The HTPC (Home Theatre PC) Ask-All Thread

Alright -- let's break a year and a half of silence.

I have setup an HTPC, which means I have a mid-range gaming rig with a Hauppage card hooked to the TV. It is used almost exclusively for television/DVR/Netflix watching up to now.

I put a BD-ROM in it today. Out of habit(?) I loaded the trial of AnyDVD-HD. I have already loaded Media Browser and "Auto Rip and Compress". The first DVD I put in seems to have worked like a champ (apart from metadata, but I can figure that out).

Blu-Ray is another story entirely. How the f*ck do you rip BD and play it out in WMC? Is converting formats the only way? I grow weary of "oh no, we don't use that format anymore", so I'd like to operate on straight rips if possible. The rip seems to have worked, but WMC7 yields naught but "WMC cannot play this". Some folks imply it should work with my installed PDVD, but that's not happening.

It seems like most folks are using MakeMKV, but I hesitate to use beta-free-for-now-but-not-later-and-might-disappear-at-any-time. Plus, wouldn't be a rip.

Trying to keep this as wife friendly as possible. Auto Rip and Compress is really close, just need to figure out the easy playback.

Thoughts? and thanks!

I'd say probably the best compatibility with WMC for Blu Ray rips would probably be to put them in m2ts containers instead of mkv containers. That way you can stream to Xboxes as well if you want to, and you don't have to do a bunch of crazy codecs that might cause problems with other Media Center stuff. If you can do anything without installing additional codecs with WMC, you're probably much better off.

Note that you can get mkv's to stream to Xbox extenders with a media splitter if the enclosed streams are properly formatted, but sometimes that can be a headache, hence my recommendation for m2ts.

Fair enough. What do you use to rip/encode? HandBrake?

I'm trying to figure out the cheapest way to cut the cable cord and get OTA TV recorded and then played back on my HDTV. I don't have room in the budget now for a $600 HTPC (which I'd love to do...), so I'm trying to figure out what I can use out of the parts I've got + minimal investment in new HW & SW.

Here's what I've got to work with:
- Panny plasma
- networked Yamaha receiver
- Xbox360
- Roku 2 XS
- Samsung BD player
- 2 Win7 PCs (one upstairs with an aging C2D 2.3 GHz CPU, and one downstairs at a desk about 20 feet from the TV area with a core i5-2500K)
- unused 2007 Mac mini (believe about C2D 1.5 or 1.8 GHz - apparently too underpowered to use as an HTPC for 1080i HDTV playback)
- Harmony 550 remote
- iPad
- android phones

So I could potentially get something like a Silicondust HDHomerun tuner and an antenna, and could then record OTA TV to one of the Win7 PCs.

I could then either run an HDMI cable from my downstairs PC to the receiver, or use the WMC extender in the XBox to view the recorded shows. The problems I see with that, though, is that then the downstairs PC isn't available when someone is watching TV, as it will be using non-trivial CPU to decode the saved TV files and transmitting them to the TV or the XBox (plus my experience with using WMC extender in XBox was that it was sluggish and annoying, which from reading may be due to the fact the XBOx is not doing any of the processing - it's just essentially a remote-desktop client).

Does anyone see any solutions short of saving up and building a real HTPC? Is there a way to use the Mac mini somehow (install Win7 on it?) without relying on it to have to decode, and still not kill performance on the downstairs PC while playing back? That may be a stupid question, I'm ignorant and thus looking for a clue. Please help cure me of my ignorance

Reading your list, seems like the cheapest route would be to put a Hauppauge (and maybe second hard drive) in either of the Win7 boxes and use it. You could output direct from the computer, or use the X360 as an extender (or look into other extenders). WMC in Windows 7 with the Hauppauge will record OTA for you.

Dual tuner Hauppauge would run you about $100. Hard drive will depend on how much you want to record.

Remaining variable is the speed of your internal network ... wireless G will not cut it for HD viewing. So far, I haven't had N accomplish it either in my house.

Oh, and whether you already have an antenna.

Everything is wired ethernet (except the ipad and phones, obviously).

Do you have experience with tuners? Is the PC usable (read: for gaming) while shows are recording, or being accessed by an extender? The issue is that my wife likes to watch TV while I'm playing on my PC, so that's a concern.

What other extenders are there?

I know this is the HTPC thread, and Tivo ain't free, but it sure is painless and does exactly what you are looking for.

Why not use the upstairs machine? Would both be used while television was being watched?

I haven't played anything more strenuous than Portal on my HTPC. But that ran with something recording. I've been meaning to fire up Batman:AA to show the wife. I can try it out.

That said, my HTPC is kind of a beast for an HTPC. i5-2500K, 16GB, GeForce 460, Intel SSD for OS, 2TB Caviar Black for programs, 2TB Caviar Black for WMC. What works for me may not work for you.

Khoram wrote:

What other extenders are there?

Now that I think about it, I don't think there are any others anymore. The Linksys DMA2100 is what I was thinking of, but it's discontinued. I have no experience with any extender other than the 360.

Yeah I guess I will try that. Just ordered a basic indoor antenna and a SiliconDust HDHomerun dual tuner from amazon. Can put them up on second floor near window (already have a powerline ethernet jack there) and do some experimenting. Shouldn't be any reason why we can't use the older C2D 2.33 CPU upstairs I guess.

I'll report back with results after I play around with it.

Khoram wrote:

I could then either run an HDMI cable from my downstairs PC to the receiver, or use the WMC extender in the XBox to view the recorded shows. The problems I see with that, though, is that then the downstairs PC isn't available when someone is watching TV, as it will be using non-trivial CPU to decode the saved TV files and transmitting them to the TV or the XBox (plus my experience with using WMC extender in XBox was that it was sluggish and annoying, which from reading may be due to the fact the XBOx is not doing any of the processing - it's just essentially a remote-desktop client).

I run 3 extenders around the house, and the CPU cycles for recording up to 7 shows and streaming a couple is not really enough to keep you from doing anything serious on a several year old e8500.

Only thing that's really sluggish on the extenders is when it boots, sometimes the guide takes a bit to serve up, and sometimes recorded TV doesn't display thumbnails for a bit.

In the past, I've also advised that it's not worth trying to do HD over wireless N, either, but I've been running an extender in the step-daughters room for several months now, serving up HD content with only one hiccup in all that time, and that was when she'd folded down the wireless antennas on the MS dongle. What I did do, though, was to put her on the 5Ghz band pretty much by herself so that the N traffic would have no chance to get slowed down by the random G traffic.

So my system: Win 7 HTPC running on a e8500, 7 tuners (4 cablecard, 2 OTA HDHomeRun ethernet tuners, 1 ClearQAM). CPU usage rarely over 30% while running all that plus up to 3 extenders and it's own output.

Awesome, thanks for sharing that data! Sounds like I should be ok then with my setup. Now I just need to wait for HDD prices to plummet again...

What I'm really curious about is Win 8's version of Media Center. I'm pretty much expecting it to be virtually unchanged, as I think they got rid of most of the ehome group and rolled them up into other areas of the company.

What I really wish would happen would that it would be brought into the Metro interface and opened up to HTML 5 plug ins like the other Metro apps instead of the current MCML that nobody seems to have a good time developing for. If they did that, I really wouldn't care if MS just got out of the way and let other people take over most add in stuff.

Anyone here have experience with both EyeTV on Mac as well as Windows Media Center on a windows HTPC? The Mac mini is a 2.0 GHz C2D with 2 GB of RAM; before I spend $100 on EyeTV PVR SW I think I should try to get a read on whether that would be the best use of the money, or whether I should look at picking up a license of Win7 and put that on there instead. I do not like the WMC extender experience through the Xbox, it gets very sluggish and weird, well after things in the library are scanned. Like it will take 10 seconds for button presses to register, etc.

Every Mac HTPC I know runs Plex, but last I checked it had no mechanisms for OTA.

Actually I can watch OTA on the mac with Plex fine, but it doesn't record I don't think. EyeTV seems to be the defacto Mac DVR software as far as I can tell.

I've got the Mac Mini hooked up ok, with Windows 7 installed via Bootcamp. Tried watching OTA TV via the HDHomeRun and it was so stuttery it was unwatchable. This is apparently because of the craptastic graphics card (Intel GMA 950) in the 2007 Mac Mini I have, though the CPU should be fine - it's a C2D 2.0 GHz, and the mini has 2GB RAM as well. I've got a Broadcom Crystal HD card coming that I can put in the mini in place of the wifi card, which I don't use. Hopefully that will allow playback of 1080i/p. 720p is great.

Right now while I wait I'm recording TV on my desktop. It only takes up about 3-5% on 1 or 2 cores when it's recording. However, last night I watched BBT after it was recorded, and there was all kinds of stutters, like when the reception isn't good. I thought maybe I didn't position the antenna good enough for that channel (it's in the garage) so I tuned to CBS to watch for a bit, and it was rock steady. The only thing I can think of is that i was farting around on the PC when the show was recording, so apparently that can mess with the quality of the recording (even though I've got 4 cores at 95% unused utilization... ? I guess? seems odd).

So far though I'm pretty happy with the quality of what's available without cable. I just have a few kinks to work out yet. Right now I'm trying to figure out if WMC can utilize the Crystal HD card or not, and if it can't, what I'm going to do for PVR. Looking at MediaPortal perhaps. I've got Plex and XBMC installed, getting ready to fully configure and do a 3-way bakeoff between the 3 of them and see which works out best.

ETA: I bought one of these wireless keyboard/trackpads and it works great! Far exceeded my expectations for $30.

So when you watch BBT on the desktop, it's smooth, it's only the recording that stuttery?

I had some hardware failure on my dedicated PC and had to switch to recording on the desktop for awhile. I tried not to game during recorded hours, but never quit using the PC. Never really saw a hiccup.

Make sure you've got your NIC configured with flow control enabled in your advanced settings. Having that off by default on one of the PCs in the past caused some problems with stutters.

Khoram wrote:

I've got the Mac Mini hooked up ok, with Windows 7 installed via Bootcamp. Tried watching OTA TV via the HDHomeRun and it was so stuttery it was unwatchable. This is apparently because of the craptastic graphics card (Intel GMA 950) in the 2007 Mac Mini I have, though the CPU should be fine - it's a C2D 2.0 GHz, and the mini has 2GB RAM as well. I've got a Broadcom Crystal HD card coming that I can put in the mini in place of the wifi card, which I don't use. Hopefully that will allow playback of 1080i/p. 720p is great.

Right now while I wait I'm recording TV on my desktop. It only takes up about 3-5% on 1 or 2 cores when it's recording. However, last night I watched BBT after it was recorded, and there was all kinds of stutters, like when the reception isn't good. I thought maybe I didn't position the antenna good enough for that channel (it's in the garage) so I tuned to CBS to watch for a bit, and it was rock steady. The only thing I can think of is that i was farting around on the PC when the show was recording, so apparently that can mess with the quality of the recording (even though I've got 4 cores at 95% unused utilization... ? I guess? seems odd).

So far though I'm pretty happy with the quality of what's available without cable. I just have a few kinks to work out yet. Right now I'm trying to figure out if WMC can utilize the Crystal HD card or not, and if it can't, what I'm going to do for PVR. Looking at MediaPortal perhaps. I've got Plex and XBMC installed, getting ready to fully configure and do a 3-way bakeoff between the 3 of them and see which works out best.

ETA: I bought one of these wireless keyboard/trackpads and it works great! Far exceeded my expectations for $30.

If you don't mind my asking, how much would you say you've spent on the OTA TV watching and recording so far? I ordered a mid-range Mini earlier in the week and am curious.

Interesting that you asked that, because I was starting to get worried about the cost of my "experiment" the other day.

What I've spent so far:
- $100 for Silicondust HDHomerun networked dual TV tuner - necessary for capturing OTA signals (or sub any tuner, either internal or external)
- $8 for basic RCA indoor antenna - necessary
- $30 for the wireless keyboard/trackpad - luxury item I indulged in, could probably get by with universal remote once set up + out of the way keyboard/mouse or VNC for heavyduty computer tasks
- $30 for the broadcom crystal HD pci express card - necessary for my underpowered 2007 mac mini (assuming it works... fingers crossed)
- $65 for another Netgear powerline adapter for the HDHomerun - could probably have worked around this, somehow, but this was the most aesthetically pleasing solution for me. Everything else in the house except my desktop PC uses 200 Mb powerline ethernet (the incoming cable line for the modem happens to be right next to my desk so I'm plugged in right into my router).

so I've spent $238 so far. That with being given a 2007 Mac Mini and a new, unused Windows 7 Home Premium license for free, and using a free PVR solution (either WMC or MediaPortal, haven't tested either yet with the Crystal HD card).

Also keep in mind I didn't actually need all this if I only cared about OTA TV watching and recording. If you have an XBox 360 hooked up to your HDTV and a decent Win7 PC elsewhere in the house, all you really need is the tuner and antenna. I went with the mac mini htpc because it was "free" (although you see the price tag already going up, with wireless gadgets, etc... ), it will allow us to do supplement OTA TV with internet TV stuff, and because I like to futz around with it.

What year Mac Mini did you buy? Anything 2009 and afterwards and you should be ok for 1080 playback. Definitely the 2010 and 2011.

MannishBoy wrote:

So when you watch BBT on the desktop, it's smooth, it's only the recording that stuttery?

I had some hardware failure on my dedicated PC and had to switch to recording on the desktop for awhile. I tried not to game during recorded hours, but never quit using the PC. Never really saw a hiccup.

Make sure you've got your NIC configured with flow control enabled in your advanced settings. Having that off by default on one of the PCs in the past caused some problems with stutters.

Hmm, I didn't actually check it on the desktop, only through the XBox. I'll check that, and the NIC settings, tonight. Thanks for the tip! I need all the tips I can get, this is definitely an area that isn't hard to understand for each element taken separately, but man there are so many variables and configuration settings in total that it is very overwhelming.

Check that channel for both live video and the stuttery recording. If live is fine, and your recording stutters even on the desktop, that will tell you if you have a problem. I'd say if you only have one drive that you're running the OS on as well as recording to, that isn't optimal from an IO perspective, especially if you're recording a bunch of channels at once as well as playing back. Things SHOULD be fine with modern HD's, but you're better off recording to a non-boot drive if possible.

Khoram wrote:

Interesting that you asked that, because I was starting to get worried about the cost of my "experiment" the other day.

What I've spent so far:
- $100 for Silicondust HDHomerun networked dual TV tuner - necessary for capturing OTA signals (or sub any tuner, either internal or external)
- $8 for basic RCA indoor antenna - necessary
- $30 for the wireless keyboard/trackpad - luxury item I indulged in, could probably get by with universal remote once set up + out of the way keyboard/mouse or VNC for heavyduty computer tasks
- $30 for the broadcom crystal HD pci express card - necessary for my underpowered 2007 mac mini (assuming it works... fingers crossed)
- $65 for another Netgear powerline adapter for the HDHomerun - could probably have worked around this, somehow, but this was the most aesthetically pleasing solution for me. Everything else in the house except my desktop PC uses 200 Mb powerline ethernet (the incoming cable line for the modem happens to be right next to my desk so I'm plugged in right into my router).

so I've spent $238 so far. That with being given a 2007 Mac Mini and a new, unused Windows 7 Home Premium license for free, and using a free PVR solution (either WMC or MediaPortal, haven't tested either yet with the Crystal HD card).

Also keep in mind I didn't actually need all this if I only cared about OTA TV watching and recording. If you have an XBox 360 hooked up to your HDTV and a decent Win7 PC elsewhere in the house, all you really need is the tuner and antenna. I went with the mac mini htpc because it was "free" (although you see the price tag already going up, with wireless gadgets, etc... ), it will allow us to do supplement OTA TV with internet TV stuff, and because I like to futz around with it.

What year Mac Mini did you buy? Anything 2009 and afterwards and you should be ok for 1080 playback. Definitely the 2010 and 2011.

Thanks for the input. $238 doesn't seem that bad at all...I figured you'd be closer to $400 for some reason.

I ordered the Mini through a rewards program that my company offers...so 2011, 2.5 ghz, 8gb ram, 500gb ATA HD, 6630M. Really looking forward to getting everything up and running.

Not sure where to put this but Boxee has the LiveTV dongle available now

http://www.boxee.tv/livetv

Since I will be in San Diego for 3 months in Feb. I ordered this and will use my Boxee Box out there for entertainment purposes.. seems like a handy way to pull in some LiveTV and watch through the Boxee.

It's kind of strange than in my perusing this forum I see no mention of the single best piece of multimedia software out there: XBMC.

Overlap12 wrote:

It's kind of strange than in my perusing this forum I see no mention of the single best piece of multimedia software out there: XBMC.

I think people have mentioned it... I certainly used it quite a bit on my old Xbox back in the days.. but I always struggled getting it to play nice with my Harmony remote.. I've never tried it on my Apple TV and I've never tried getting my Apple TV to work with my Harmony as well.

Wife and I purchased a 70 year old house that's never been updated so before we move in we'll need to redo the electrical, bath and kitchen among other things. Since so much of the living area will be torn up I'm thinking I'd like to take the time to move the HTPC equipment to another room. Ideally all that would remain in the living area is a wall mounted TV with a powered speaker underneath.

I've been looking at iRule as the remote and perhaps the Global Cache iTach IP2IR with an emitter for the cable box. For local video and audio I'm thinking of either streaming or hardwiring from a mac mini / NAS to the TV / speakers via an Apple TV2. Getting the broadcast video from the cable box to the TV would would require HDMI to ethernet.

Does anyone have experience with HDMI to ethernet and do you like it?

Turning the TV on and off plus switching inputs between the HTPC and cable box are throwing me a curve ball. A IR HDMI switch with an emitter from the iTach could take care of the later but I'm still stuck on the former. It would be great to operate the entire system from a smartphone / tablet but I'm not sure how to accomplish this.

The TV is a Samsung LN46B650 from 2009. There's a RS-232 port on the back but I can't find a definitive answer as to wether a device exists that can allow the TV to be controlled over IP. The TV also has a RJ45 jack to allow it access to the internet for its painfully slow widgets - which we never use - two USB ports and an Ex-Link port.

Suggestions?

Usually if there's an RS232 port, you can do home automation style control of consumer electronics. You just have to find the codes and an automation controller of some type (Crestron, etc).

I'd look around at www.remotecentral.com .

Just thought I'd post an update.

So to recap, since deciding to cut the cable cord, we went through several stages:
1. Use my Win7 PC to stream media to TV through XBox as extender. Was okay in the beginning, but there was just something incredibly laggy about the experience that made it nigh unusable.
2. Roku box. It's nice for what it is, but far too limited for my tastes.
3. Mac Mini (mid 2007 model) as HTPC/XBMC player + HomeRunHD TV Tuner. Actually was incredibly nice HW form factor-wise. Installed Win7 on it and it was great, except that the graphics card can't handle 1080 (i or p) and can't be upgraded (this is needed because the OTA HD signals are mostly 1080i). I tried adding in a Broadcom CrystalHD card, but realized after the fact that it only works for applications written to take advantage of it. That does not include WMC and I could not get the PVR function in XBMC to work.

So I just got a little bonus at work, so I built myself an HTPC that can handle anything. Here's the partlist I used:

HTPC Case: SILVERSTONE ML03B
CPU: Core I3 2105
MB: GIGABYTE GA-B75M-D3V
PSU: ANTEC Earthwatts 380W
RAM: CORSAIR 4GB
SSD: INTEL 60 GB SSD ($44 after rebate! Holy cow!)
HDD: WD Caviar Green 2TB
Optical: ASUS DVD-W 24B1ST
CPU Fan: SCYTHE Shuriken Rev 3
Case Fans: ENERMAX UC-8EB 80mm x4

Already have a Logitech Harmony remote, but picked up a cheap IR receiver to use with it.

Put it all together yesterday and it works absolutely wonderfully. Of course now I have to redo XBMC and all the media scraping blah blah... but it will be worth it. The case is really nice. Well maybe not beautiful if you have it out somewhere and you obsess over the beauty of your components, but it looks like a nice media component for putting in a cabinet/under the TV. It is pretty tight space-wise inside, but I just went slow and took care to stuff wires in unused spaces and it worked out fine first time.

Wow that SSD is soooooo nice... Now I want one for my Desktop PC. It's crazy when you reboot or turn on and you're in Windows in like 5-7 seconds. Absolutely insane. And for $45 I couldn't say no.

The only "gotcha" I encountered was that I didn't really pay attention to the audio connection. The Mac Mini had a nice SPDIF/optical out port that I just plugged right into my receiver, and just sorta thought I'd do the same here, but didn't realize til later that the motherboard I picked only has analog out. So right now I've just got an old RCA/red-white cable going to the receiver. It's ok but it seems to lack the punch of the digital out. Was going to pick up a ASUS Xonar, I've heard good things about the $30 version, but couldn't find one that has a low-profile bracket (a must for any expansion port in this particular HTPC case). So I ordered this card and it should arrive later this week.

I could have put a BD player in it, and I might down the road, but just didn't bother for the time being, we don't really have that many BD disks.

Love the fact that the HTPC is basically the only device we need to use now. Just that and our BDplayer hooked up to the receiver/HDTV. I was worried at first about the wife/child factor but they took to it pretty easily. XBMC is definitely very classy and provides a great interface. WMC native on the HTPC is very snappy and responsive, unlike the experience through the extender and without the worry of playing games on my desktop PC interfering with the recording of TV.

Was a fun project and the end result is everything I was hoping.

Khoram wrote:

1. Use my Win7 PC to stream media to TV through XBox as extender. Was okay in the beginning, but there was just something incredibly laggy about the experience that made it nigh unusable.

Weird. I run 4 Xboxes fed from a virtually ancient PC (e8500 on a 9300 Nvidia chipset) that runs 7 tuners of HD throughout the house over ethernet, powerline ethernet, and 5Ghz Wireless N. My extenders work great, other than the guide on it and the host HTPC have gotten a bit slow at times after adding the cablecard tuners (with hundreds more channels).

With the SSD prices dropping so fast lately I'm considering trying an SSD as the main drive (separate recording drive) to see if that would improve the guide situation. But the guide being slow isn't a constant thing, and it's really no more than 3-4 seconds even when it lags on first load.

Yeah I don't know what to say, but WMC through my XBox, both plain vanilla and with MediaPortal were just unusably, painfully slow. Not sure what the issue is. I'm also using 200Mb powerline ethernet that has no other issues. Anyway, I also had issues recording on the desktop box when playing games, so having a dedicated HTPC eliminates that headache as well so I'm happy.