The Popcorn Hour A-110 was starting to piss me off with the 3 recent firmware upgrades all being steps backwards in terms of reliability. After playing around with XBMC on my desktop and really liking the interface I decided to take the plunge and build a living room friendly HTPC. Since there has been quite a bit of interest in various threads on here I figured I’d document what I went with.
First, some of my requirements.
1: Must be able to play 1080p MKV’s with DTS audio from my server and pretty much any other formats I throw at it.
2: Must have a good jukebox for organizing media since I have 100’s of movies and TV shows.
3: Must fit in with my entertainment center. AKA, no big ugly tower sitting there in my living room.
4: Must be “wife friendly”. My kid gets to pick something from the massive video library in the morning while we’re getting ready for work. This needs to be an easy to use interface.
5: Not willing to spend more than $400.
I’ve looked at several “in a box” solutions like the Popcorn Hour, WDTV Live, Roku, Boxee Box etc etc. They all have major limitations of being closed systems where the company you buy it from keeps it locked down.
After lots of reading I decided a full fledged PC was the answer. To keep it living room friendly the answer I found was the Intel Atom d525 with Ion2 graphics by NVidia. The d525 is an Atom dual core running at 1.8mhz. The Ion2 is a dedicated graphics chip running 512MB of DDR3. That Ion2 chip is the key to playing 1080p on a relatively weak processor since all the video stuff gets offloaded to the graphics chip.
Lots of companies make living room friendly PC’s based around this d525 setup. One of the more popular ones is Zotac, but at the time I was buying Newegg did a great combo deal on the Jetway Mini-top. The Mini-top comes with the case, processor, graphics chip, fan and an IR home media remote. You add memory (DDR2 laptop ram) and a 2.5" sata hard drive (a laptop drive). Since I wanted this thing to fly I went with a 64GB SSD for performance reading all the various library files.
Assembly took about 10 minutes. Slide the cover off, use the included mounting brackets to lock the SSD in place, clip ram in, put cover back on. HDMI goes to the TV. Optical out going to my surround sound receiver. One note here, Jetway screwed up their design a bit by putting the SPDIF out on the front of the chassis. To help hide the wire I added a right angle mini optical to toslink adapter. Total investment with the combo deal is $310.
For the OS I originally wanted to run Ubuntu. A little background though. I’m a Windows guy, software engineer by trade using MS developer tools. When the Ubuntu install started giving me problems with the digital audio I bailed and put Win 7 Pro 64 bit on it. It worked flawless right out of the box and while I have read many many pages of how to make the jetway mini-top work with Ubuntu and XBMC that level of nerd dedication just wasn’t going to happen.
You might be asking, “wait a minute, how did you install a DVD based OS on a computer with no optical drives”. Or maybe you’re not, but anyway, you install it from a 4GB or larger USB thumbdrive like this:
So, once Win7 was installed I had a fully functional PC on my 58" plasma. Next up, XBMC. www.xbmc.org. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because you just download it, run the installer, and bam you have a great living room friendly interface. You point it’s library manager to all your stored media, tell it what the media is (movie, tv, music etc) and it pulls down all the cover art, posters, trailers, ratings, descriptions etc from various internet sources. The XBMC site explains how your media needs to be named to get this to work.
The end result is amazing. Flawless 1080p video playback, a really responsive and customizable jukebox that is completely wife proof, the ability to play 1080p youtube videos, surf the web. Basically anything a PC can do. I haven’t tried Hulu yet.
Performance wise I get the following:
1080P MKV with DTS audio in XBMC, 20-25% processor usage.
1080P youtube video, Firefox with latest Adobe Flash player, 12-15% processor usages.
The only thing I’m not 100% happy with is the remote. It’s IR and seems to only capture the button presses about 80% of the time, and then only if you carefully aim it. I ordered this:
But sent it back yesterday because the trackball was way too sloppy. Any time you moved the keyboard the trackball would move the cursor, which while playing a movie in XBMC causes the control menu to pop down from the top of the screen. I ordered this today and will update when it gets here tomorrow:
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-920-000594-diNovo-Mini/dp/B0011FOOI2/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1296146868&sr=1-1
A list of the hardware in my build:
Jetway Mini-Top:
G.SKILL 2GB DDR2 800 laptop ram:
A DATA 64GB solid state drive:
Right angle SPDIF adapter:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002J2MTQ/ref=oss_product
Is it perfect?
No. The mini-top’s current bios does not support wake from USB. Meaning, if it goes to sleep none of the add on keyboard/mouse combo things I’m trying to add will be able to bring it out of sleep. The remote it comes with can wake it, but that means keeping an extra remote around simply for turning it on. Lame. My solution was just never let it go to sleep since it’s such a low power PC anyway (20ish watts at idle).
The configuration took a few days of tweaking to get the library display the way I want it. The plus side here is all the tweaking you could ever want to do is available to you. The down side is you have to be willing to read and figure out how to do it.
Overall though, it’s a huge upgrade over my PCH A-110.
/huge nerd