The HTPC (Home Theatre PC) Ask-All Thread

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Hey gang,

As time and technology march on, more and more of us seem to be heading toward a holistic solution in the media room — the HTPC. I've seen a lot of threads pop up lately asking various questions about how to get certain things to work, what is the best program for "x", etc., so I thought it would be a good idea to try and capture those all in one place. So do you have a questions about Hulu? Want to know how to integrate plugins into Media Center? Want to know if you should be running 0-255 or 15-235 into your TV? Need help (God help us) choosing codecs? Ask it here!

I'll start:

Does anyone know an easy way to convert ripped .sup subtitles to a format insertable into a .mkv container, like say .srt? My Google-fu is failing me on this one.

I'm going to answer my own question here: BDsup2sub. Although I still haven't figured out how to delineate forced subtitles from the whole thing (like in the Godfather II where they speak in Italian for like five minutes). Hmm...

I know this has been asked/answered else where, but to keep this thread alive, I'll ask here.

What components are most important to spend money on when building an HTPC? I would assume video card, but what about RAM and CPU?

Would onboard sound that is 5.1, be just as good as a dedicated sound card outputting to a AV Receiver/Surround Sound set up? Or get a video card that outputs audio over the DVI/HDMI port and run it through the TV to the receiver?

I don't see that a video card requires a lot of money, just a smart purchase. Nvidia's cards have done really well for a while now with the PureVideo support. Something reasonably decent should be able to handle any effects in your frontend GUI of choice. I'd rather spend the difference there toward a better sound card. I've only cursorily looked into this, but I believe if you want to have Blu Ray playback the audio decoding will have to be done on the PC so you'll want quality DACs.

Actually I just found something saying that PowerDVD has added bitstream over HDMI 1.3a support so if your receiver is so equipped you might be okay.

Tigerbill wrote:

What components are most important to spend money on when building an HTPC? I would assume video card, but what about RAM and CPU?

It depends on exactly what you want to do with your setup. Unless you're planning on doing a lot of gaming, video card power isn't even remotely important—remember that all menus, etc. are still in 2D. CPU is much moreso, as transcoding, decoding, etc. are all CPU-intensive and all scale very well with multiple cores. If you're focusing more on TV/Movie watching, I'd agree 100% with LiquidMantis in that the correct video card choice is important, but cheaper than you think. I personally really like the newer ATI cards right now, as even the cheaper ones can actually bitstream multi-channel LPCM audio through to your processor, mitigating the need for a separate sound card. Nvidia isn't quite there yet with that particular technology, but I'm sure they'll catch up soon.

Would onboard sound that is 5.1, be just as good as a dedicated sound card outputting to a AV Receiver/Surround Sound set up? Or get a video card that outputs audio over the DVI/HDMI port and run it through the TV to the receiver?

Sound is still the trickiest part of the HTPC equation. It depends on the codecs you want to use (Blu-ray audio? AAC? PCM/LPCM? Or typical DVD AC-3 and DTS?), the outputs with which you're equipped, etc. For instance, if you only have S/PDIF outs, or even worse, analog, on your "HD audio" setup on your mobo, I'd steer very, very clear of it. There's a ton of interference inside a computer box and you don't ever want the D/A conversion to happen inside of it. S/PDIF transmits digitally, but is pretty locked down (you can only transmit stereo LPCM or 5.1 AC-3/DTS, no AAC, etc.). Better is to have either a video card or dedicated audio card transmitting audio digitally through HDMI. Since you're just passing a digital signal, there's no difference between the two, so I'd stick with audio over a video card*, instead of a discrete audio card.

As to passing it through your TV to the receiver, remember that HDMI is weirdly and stupidly copy-protected, so that equation may get tricky. TVs are set up to only be able to digitally output a stereo signal received through broadcast, so that you can't record surround broadcasts over-the-air. Some TVs have problems even with this and will only pass stereo audio from any source, even though they should be able to pass 5.1 on un-protected sources. So it's much, much better to go into a receiver first, if possible. Hope that helps....this is still a new and confusing world for everyone.

* the exception here is the ASUS Xonar card, which can, in fact, bitstream TrueHD and DTS-MA tracks to a receiver. However, it is a serious PITA to get it to work from my understanding, so unless you're planning on watching a ton of Blu-rays and have a surround setup that can make use of it, don't bother.

Wow you threw a lot of alphabet soup up there Minarchist. Let me try to break down what I'm looking for on smaller chunks.

As far as gaming on it goes, I'm still torn, I didn't like the way my Studio XPS 16 looked when it was hooked to my TV, I might see if my friend can bring over his new gaming rig and see if it looks better. Long story short this would be mostly for internet TV/ movies. I currently use Play On to stream to my Xbox, but I have a feeling that Hulu directly to the TV would run better.

Audio: My current receiver doesn't have HDMI on it, and I'm not looking to replace it just yet. I don't really have surround sound set up yet, but am looking at getting some 5.1 headphones with in the next couple of months. The Trittons I linked too could be switched between my Xbox and HTPC if needed.

MY TV is a Sharp Aquos 42", the one before the current gen, I forget which model #.

Tigerbill wrote:

Wow you threw a lot of alphabet soup up there Minarchist. Let me try to break down what I'm looking for on smaller chunks.

Sorry, it does tend to get a little ludicrously and unnecessarily complex. Hopefully within a few years some standards will become, well, standard.

As far as gaming on it goes, I'm still torn, I didn't like the way my Studio XPS 16 looked when it was hooked to my TV, I might see if my friend can bring over his new gaming rig and see if it looks better. Long story short this would be mostly for internet TV/ movies. I currently use Play On to stream to my Xbox, but I have a feeling that Hulu directly to the TV would run better.

No gaming? Check out the ATI HD 4350. They're like $40 on Amazon and will perform incredibly well in that environment. Make sure you buy from a company that includes the ATI DVI-to-HDMI dongle, though, otherwise you'll have to buy it separately (not a big deal, they're $5).

Audio: My current receiver doesn't have HDMI on it, and I'm not looking to replace it just yet. I don't really have surround sound set up yet, but am looking at getting some 5.1 headphones with in the next couple of months. The Trittons I linked too could be switched between my Xbox and HTPC if needed.

So I take it your mobo has optical out, then? If so, the easiest solution would be to run that to your receiver, and HDMI video to the TV. I know the Aquos' can do 1:1 pixel mapping, although they call it something weird. "dot by dot" mode, I think. Your PC may look like total crap when you first plug it in; but select the 1:1 mode on your TV, make sure your PC is outputting the TV's native resolution (likely 1920x1080; hopefully not 1366x768), and try to calibrate brightness and contrast as best you can (the Pixar DVDs do well, if you have a DVD player on your HTPC). That should make things look considerably better. It should look as good as any computer monitor. If not, we can travel down paths like color gamut, gamma, pixel type, etc., but you shouldn't need it.

Those headphones would be bought primarily for the 360 which does have optical out. Would getting a mobo with optical be something I should lean towards?

Since I know this question will come up, the budget would be $600-750.

That 1:1 thing you were talking about, maybe that's why I didn't like my laptop on my TV, even though I was outputting to 1920x1080, it seemed blurry. I might try that setting on the TV tonight and see if it looks better. If it works that could throw the whole HTPC out the window, as I can keep using my laptop for it. Although I don't like to stream stuff to the Xbox, its just one more thing added to the chain to go wrong. I would prefer to have a dedicated box hooked to the TV that I could watch Hulu and such on, and still be able to use my laptop on my lap.

On that note, if we are just talking streaming internet content; I have a P4 2.0ghz box, with a 1gig of RAM just sitting, the video card is a GeForce 4 Ti4200 128mb. How would that work output to my TV? The reason I didn't talk about it earlier, is it's just below Play On's recommended min specs for CPU. If I'm just running it to the TV, I guess I don't need to worry about Play On's specs. A quick Google of the video card shows it is capable as far as resolution goes.

I'm not a stickler about noise, or about crystal clear picture on most things that I watch. I put up with the 360's jet engine, an HTPC can't be much louder than that, and my internet connection doesn't allow for me to stream many things in HD. Besides if I go with the headphones, outside noise would not be a problem, unless company was over and I couldn't use them.

I'd want quiet components for a htpc.

That's true, a mac's not a bad idea at that price. Just note that if you plan on doing much ripping/transcoding, there isn't a receiver or TV out there than can decode AAC, and it's hard to get the mac to want to work with much else.

But you can build a quite capable PC for that much nowadays, too. If you really want quiet, check out silentpcreview.com. I was an active poster over there for quite a while, and will still pop my head in from time to time. They're like GWJ in that you can have a cogent conversation with someone else, and they build PCs so quiet that you can't tell they're on even if you stick your head right next to the fans.

You don't need much to stream internet TV. MY iMac has a 9400M mobile gpu and it works fine. You can get a motherboard with it built-in for just north of $100. Or add the ATI 3400 that others mentioned. Add a cheap yet newer INtel core2 duo cpu and 2 gigs Ram at least and you're set.

Another thought - if you want a $600 htpc to stream internet tv then consider a Mac Mini.

Pr how about an ATV for $230 with a 160hd. You hack it and put Boxee on it. Presto! Hulu etc.

Minarchist wrote:

Just note that if you plan on doing much ripping/transcoding, there isn't a receiver or TV out there than can decode AAC, and it's hard to get the mac to want to work with much else.

I don't think that's accurate. You can get a Mac to work with anything. It's all about the software.

Also I don't think you need anything to decode AAC. That's the job of the Mac or pc or DVD player or ipod or Zune or whatever.

I do prefer to stay away from Mac's (that's a debate for another thread). Wouldn't be doing any ripping, as far as transcoding though.....probably.

So am I hearing that I shouldn't bother with my old P4 system, which is kind of what I figured.

To get this thread back on track, at least 2gigs of RAM and decent video card that outputs audio with video. What about CPU's, is it possible to have too much CPU, for internet streaming with maybe a Blu-ray drive added down the road? I'm not sure if I need to invest in another new disk format; I don't own/buy many movies, and don't plan on updating my collections unless I have too. Also I got burned by being an early HD-DVD adopter.

Minarchist wrote:

That's true, a mac's not a bad idea at that price. Just note that if you plan on doing much ripping/transcoding, there isn't a receiver or TV out there than can decode AAC, and it's hard to get the mac to want to work with much else.

I've been looking at getting a Mac mini as an HTPC. Could you explain more what you mean here?

No such thing as too much cpu.

and for the record, you don't have to run OS/X on a Mac Mini. You can run Windows 7 exclusively if you want to. ATV hacked with Boxee would be independent of OS/X also.

Maybe you want to consider a Ps3? Not sure how Hulu etc works on there, but you get a BR player and the Hd is swappable. And of course it plays those videogame things.

Tigerbill wrote:

To get this thread back on track, at least 2gigs of RAM and decent video card that outputs audio with video. What about CPU's, is it possible to have too much CPU, for internet streaming with maybe a Blu-ray drive added down the road? I'm not sure if I need to invest in another new disk format; I don't own/buy many movies, and don't plan on updating my collections unless I have too. Also I got burned by being an early HD-DVD adopter.

Honestly, if you aren't talking high-definition, pretty much any computer can get the job done; just find some way to get audio out of it. My 5-year-old Athlon 64 setup does great with DVDs and Hulu, with a $20 audio card. But if you're watching hi-def stuff, doing much transcoding, or gaming, I think a cheap quad-core and as much ram as you can cram into your machine helps. I just build a new Blu-ray HTPC and found good OCZ ram at <$100 for 8GB...and when transcoding that thing uses every bit of it.

Oh, and if you do start transcoding, storage. Lots and lots of storage. I've filled up 3 TB so far.

adam.greenbrier wrote:
Minarchist wrote:

That's true, a mac's not a bad idea at that price. Just note that if you plan on doing much ripping/transcoding, there isn't a receiver or TV out there than can decode AAC, and it's hard to get the mac to want to work with much else.

I've been looking at getting a Mac mini as an HTPC. Could you explain more what you mean here?

Aw, I've been replaced . I'll have to come up with another pithy idea.

If you're trying to maintain good signal fidelity through a multichannel setup, it's much preferable to run a digital signal to whatever receiver or pre/pro you're using to drive your speakers. *WARNING: ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE AHEAD* In my experience with trying to set up a mac as HTPC, I had a difficult time running digital signal along with video to any home theatre setup. The mac wants to store all audio as AAC, which means that's what you're reading from when you playback in realtime, which means in order to send a signal a receiver could actually read, you had to convert to something else (likely PCM) on the fly, which means processing latency and, over a 2-hour movie, sync issues. I was never able to find any good splitters, decoders, muxers, or any of that good stuff for OS X, especially not for higher-level audio codecs like TrueHD or DTS-MA. It may be out there, but by and large the HTPC community is all open-source, basement-driven developers and there are just a lot more people using PCs. There still isn't any good Blu-ray support for the mac (which is rumored to change with the next edition of iTunes). TV Tuners and recording from over-the-air broadcasts? Actually works pretty well on Mac, but is much more expensive than doing the same on PC. I dunno, there are some guys on AVS forum who have gotten it to work, but it seems to be a heck of a lot more work than using a PC (which is plenty of work itself).

If you run analog signal out of your computer, completely disregard my above statement. Or if you're mainly using it to convert stuff to watch on an iPod, or watch Hulu (which is already horribly compressed, so who cares about the audio?). Your mileage may vary.

It all depends on the software you are using Minarchist. OS/X (Core Audio) supports digital audio pass through.

Ok after playing with my laptop some more on the TV, I came to the conclusion that something in it can't keep up with online videos. I tried Hulu.com, Hulu desktop, and some downloaded videos: all stuttered to some extent on the TV. Ironically the same video watched through Play On to my 360 works great. So it looks like I will sick with Play On until I decide on/save for a HTPC.

Side Note: I finally found that "bit to bit" setting and it helped the blurriness some.

I'm skimming here, but Tom's Hardware just did a HTPC round up with mobo's featuring on-board video and almost all of them performed swimmingly in Blu-Ray codec playback. They were also only using $100 processors, and barely ever got above 25% cpu usage. It seems to me from that article that even a cheap processor and on-board video / audio would work out just fine. Then again, I didn't read that whole thing either.

Tigerbill wrote:

Ok after playing with my laptop some more on the TV, I came to the conclusion that something in it can't keep up with online videos. I tried Hulu.com, Hulu desktop, and some downloaded videos: all stuttered to some extent on the TV. Ironically the same video watched through Play On to my 360 works great. So it looks like I will sick with Play On until I decide on/save for a HTPC.

Side Note: I finally found that "bit to bit" setting and it helped the blurriness some.

Well, Hulu is widely known as one of the biggest resource hogs when it comes to video playback, so its not a surprise. In fact anything flash-based can cause a lot of trouble.

Faceless Clock wrote:

Well, Hulu is widely known as one of the biggest resource hogs when it comes to video playback, so its not a surprise. In fact anything flash-based can cause a lot of trouble.

I'm leaning towards my video card not liking the higher resolution, I used Mobility Modder to unlock some features. This is the only thing that makes sense. To me having to download, then transcode and send the video over wireless would be more resource intensive; than downloading it and letting the hardware video card display it directly to the TV.

trip1eX wrote:

It all depends on the software you are using Minarchist. OS/X (Core Audio) supports digital audio pass through.

Right, I got it to work with AC-3 eventually, but I never found anything that could support TrueHD or DTS-MA. Like I said, it was just my personal experience.

Tigerbill wrote:

I'm leaning towards my video card not liking the higher resolution, I used Mobility Modder to unlock some features. This is the only thing that makes sense. To me having to download, then transcode and send the video over wireless would be more resource intensive; than downloading it and letting the hardware video card display it directly to the TV.

It's my understanding that it's much more difficult to turn a laptop into a HTPC because even with a higher-end graphics card, it doesn't have its own discrete memory. It's a performance hit when processing, transcoding or decoding (two of which are happening during Hulu) that is higher than you'd think. I could be wrong, though.

That's good to see, Tomato! Hopefully even base-level comps will soon be able to run a home theater with ease. Now if we can just find a unified software solution that actually works...

Tigerbill wrote:
Faceless Clock wrote:

Well, Hulu is widely known as one of the biggest resource hogs when it comes to video playback, so its not a surprise. In fact anything flash-based can cause a lot of trouble.

I'm leaning towards my video card not liking the higher resolution, I used Mobility Modder to unlock some features. This is the only thing that makes sense. To me having to download, then transcode and send the video over wireless would be more resource intensive; than downloading it and letting the hardware video card display it directly to the TV.

Flash is cpu dependent afaik. Uses up 25% of my cpu power although I think it performs worse on the Mac than in Windows.

But any Core2Duo cpu will handle it fine.

Minarchist wrote:
trip1eX wrote:

It all depends on the software you are using Minarchist. OS/X (Core Audio) supports digital audio pass through.

Right, I got it to work with AC-3 eventually, but I never found anything that could support TrueHD or DTS-MA. Like I said, it was just my personal experience.

Plex works with DTS too as does other software.

There is support for TrueHD in VLC and Plex can transcode it down to DD 5.1 But probably better to rip a BR down to DD 5.1 beforehand.

But no HDMI equals no TrueHD I guess so I see where you are coming from. It won't pass through an optical port from what I read. DisplayPort can support it which is on new Macs, but not enabled in OS/X from what I could find.

trip1eX wrote:
Minarchist wrote:
trip1eX wrote:

It all depends on the software you are using Minarchist. OS/X (Core Audio) supports digital audio pass through.

Right, I got it to work with AC-3 eventually, but I never found anything that could support TrueHD or DTS-MA. Like I said, it was just my personal experience.

Plex works with DTS too as does other software.

There is support for TrueHD in VLC and Plex can transcode it down to DD 5.1 But probably better to rip a BR down to DD 5.1 beforehand.

But no HDMI equals no TrueHD I guess so I see where you are coming from. It won't pass through an optical port from what I read. DisplayPort can support it which is on new Macs, but not enabled in OS/X from what I could find.

That's good to know, though, thanks for the info! I do think that could change if/when Apple decides to add blu-ray support to iTunes.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

I'm skimming here, but Tom's Hardware just did a HTPC round up with mobo's featuring on-board video and almost all of them performed swimmingly in Blu-Ray codec playback. They were also only using $100 processors, and barely ever got above 25% cpu usage. It seems to me from that article that even a cheap processor and on-board video / audio would work out just fine. Then again, I didn't read that whole thing either.

Read that article last night, really insightful. Now I just need to get the credit card paid off, and my budget adjusted for school/car loans.

I got one of these the other day. It's an Acer Aspire Revo with a dual-core Atom 330 chip and nvidia ion.

I've got it running XP with XBMC as a front-end. It's pretty awesome.

Lester_King wrote:

I got one of these the other day. It's an Acer Aspire Revo with a dual-core Atom 330 chip and nvidia ion.

I've got it running XP with XBMC as a front-end. It's pretty awesome.

Nice! I haven't kept up with XBMC since my friend got rid of his modded original Xbox, how is it nowadays? How well/if at all does it play with online content, i.e. Hulu?

I've skimmed over some of this stuff, but a couple of basic pointers for A/V cleanliness are never to use the onboard video/audio. Minarchist implied this, but onboard audio cards tend to have an unacceptable amount of noise, especially on the very high and low frequencies. They also have a lot of a canned sound.

To add a new point, nobody has talked about cables. From what I understand about the way HDMI works, don't bother getting an expensive shielded cable. HDMI doesn't really accept interference the way analog cables do. Best Buy will try to sell you a ridiculously marked up $100+ Monster Cable, but I've found the $2 - $10 cables off of NewEgg to have the same clarity, and neither have any interference. If someone knows more about this than I do, please let me know.

For the audio cables (if you go towards surround sound), keep them away from power cables and make sure they're well shielded.

For my question: Has anyone found a way to use a 360 as your media server with less common codecs aside from TVersity? Like MKV holding an XviD and OGG audio? I tend to encode this way to keep all the tracks and subtitles, but to get it to play on a 360 I've been using TVersity to do real time transcoding. However, the quality is about 1/2 the original file or worse, depending on the file size and encoding details.

Would I just be best to build a dedicated HTPC? I've been holding off while I still live in apartmentland.

Free would be best, but I'm willing to pay for good live transcoding as long as someone here has tried it and likes it.

Have you tired Play On? It has a 2 week free trial then its a $40 one time fee. I like it infinitely more than Tversity, and you can get a plug in for it to stream Local Files, not sure if its compatible with the formats you listed, but I do know it works with QuickTime, FLV, and Mpeg. As far as quality retention I think its decent, but I'm not a stickler for that.

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