HTPC build

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

hah, and I was the one who got blasted when I said that I didn’t trust popcorn hour’s support.

Sounds like a good machine you’ve got there. In all fairness, you should try out Boxee software too though. It’s pretty great as well. I think I prefer it over xbmc, but it’s been at least a year since I’ve used xbmc.

Well, I used a PCH for 3 years and it worked great. All of a sudden they went downhill fast. Their forums are saying the A210 isn’t having the same problems because it has a lot more processing power but I’d have spent about $230 to get one of those and at that price it wasn’t worth it. I paid $105 for my refurb A110 and at that price it’s still a great deal. I moved it into my bedroom where it will mostly be playing 720P TV captures and will be fine. It seemed to only get flaky after playing 1080p content.

Hahhahahahahhahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

How is this working out for you, still going strong? I’m looking to build a similar system soon and ditch cable/dish.

He upgraded to a full fledged one, the Atom is fine for XBMC and local video content, but it will struggle with streaming content. If you are content with that then look at a AMD E-350 Nettop.

http://www.nyspeed.com/showthread.php?225487-New-HTPC-build

That’s his new build that I helped pick the parts for, if you want to do Netflix, Hulu and other streaming sites reliably then you need to do something like that.

I have seen his setup in action (both units) and they are fantastic. I just replaced my PCH A-110 myself with a Foxconn AMD E-350 nettop and it works great for my local XBMC but like I said struggles with streaming content.

^ What he said. I’m still running the Atom nettop but now it’s in my bedroom and the PCH will be going on eBay. Still streams 1080p movies via XBMC and 1080p youtube in Internet Explore (and sometimes Firefox when Flash doesn’t bug out) like a champ. It struggles with Hulu HD which is why I built the one linked for my living room. The wife and I realized we were watching all our shows from newsgroup downloads and decided to make the big scary leap and dump cable service. I wanted to be able to stream hulu in HD if I dumped cable for those times when I just want to watch something random on a weekend afternoon. Couldn’t be happier with the full scale HTPC. I even tossed a tuner card in it connected to an antenna in my attic and through windows media center get NBC, CBS, FOX, ABC and PBS in perfect HD with a digital guide and DVR that works better than the one from Fios or Time Warner.

Nice. How much are you spending now with Hulu, Netflix, etc? Any programs you can’t get you wish you could?

^
If you dump cable, how do you watch sports? I still can’t grasp my brain around this concept… and I’ve heard quite a few people talk about “You don’t need to pay for TV anymore… it’s all on the internet”

Is there sites that stream HD NHL and NFL games that are reliable/free?

For the Bills games they’re all over the air for free, in HD better than you get from cable because the OTA feed is less compressed. It’s 100% reliable. I was getting some signal drop because I used the existing run of shitty coax that was going to my attic with several splitters and it was leaking interference any time a car drove by. Now that I ran new RG-6 quad shield cable with quality compression fittings from the antenna straight to the PC it’s perfect.

Sabres you’d need to sub to NHL’s gamecenter live pass for $169 or Hockey Streams for $100. Gamecenter live blocks local games but there are ways around it. I haven’t given a shit enough about the Sabres this year (I still hate Lindy Ruff) to bother, but if I was going to do it I’d go the Hockey Streams route: http://www6.hockeystreams.com/

I’m paying $14.95/month for an unlimited newsgroup account, $8/month for Hulu Plus, $39.99/month for Fios 25/25 internet alone (good luck duplicated that deal though, I worked magic with the retention department) and that’s it.

The only thing I miss is random shit on discovery/history. They are still stuck in the past and refuse to stream much of anything. Their popular shows are available via the newsgroups though.

Sabres games are super easy to find streams for

Follow @BSN360 on twitter for sabres feed

As stated, standard football is available OTA on the antenna. ESPN3 (online) is good for sports news, highlights and some college football games.

Free streams usually suck though if you’re an HD snob like me. If at some point I start caring about the Sabres again I’d have no problem dropping $100 a year on something that promises 720p with a minimum 30frame/sec reliable streaming.

My cable bill went from $175/month to $40 (had home phone which I also dropped) so spending $100 a year is nothing.

100/12 = $8.33/month

  • $8 for hulu plus
  • I think around $35 more a month to get my wife an iPhone so we both have good cell phones.

So I’m still ahead about $84 a month and my wife has an iPhone instead of a shitty pre-paid droid. Plus all our TV is commercial free and in XBMC’s way better organized format. If I ever run of out “dvr” room I just slap in another 3TB drive for $100 instead of dealing with TimeWarner or Fios saying their XXXGB drive should be more than enough. @ $84/month it doesn’t take long to pay for my $400 HTPC.

Who knows though. SOPA may fuck it all up for me, but I have a feeling the internet will always find a way around anti-piracy regs.

yeah, true that…the feed I posted above is a good alternative though. Got me through the playoffs last season.

Gamecenter > hockeystreams.com, I read a ton of reviews, sampled hockey streams for a week or so and they aren’t even comparable. The only positive of hockey streams is no local blackouts but the feed quality is way better on gamecenter.

Kinda OT I need to build a NAS for home? suggestions?

I’ve been really happy with my Crystalbuntu XBMC frontend. It uses an Apple TV1 modded with a CrystalHD chip and has been able to decode all the 1080p mkv’s w/ DTS that I’ve thrown at it. I guess it supports hulu but I haven’t tried it. Total cost nowadays is under $100 (if you get the atv on ebay) but I paid about $150 for it at the time.

---------- Post added at 12:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:51 PM ----------

FreeNAS with multiple gigabit NIC’s

most people who think they need a NAS for their home are probably just better off with a PC which holds a few hard drives and functions as one among other roles. By the time you’ve built a NAS you could have had a HTPC like the one in this thread.

Diskless ReadyNas Duo is $179…It would be hard to build a PC for that price (of course the drives are more, but I found 1TB drives at best buy for $54 each)

how cheap is a used PC that can hold 2 or more SATA drives these days? I just can’t see spending $200 and not getting a whole computer while you’re at it.

Yeah, my “nas” is just my amd quad core that serves many roles.

4TB of disk space
XBMC server with MySQL backend (all 3 computers share the same XBMC data and box art)
Sickbeard internet PVR
Sabnzbd server
RDP access to my home network
FTP server (only on when I want to give someone access)
Air video server (streaming my entire movie/tv collection our iphones)