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primesuspect
The Curator of Delightful Experiences Admin, D&D Supernerd, Supporter, Expo Attendee
Icrontic — Home of the Big Beef Burrito since 8-8-2000, fool. A Short-Media community © 2003–2013. Powered with <3 from Vanilla & WordPress.
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Actually, this looks really solid, seems like a great solution at a reasonable price that has all the bases covered. I'm not really a TV guy though, any TV I watch is streamed via Hulu & Netflix, there's a lot of overlap here with what my system does but definitely to a whole new level.
Just throw a decent THX sound system on that box and enjoy. Best investment my roommate has made to our place.
I use several plugins, including Media Browser. It's a little more robust and customizable than the integrated movie browser.
When I have some time, I was thinking about putting together an article for customizing WMC, including launching Hulu and other apps from within WMC, editing your menu, playing MKV files, and more.
http://homepage.eircom.net/~rock2002/Blog/v7-WMP11-MKV-MKA.reg
It would be good to know what "end-user features" it can and cannot support (like: watch & record digital & analog TV from cable, over the air and internet; handle 1080p video; recording can be done on schedule; play CD, DVD & BlueRay disks; record CD & DVD; video output via HDMI, DVI, VGA, or component; audio output via HDMI, optical digital, stereo miniplug, or 7.1 miniplugs; handle simultaneously 2 sources to 2 outputs; minimize number of cables between components; control by multi-component remote control; operate under very low power when inactive; and what else?). I saw a $200 machine that can meet all of my current requirements (but not all that I have listed here).
The Lynx platform looks promising for HTPC in 2011. But I don't think I'd wait that long.
The TV Tuner card does come with a remote, don't know if its multifunction or just PC. I'd also factor in a wireless keyboard/mouse, and possibly an XBOX 360 controller for PC, might be able to control Media Player with this controller, etc.
Mine is a small old HP box I bought from a client for $75 with a no name motherboard, 40GB IDE hard disk, and Athlon X2 4800+. I used an Antec Neo 500 for a quiet PSU, 2GB of DDR2, Zalman CNPS7000b-Cu, and a gigabit NIC all from from my parts bin, then bought an HD4350 from Newegg for $20 after mail in rebate. Assuming you have storage elsewhere on the network, this is all you need for a rockin' HTPC. The case is not attractive, but my home theater setup has a cabinet. You also need a splitter and probably an AC3 filter, but yes, easy.
Best part is if I want to watch tv and do work I can drag the window over to my main monitor and make it smaller. Also, a guide on getting playing mkv files would be amazing. And as far as netflix is concerned. I was less than impressed with their selection so I canceled my trial with them.
I also use metabrowser as a metadata manager and have edited the Media Browser config file so that actor images from metabrowser show up in Media Browser.
Getting MKV to play in Media Center is pretty easy. Install the Haali splitter, install AC3 filter, do the registry edit Nate linked to above. If you're running some sort of codec pack, you probably won't need to do anything other than the registry edit, but codec packs are usually more harm than good IMO, and pretty much unnecessary in Windows 7.
Everybody has their opinions, but I personally prefer transparency to absolutely inundating the site with ads. I'd rather do less ads and more affiliate marketing personally, brother... but somebody's gotta pay the bills. Is it going to be you?
Icrontic has some of the most non-intrusive ads I've ever seen on a site of this magnitude, and it achieves complete transparency in regards to how things like that are handled. Honesty is much more valuable to us than deception and money.
IC is one of a very small number of sites that I turn Adblock off for.
OCZ has been great to Icrontic, but honestly for an HTPC build you have no business overclocking. Any decent RAM will do; if you're spending over $70 w/o rebates for 4 GB you're doing it wrong.
In the interest of full disclosure, that $600 figure is a little misleading; it helps to have access to a well-stocked Goodwill. I picked up my Logitech Harmony 510 and bt8x8 TV tuner there for like $20 total. Yeah, mine can't do Blu-Ray yet or tune ATSC over-the-air, but those features are coming.
Why spend close to $300 on a green 2TB hard drive when you chose a high-wattage quad core processor? Seagate desktop 2TB 7200.12 drives were $160 at Frys last weekend, have a better warranty, and have a design power of like 9W which you're not going to notice with that space heater you've got mounted on your motherboard.
I would also argue that Mythbuntu or XP with MediaPortal are still solid OS choices.
To me, this looks like $250 short of a pretty decent desktop gaming machine.
-drasnor :fold:
"High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is a form of digital copy protection developed by Intel Corporation to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across DisplayPort, Digital Visual Interface (DVI), High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), Gigabit Video Interface (GVIF), or Unified Display Interface (UDI) connections.
... For DVI interfaces, HDCP is optional."
But if I wanted to build another computer to hook to my TV, this would be nice.
Oh and I have the tuner card that is mentioned. works great.