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

Poor Thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

[blockquote]...fanless graphics card...[/blockquote]

It must be so lonely.

Re:Poor Thing.

[FuturePastNow]

(This line of conversation is off-topic, so I'm just going to check the "No Karma Bonus" box and mod myself down at the start.)

First, moderators are slashdot users just like you. They have biases and their idea of flamebait might differ from yours. Bookmark your comment and check on it in a week or so, and see if it changes. If it does, then a metamoderator saw it and decided it was unfair. If not, I don't know what to tell you. It's a technology news site, don't take it too seriously.

And on a broader note, a lot of people complain that the mod/metamod system is broken. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but I've been clicking on the "Have you Meta Moderated Recently?" link every other day almost since I joined a year ago. In my humble experience, 90% of the moderations on Slashdot are fair, and those that aren't usually get changed. YMMV

Total Cost

[Niraj59]

$2,315? Sounds a little steep for me. I'd rather buy a 42-inch plasma TV.

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...

[DrEldarion]

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.

Well, as more and more people want that, they can use it as a bonus against their competitors. "Yeah, WE allow you to use our service with your computer, but the sattelite companies don't!". They still make their money on the service.

Either that, or they can rent out the CableCards for the same price.

Re:Nice, but...

[ergo98]

"Either that, or they can rent out the CableCards for the same price."

The cable company is in the business of selling content, not renting boxes. They rent boxes for the sole purpose of selling content (there is no other way to receive all of the digital channels - no standard existed, coupled with the fact that the sources - both movies and television networks - wanted some assurances of DRM). My cable company rents a Motorola 6812 - a dual-HDTV "tuner", very capable box for like $18 a month - I doubt that comes close to covering the depreciation on the box month over month.

Re:Nice, but...

[woolio]

a dual-HDTV "tuner", very capable box for like $18 a month - I doubt that comes close to covering the depreciation on the box month over month.

Why do you say that? $18/month = $216/year == $648 over three years... Just how much does just the "tuner" cost??? Keep in mind that if you cancel it, they can still rent it out to someone else...

All this on top of the ~$50-$70/month for digital cable...

Well, looks like they cost less than $300:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =5832099588

The Cable company is in the business of making money And considering that it has a monopoly on wired cable TV, it shouldn't be that difficult.

My apartment complex requires all kinds of crap for 18"dishes... (Including something like $500K insurance). and they don't allow them to be mounted. They pretty much made it impossible for residents to have one. (Of about 1000 residents, nobody has one!)

Do you really think that "AOL/Time Warner" (the local cable company) didn't have ANYTHING to do with this?!?!??!?!?!?!?

GAH!

[badxmaru]

Why are people posting these lowbrow, "how to make a PC" posts? Aren't there geek forums on hardocp / anandtech / ars where people can parade their own PC creations? I mean what in the world is so educational and mindsharing about this posting?
It might as well just be
"build your own Dell system for $200 off in Dell Small Business"

What's the big idea?
Isn't there google for these things?
these posts only further slashdot into the realm of those mainstream wannabe geeks who think that making yet another PC puts them on the alpha stack.
gives slashdot a bad name! MODERATE THESE OUT IN THE FUTURE PLS.

Re:GAH!

[it_ain't_my_fault]

I agree there are too much articles about building a PC on /. I think most of us already know how to build one but it's interesting to see the what hardware somebody used for his PVR, Media Center or whatever... But please this is /. I know from the statistics most of you come from windows but it's a place with a reputation of linux ethusiasts, so come on show original setups for mythTV that doesn't involve a PVR-150/250/350... instead and I'm sure a lot of us would complain less.

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.

The geek way

[Anonymous Coward]

Nehemia 1GHz Mini ITX
1GB RAM
Nvidia Card (any one)
Gnu/Linux (Debian Sarge)
Limp 1.2
gmplayer + glame + libdcss

Cost - 300
Setup time 2 hours
Noise - none (totally silent if you heatsing the card to the case)
Power use - about 12 Watts

nb please don't mod this up it only rewards the lazy asses who don't browse for actual content at 0 instead of the hivemind popularity contest

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...

Huh?

[Chaffar]

This one takes advantage of Windows Media Center Edition 2005 Rollup 2.

Someone please define advantage :-\

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

Why such a fancy system?

[julesh]

My old AMD 950MHz system is more than happy handling any media you care to throw at it. Its Hauppauge WinTV PVR capture card handles MPG conversion on the hardware, so there's really no need for a fast CPU for that. Being single core, cooling is less of an issue, and it's got a fanless graphics card that was much cheaper than $115. More like $20 (an ATI Rage 3D card with 8Mb). And what's the point of 2Gigs of RAM in a media system?

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

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...

Silent mini ITX is easy

[xtal]

Pick up a fanless mini-itx board, get yourself one of the snap-on DC/DC converter kits from mini-box.com, or similar, put it in a nice box and away you go. I've made 3 of these so far and they work great, and are acceptably silent with quiet drive.

If you want to go to the next level, boot the mini ITX board off compactflash and NFS mount your media off a server in the basement. This is what I did to get around some heat issues. Works like a CHARM.

Fast enough for a great MythTV box, not sure why this is such a revelation.

Fanless hardware not worth it

[n0dalus]

If you have the space, it's way better to just buy $25 worth of shielded extension cables for your monitor, TV, audio, keyboard and mouse; put the computer around the corner or in the next room. I got my VGA cable for $15 (shielded), and two PS/2 cables for $5 each, then made my audio cables for a couple of dollars from good shielded wire and plugs. All 5 metres long. You can probably get this stuff cheaper if you look around.

The only disadvantage is that you have to walk to the next room to put in a CD, but this is something I don't need to do very often. Compared to the time it takes to burn a CD or even just read a CD's TOC, walking around the corner is well worth the lasting peace and quiet. Why spend hundreds of dollars extra on hardware just to cut down noise?

Re:Fanless hardware not worth it

[interiot]

I second the cable-extender thing... though it's actually cheaper to go with Cat5 for extending most things. You might need shielded cable for VGA/DVI/USB (stuff with a bitrate >100MHz), but PS/2 and audio and IR can definitely go a long long way over the cheaper Cat5.

Re:Fanless hardware not worth it

[cli_rules!]

External CD/DVD drive via USB2?

That plus a custom IR remote might just about do it.

who would have thought ..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. that you CAN build a fully functional media center for 2500$.

coming up next: build your own fully functional house for 1,000,000$.

Re:Just wait until January

[aaron_ds]

Great. Now we'll have one-button remote zealots too!

Skip MCE -- Go with MythTV

[tji]

I went through this same process when putting together a system for my MythTV box.

MythTV allows for your frontent (display system) to be seperate from your backend (receiver cards, storage, transcoding - commercial removal, etc.). So you can make a big, cheap, powerful, loud system to do all the heavy lifting, and make a scaled down front-end as quiet as possible.

But, if you need to put them all in one box, you should consider power/heat in all components. Here are the main points in mine:

- Athlon64 CPU. Lower power requirements in general, and Cool 'n Quiet feature to slow down the processor, make it much better than Intels.
- Large Heat Sink + Fan. A large copper Zalman HSF runs very quiet. In my system, with cool 'n quiet enabled, the fan actually turns off most of the time it's not doing heavy lifting.
- Good case, designed for quiet operation. The Antec Sonata has a fairly quiet power supply (the newer unit has the single large fan on the underside of the PSU), and a large case fan. The large fans run slower/quieter and still push a lot of air.
- Quiet HDD. I prefer Seagate Barracuda. This used to be hard to find, but now it seems most HDD manufacturers are making quiet drives with fluid bearings. The Antec case has rubber connectors where the HDD attaches to cut down on vibration noise. If you can use network file storage, using a 2.5" drive will cut down even more on power/noise/heat/vibration and size issues. (Taking it even further, some people use a flash based system, or network boot, to eliminate spinning disks completely).
- Fanless Video Card. The Nvidia FX5200 can be found fanless from many places. It supports MPEG2 acceleration in Linux (XvMC) and works well with MythTV.

Throw a Hauppage PVR-500 Dual SD tuner card in there, with a couple HD3000 cards from http://www.pchdtv.com/ and you've got a great MythTV PVR.

Where's the Verification?

[HockeyPuck]

So they go through all the hassel of putting one together, but then when they justify components they use purely subjective reasoning and then later don't even bother to back up their claims

For example:

While the CPU is certainly important, a lot of the work in a home theater PC is offloaded to other components to a certain degree. If you're using hardware-based TV cards (whether digital or analog) and an audio card with hardware DSP, then the CPU becomes less of an issue. Still, the processor can get pretty busy just managing system chores when you're trying to capture multiple video streams in DVR mode. So we decided we wanted a dual-core processor.

Ok, so there's justification for not using a high end processor (offloading most processing to other components), but then they go ahead and drop in a a $330 dual core CPU. I think the only justification to pick this CPU is for the 'geek factor'.

Lastly, after putting in a design like this why don't they go through and demonstrate that they components they chose were the right ones. How much memory does this thing consume while actually running common operations. What is the CPU usage for these same operations?

Anybody can create a media PC, but a responsible reviewer should provide the justification for their steps and the proof that what they did was the best (or not the best) decision.

Re:Where's the Verification?

[stienman]

Ok, so there's justification for not using a high end processor (offloading most processing to other components), but then they go ahead and drop in a a $330 dual core CPU. I think the only justification to pick this CPU is for the 'geek factor'.

In this case this is very appropiate. They had two HDTV tuners and two analog tuners. The HDTV tuners consume nearly 20Mbps each, while the analogs go up to 12Mbps. The CPU is doing a ton of work when recording 64Mbps of data to the hard drive - in fact, they indicated that the system really wasn't reacting well to other user actions while it was recording from all four tuners at once. It is likely that they couldn't have recorded from two and watched another at once.

The dual core was a good choice, despite the lack of qualification. There are other system bottlenecks, and I suspect that they would have a better system if they went with a single core and spent the additional money on a striped raid and huge cache, extremely low latency hard drives to improve HD throughput. In a system like this you want to be able to write 64Mbps to the HD (not sequentially) and read 20Mbps simultaneously.

-Adam