me $5 per Pay-Per-View movie* or provide pathetic closed-source DVR "solutions" to which my MythTV box is superior.

* Most of which goes to movie studios, which I boycott anyway

Home Distributed Media

[Doc Ruby]

PocketPCs that can run Linux go for $100 used. How about a $1300 1.3TB RAID in one room, and a $500 cluster of 5 of those in the media room, with one dedicated to video-out for an extra $500? That sounds like a wicked, silent mediaroom PC that can also do a lot more.

Thin client with flash card HD + Linux does it

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash card HD (for example Fujitsu thin client hardware), Linux, MPlayer, MythTV, Matrox video card (no fan). These are the recipients for a complete multi purpose video/audio/media jukebox. No noise, no digital rights management shit, none what so ever - just enjoy.

Slight Contradiction

[c_spencer100]

What I found interesting is how they went premiere on everything but the graphics card - one of the most important parts. People complain want at least almost high resolutions on a 17" monitor, so you care to explain to me how this is going to look on a 36" TV screen (probably even bigger). Some "light gaming" with the GeForce 6600 on a screen that large isn't going to cut it, and it's a pretty freakin safe assumption that anymone who builds themself a $2,500 computer is probably a gamer.

Interesting article though, but on that point the seem to have forgot what crowd they're apealing to.

No TV

[PCM2]

The so-called Media Center Macs won't have a TV tuner, for one thing.

spdif router?

[hirschma]

Anyone use something that can take various spdif inputs (optical, coax), and output a single optical? That's what my HTCP system really needs right now. Something like the Creative thingy mentioned, but with more inputs and some intelligence about what to output.

jh

Re:The geek way

[level_headed_midwest]

I read an article where a guy did that with a 600MHz VIA M12000 unit on a 12cm x 12cm Nano-ITX board. He had no HDD, no opticals, and the chip required no HSF. Totally silent and he had a Silvestone case. He used a 512MB USB stick and a CF card to boot and provide storage on the machine. He put Puppy on it and it ran okay, but not great- his opinion was that it was more of a proof-of-concept unit.

He later put an optical drive and a 3.5" HDD on it and ran Mepis on it. I just wish I could find the URL...

Re:Why such a fancy system?

[evilviper]

My old AMD 950MHz system is more than happy handling any media you care to throw at it.

Only if you don't throw HDTV videos at it... My Athlon system, overclocked almost to 2GHz, can just BARELY play 1080p content with a whole lot of software tricks using mplayer on Linux.

You can do hardware decoding with a few videocards on Linux, but you have absolutely no options for deinterlacing, inversing telecine, etc. You're also completely out-of-luck if you want to play WMVHD content, HD h.264, etc. So, it's far, far nicer to be able to do the decoding in realtime on the CPU.

And besides that, most people want to be able to convert the video they've captured from one format to another, in a reasonable ammount of time. How long do you think it would take to edit and reencode 1080 material on a < 1GHz system like yours? Using something like Xvid, probably a week...

The description of "quiet" made me think "fanless", not "just as many fans as my existing system".

I have very quiet systems, with a LOT of fans... I'm not even interested in going fanless (even if it wouldn't cost an arm and a leg), since my DVD-ROM and hard drive are louder than the fans in my HTPC...