Slashdot Mirror
Build a Homemade Media Center PC
DigitalDame2 writes "PC Magazine's Loyd Case explains how to build a Media Center PC of your own, how to choose the parts for a custom project, and tips for the Motherboard." I imagine you guys might have some other opinions on what parts and tools to use for the task...
...for over $2200? I realize it needs to have a lot of bells and whistles, but that seems excessive somehow.
You can buy an OEM version:
2 E16832102311
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N8
I've had a lot of luck running MythTV on inexpensive hardware I had lying around the house. There's no reason to spend buckets of cash like the one mentioned in the article if all you need is a simple PVR.
Depending on your needs, you can spend alot less than $2246. I have my pvr running on a Shuttle SS40g with a 1GHz Athlon/512MB RAM/200GB drive. Its been running for 3 years now without problems (knock on wood). If people need a pvr on the cheap, I would recommend buying a used lowend Shuttle PC or similar and save yourself the cash. You could probably get one on eBay for half the cost than this one.
http://religiousfreaks.com/Ever Heard of OEM? You can buy an oem copy of windows when you buy the parts at the same time.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
MCE $130 OEM.
Note that you "must purchase with a piece of hardware" to get around Microsoft's "must be sold with hardware" legalese.
More
From the MS site:
w tobuy/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/ho
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is only available pre-installed on computers sold by PC manufacturers. You can purchase a PC with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 pre-installed at retail consumer electronic stores, direct from PC manufacturers, or through online consumer electronics Web sites.
but $2,276 seems like a lot for a computer these days. If money is not an issue, sure go for it and get this system, but you can save on a lot of these areas. Like case for $120. That's a lot. $300+ for the cpu also seems too much. You can get a very nice CPU for $150 and under. I think you can even get a lowend dual core for that price if that's your thing. I'd stick with the 2 gB of RAM, because RAM is the most useful thing these days in my opinion. You don't need that hardrive though. You can get one for about $150 that has a similar capacity that you will probably NEVER fill. The sound card for over $100 is outragous. I use the one that came with my mother board and it sounds great. A $75 microsoft keyboard is redicoulas. You can get a wireless mouse/keyboard combo for less than that price. I want even get into the $125 for the OS. Just my $0.02.
No Sigs!
If I was building a HTPC, I'd use Linux, 'cause it's highly customizable since you can strip it down the way you need it. I think Windows is totally inappropriate for HTPCs especially 'cause of all that DRM shit.
-DBS
Sigs suck!
This setup is very over priced, personally I would of not done the 400gb drive, and just raid like 2 250gbs together would be cheaper, also sounds like they just went to a random site and picked out stuff not on sale, if you go to www.slickdeals.net you can find alot of cheap stuff.
You're talking about MythTV, and it's quite good. It's difficult to get working in many cases, but most people who like it put up with that because of the flexibility it allows. One backend, multiple frontends, so your TV upstairs can watch shows recorded on the main machine in the living room, for example. It also has great IMDB lookups for existing video files, no DRM (media center edition definitely doesn't have either of those). Best thing I can recommend is to try it. You can always install Media Center edition too, if you think it's bad. Not like it'll take anything but a bit of time, and it's free, so the price is much better than Media Center.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
My question to Slashdot is: How good is MythPC?
Your asking this to Slashdot? We can't decide if Apple, MS, and Google are good or bad.. We flip flop on this daily!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
How good is MythPC?
You mean MythTV. It's very good, and it keeps getting better.
The people who complain either expect commercial-like support for a turnkey product, try to use poorly supported hardware without the technical ability to make it work, or they are not comfortable with Linux or debugging their own install and setup.
They don't sell a retail version by itself, but you can get an OEM edition, and you can buy it bundled with some tuner cards. The problem is to be made into a mode of pure watching, a state of the same. In fact, if the environment is technologically-driven, so you crumple up the URL from the last tab you were already expecting.
Man. I'm always missing out on something.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The problem is to be made into a mode of pure watching, a state of the same. In fact, if the environment is technologically-driven, so you crumple up the URL from the last tab you were already expecting.
/. when I say:
I believe I speak for a large % of
What the hell did you just say?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Ok, you'll all turn this into a "Install MythTV" thread, but...
I've built several MCE machines. Here's what you need to know.
An Athlon 1700+ is overkill for a three-tuner (dual analog + OTA HD) setup. Encoding is done on the card. They suggest a $500 CPU/motherboard combination. A Sempron 2600+ on a motherboard is at Fry's for $69, and is boxed with a fairly quiet fan on a cool-and-quiet supported motherboard.
1g of memory is overkill. 512M of Corsair Value RAM costs $38 at NewEgg. That's about $150 cheaper than their suggestion of 2G of CVR.
A "fancy" sound card is useless if you simply intend to go out to your stereo. Optical out is available for a couple of bucks, and the stereo out on any newer piece-of-junk AC97 audio sounds just fine through my stereo.
Their tuners are "fine", but the standard configuration for MCE is almost always a single MCE500 from Hauppauge and a combo of an ATI HD Wonder (no broadcast flag support) and an AverMedia A180. About $400 for this - and it'll be your biggest purchase.
You do not need a keyboard except in the closet; and yes the remote is $35 from NewEgg.
250gig drives run $75 or cheaper after rebates and other "scams." I bought a pair of Hitachi "Deathstar" 250's at $49 each at Fry's. We'll pretend though that you'll have to spend $100 for a solid 300 gigger.
Cost for a four-tuner setup including dual-HTDV dual-analog tuners and plenty of storage? http://www.powercompress.com/product.htm
It's also available by Graphedit add-ons and an AT job if you can live without a fancy front-end.
Last month, I built my own PVR. Here's my cost:
- ECS motherboard + Pentium 4CPU combo from Fry's: $110
- 512MB (2 x 256MB) of Kingston RAM: $50
- Zalman CPU fan (stock is just too noisy): $45
- Antec TruePower 2.0 380W power supply: $60
- GeforceFX 5200 (no fan == so silent): $40
- MS media center remote: $35 (yes, you really need this)
Items reused: OS, mouse & keyboard (for initial setup, then don't need them anymore), dual-tuner Tv tuner card, and PC case. Total cost for me was $340. If I had to buy the items I reused, then I could have very easily stayed under $500.The machine is hidden behind my TV stand (I have a CRT 30" HDTV Sony Tv, 16:9 aspect ratio), is almost completely silent, and delivers a nice, crisp, HD signal to my TV (DVI port of my graphics card plugs in to the HDMI port of my TV). I keep it on all the time, and manage it via VNC. It has been running for almost a month with no hiccups, and I saved $1700 in the process.
You can save a lot of money by downgrading from the specs in the article.
Any equivalent of a 3GHz P4 single-core is plenty of CPU for HDTV. A nvidia fx5200 is enough graphics card. For sound, you just need an spdif port if you already have a receiver.
And, of course, Linux and MythTV are free, and superior to MCE.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
I can help with alternatives in the Windows world. I've never used MythTV. In Windows there is:
GB-PVR - FREE, easy to install, includes media functions like photos/music/other vides/etc.., works well with current tuners, easy to install plug-ings but not open-source, not very pretty (if the wife-acceptance factor matters), the PVR software I currently use
SageTV - kind of expensive, the included media functions kind of suck, can easily install plugins (but I totally fucked up my trial install while installing one plugin), was unstable when I tried it, slows down sometimes due to resource usage, I guess
MeedioTV - haven't tried this since last August but at the time it was borderline terrible, resource-hog, crashed a lot, wouldn't stop recording when I exited live TV (causing my hard drive to quickly fill up)...these problems may not exist anymore; it does look nice, though
BeyondTV - expensive if you want media functions, works great with plug-ins, a little slow sometimes, intelligently selects recordings, high WAF
MediaPortal - I've never tried it, but it's also free and I think open-source, from what I hear it's somewhat of a resource hog, I can't say much more
Windows MCE - never tried it, never will.
Well, the better way to do this is to use turner cards that do onboard video compression instead of using the CPU. That way you can make almost any computer work. http://www.snapstream.com/Community/articles/pvs_s ervice/ ...and you can then add tons of tuners that will record all at once without really taxing a modest system...
http://www.snapstream.com/Community/Articles/medus a/default.asp
MythTV is great, but it still lacks some of the Wife Acceptance Factor that Media Center Edition has.
It is certainly more configurable and tweakable, but like the parent said, OUT OF THE BOX, MCE is highly polished and ready for the family. Adding four tuners to an MCE box is easy enough for mom and pop.
Same author, same system, slightly rewritten for PC Mag (original article date was 11/29/05). http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1893732 ,00.asp
I wonder if the guys at ExtremeTech know that their author resold the story he sold them.
Go grab KnoppMyth (http://www.mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html) and burn it to a CD. Try it out yourself and see!
MythTV sucks if you've ever had the chance of using Media Center.
I can say this because I've used both, and ended up going back to the Microsoft solution, of which MythTV makes it look good!
My setup: dvb-t card (nova-t), geforce4 w/tv out, athlon xp 2700, lots of storage etc.
Mythtv, took eternity to setup, had to manually give it the frequencies so it could find the channels. When setup, guide data took a while using xmltv, and following guide after guide to set it up. Even once setup, its nowhere near as complete or stable as Media Center using dvb-t. Getting to this point took hours.
With Media Center, its very simple to get all working without having to go to such great lengths or following guide after guide to get something done. So long as your hardware is somewhat recent and has BDA drivers, and you install rollup update 2, things are smooth for myself.
MythTV has some serious issues. Tuning into an encrypted channel crashes it. Yes I know its the mpeg codec's problem but surely MythTV can check the channel beforehand! Media center can cope with that.
The GUI hasnt got anything on Media Centers, even with custom designs.
Then there's those little things like droping a DVD full of xvid's into the system - Media Center will ask to copy it to the system and watch it.
You have to exit the TV section entirely to goto something else - Media center can do picture in picture no problem regardless of what your watching.
It can also record the stream to the hard drive in the format it came, mpeg2, without an issue with dvb-t. MythTV couldnt do this, nor could it provide a good quality recorded stream without having to use the CPU under dvb-t.
There are other things, but I can tell you now, from my own experience that dvb-t under MythTV just isnt ready for primetime. Finally, why bother spending lots of hours configuring and time tweaking it later when Media Center does it nicely first time around?
Oh wait, this is slashdot...
The "benefit" is essentially having a powerful TiVo-like device running your television.
My "television" is currently a $1,000 16x9 projector and a 72" screen connected to my computer running MCE. The computer cost less than $1000 to build with four-tuner (including 2 HiDef) support.
There's little in the way of music on my MCE box - a half a dozen albums I stuck in and let it rip one afternoon of housecleaning. I still stick my DVDs in one at a time when I watch them - as I've got a thousand (yeah...) and even transcoding them down and storing them on something would be a mammoth undertaking.
I didn't even know it was doing it, had set it to record all instances the two shows through the EPG, which yesterday happened to be aired at overlapping times.
And having it as both my stereo, video and photo album, I find 200 GB disk a minimum (I wish I went with 300), which would be a problem with laptop, but I guess you could go with external disk.
Is not to get a real PC. :-(. If someone figured out how to stick a TV card on this thing I'm pretty sure they'll make to software for it but it's not the case.
I've been planing for almost a year to build myself a media pc. Compared different possibilities, looked around for the software I could use.
And in the end I've settled of a modded XBOX. Best choice for the price!
It does everything I want with the fantastic XBOX Media Center software plus some other homebrew software (XMAME and stuff) and a couple of nice Python scripts.
The only technical requirement it to know how to user FTP.
On the downside, it's doesnt do PVR at all
So if you can live without the PVR facilities, this baby should do all you music listening, movie playing, picture browsing and classic gaming on your TV.
You can put the money saved of a PC to buy a dedicated PVR which can be programmed form the XBOX. There are scripts the show the TV program and can control some PVRs.
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
MythTV can be installed and setup very easily using the KnoppMyth distribution, and then customised after that (all I've done is install libdvdcss). Otherwise there is Jarod's detailed setup guide, and the mythtv-users mailing list is very busy, and people on there are very helpful.
If you're in New Zealand, we have a localt mythtvnz list.
Rob :)
Go buy a TiVo.
Ok, and then I will happily put up with TiVo deciding for me how long I'm allowed to keep my shows, and showing me those lovely advertisements while I'm browsing the channel lineup, and not allowing me to record more than one show at a time, and suddenly forcing me to not skip commercials, and tying me down to a proprietary channel data service which could stop working the moment TiVo folds, and forcing me to comply with every whim and wish of the all-powerful entertainment industry regardless of legality or sanity.
Oh, and by the way, it also does not support playing my music collection in flac/ogg/mp3/aac/itunes/wav format, or playing DVDs on the same box, or playing MPEG-4 encoded videos, or emulating old games, or checking the weather in a built-in module, or allowing me to upload other videos to it, or allowing me to rip my DVDs for easy access, or playing recorded shows on multiple frontends, or storing the data on a dedicated machine instead of the built-in hard drive, or...
Seriously, if all you want is the Fisher-Price(tm) version of a PVR, by all means get a TiVo. The rest of us want functionality.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
With TiVo Desktop, you can upload correctly encoded files back on to the tivo, as well as tell it not to delete shows. It only deletes shows not marked as keep until i delete when there isn't enough space left. DirecTiVo allows multiple shows at once, and TiVo Generation 3 boxes will do this as well.
It would also take something very out of the ordinary to knock tivo into oblivion overnight. TiVo is a friendly and conveniant tv recording mechanism. All my DVDs are on DVD and I dont mind sticking in a disk and pushing the button on my receiver remote to change inputs.
Also TiVo -CAN- play mp3 format. I have my entire collection in apple lossless, and until TiVO & Apple make a deal, I have another copy in mp3, which is a small price to pay (well, 100gb at 128kbit which is good enough for me and if I really want something in high quality I listen to the original CD or fire up iTunes and play the apple lossless version).
TiVo's not all bad and definately has its place in my home. My wife's not a computer geek and doesn't want to mess with the rest of the problems that come from having a windows based machine that needs you to accept updates, run virus scans and spyware scans, etc. TiVo changed our life for the better (we always missed our shows due to our 16 month old son getting crabby or wanting to play or something). We live on our own schedule thanks to TiVo. Granted, it could be done with a PC based solution, but TiVo really is simple.
You also -can- check the weather with galleon installed on a home PC that sends the java programs to the TiVo for use.
Not everybody needs to emulate old games (though I have a dreamcast and xbox for that occasional use). I can also play some fun games on the TiVo. I don't see why someone couldnt make a java NES emulator either, though playing with the remote might be strange, granted.
Anyway, the TiVo isn't a swiss army knife, but it's definately more than you think.
What am for you not understanding? In state of pureness driven to URL expecting ultimate POWER. Simple.
The price difference between OEM and retail software is due to two mitigating factors:
1) OEM software is forever married to the machine on which it is first installed.
2) Microsoft doesn't provide support for OEM products - they leave that up to the OEM.
As long as you don't want to call up Microsoft for support, OEM software is just fine. But considering support rates ($35 a pop, or $245 for a professional incident), retail software may be a deal for those who lack basic troubleshooting skills, internet search capabilities, or impressionable tech-savvy relatives.
In state of pureness driven to URL expecting ultimate POWER.
Huh? What on Earth have you been smoking? Is there ever a point where I realize that the breadth of what happens to the bulk of my base belong to you?
It's not as easy as you think to generalize all free software. Did you ever try to install Firefox? Was that a lot of work for you? It had tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking when I couldn't get the same from IE. Also, the open architectures are more extendable in the long run.
On the other hand, if you only want the features a company has chosen for you, and you've got extra cash lying around, knock yourself out. I hear Photoshop is pretty good.
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. -Groucho Marx