Media Centre Musings (Part 2 – The Plan)

This post is part one of a five-part series. Skip to related posts:

Contrary to parting comments in my last post concerning my plans for a media centre, I have not posted anything about it for several weeks. In fact, I have not posted anything about it for months.

Let’s change that, shall we?

So, what’s been happening?

Since I last posted, a few things have come to be plainly obvious concering my previous thoughts about HTPCs.

My old hardware isn’t going to cut it.
I probably won’t be bothered to setup Arch Linux.
I can fix both of these problems, and save myself headache in the future, quite easily.

Hardware

My old gaming PC is too cumbersome for 1080p playback. Unfortunately, despite the (relatively) powerful graphics card, it will not accelerate the decoding of HD content. The CPU will be left to this task, and it’s not quite fast enough for 1080p, let alone 1080p decoding, while encoding another stream, while acting as a file server.

Therefore, I have decided on the following build:

Asus P5N73-AM Intel Mainboard
Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200/2.5Ghz/2MB CACHE/800FSB/LGA775
Corsair 2GB (2x 1GB Kit) Value Select PC-5300 (667MHz)
MSI GF9400GT 512M DDR2 PCI-E Low Profile
2x Western Digital 1TB SATAII HDD 32M Cache Green Power
Antec Micro Fusion 350 HTPC Case with Remote 350W PSU

Total cost of the above hardware as at the writing date is $807; with the majority of the cost coming with the case, which is $242. I will re-use the USB HDTV adapter I already have, and may buy another if watching and recording TV at the same time is required.

Software

Arch Linux is too much effort for me now. I recently installed Ubuntu 9.04 onto my laptop and replaced the Arch installation on there, much to my great amusement. I realised that half the time I spent being a ‘Linux enthusiast’ on my laptop was because I had to set up some new thing, upgrade some other thing or (less often, admittedly) troubleshoot some thing in order to get done whatever basic computing task I wanted to get done. I didn’t like this at all, I realised, and put Ubuntu on there, which comes (mostly) with sane defaults and allows me to use my computer for actually getting work done, without thinking about how I was going to enable some functionality I required beforehand.

In this vein, I am thinking I’ll make use of either MythBuntu or Boxee (or both) on my HTPC, simply because I do not wish to play, I just want things to work.

Do I really need this?

I’ll only buy all of the above if I can see a definite use for it. My housemates, at present, seem fine using my standard desktop system to watch DVDs and play music. The HTPC will no doubt give me a nicer way to interact with my media, and also will provide me and my housemates a reliable file server for backups. As I have clearly defined the roles of my three computers now (laptop = anything not games, desktop = games, and HTPC+fileserver = entertainment), I need a place now to back up work and other important files from my laptop and gaming PC.

The cost of the system is somewhat prohibitive; I could buy a cheap case but it wouldn’t sit well with me. Perhaps I can ask for some financial assistance from housemates as they will be using the system too. Though that only provides for arguments in the future when leases end and people move. It’s easier in that sense if I pay for it and own it. That way, it’s all mine, always.

Add to the above the fact that we don’t even have a television: currently, we’re making use of my old 22″ monitor. Apparently we’re getting a larger CRT TV, but what would be the point of HD content there? The intent is that with a “cheap” HD-capable HTPC, you are saving money on buying the HDTV to accompany it. Though, I don’t watch enough TV to warrant buying one… so it seems rather pointless, in the end.

It’s food for thought at least.

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Media Centre Musings (Part 2 – The Plan),” an entry on if it's owən

Published:: 05.11.09 / 3pm

Category:: Blog

michael 05.11.09 / 3pm

over the last week i have been playing with boxee it seems pretty great. although i haven’t really used it too much since its more practical to just double click on the video i want to watch from the file browser, select the song i want to listen to in rhythmbox… but if i were to have a spare computer connected to my non existant lcd tv i would definitely make use of boxee.

although after reading your post i will be sure to check out mythbuntu

e l i 06.17.09 / 3pm

Nice one, In the middle of building one myself but personally I’d go for a Sempron over the Pentium D, in fact anything other than the intel stuff. Paired with a 790G motherboard and the right stuff you should have an idle in the vicinity of 40W – maybe less.

Unless you don’t care about wasting power :P

eese

Owen 06.19.09 / 12pm

Thanks for the heads up, but! Have you seen anything on the new nVidia ION platform? It’s basically an Intel Atom + integrated GeForce 9xxx low-power GPU, chipset, WiFi etc. You can buy mini-ITX boards with everything on it (just add RAM) and have yourself a whole system whose power usage tops out around 40W ;-)

e l i 06.19.09 / 10pm

Hmm, I was having a look at them. IMO, would be good for a front-end system but they are pretty costly to begin with at nearly $300. Depends on the purpose of course.

For me I’m looking at having 3 tuners but I’ll probably have the storage mounted over iSCSI to my filer. Changed my mind on the Sempron – found a Athlon X2 4850e with a TDP of 45W bringing it to a similar league of the Sempron but far more powerful, I hope enough to record 2 programs at once. Any idea on that?

But I really like that case you picked out looks good, I might have to go with one of them. Where abouts did you source that?

Sorry for the long comment

Owen 06.21.09 / 1pm

Umart stock the Antec cases.

I think the dual-core N330 version of the ION platform should be enough for me – it’s “only” 1.6Ghz, but I have used these Atom systems before, and a standard single-core 1.6Ghz can play back 720p unaccelerated just fine. As for your question, if you read the very old doco on MythTV, they say that an 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 is “just enough” to record and play back HD content by its lonesome. It depends on your space requirements; with digital television you can dump the MPEG2 direct to disk without any transcoding on the fly. It’s pretty big, though with hard disk prices these days, who cares?

Aside from recording the odd show, mine will mainly be for watching television and media sourced from elsewhere.

With the cost of $385 for the ION mini-ITX board + $100 for 4Gb of RAM (its only $30 more for 4Gb than 2Gb, so why not?) plus the case, it works out cheaper than my previous Intel build, but not sure how it compares to your Athlon X2 system. Will investigate!

Are you planning on using Linux, or are you going to succumb to the corporates? :-P

e l i 06.25.09 / 8am

The corporates? I thought MythTV only ran on nix?

I read the doco on the flight back last night, for sure what you want to do the atom will give you plenty of grunt but you’ve already worked that out. Mine will be more of a central media hub where I’ll probably look at having a atom based front end for the bedroom and outdoors.

Based on the documentation I’ll probably have the following
Athlon X2 4550e
780G MB
4/8GB ram – Not sure if more ram will help
ATI 4350 GC – Has HDMI and 8CH LPCM passthru
I’ve got a couple of 146GB 15K SAS disks which i’ll use as the intermediate storage between that and the SAN.

I’m hoping that i’ll have enough go to record 2 channels and playback on multiple front-ends (Not that I have to, but why not)

I’m thinking of having a bluray burner for playback and copying to disk but I haven’t found much information on this yet.

As for the case will you be using the “micro” one? it looks pretty swell.

Owen 06.25.09 / 10am

MythTV does run on *nix; I was asking if you were going to use … something Microsoft.

Nice setup, especially the disks! Unfortunately for me, in a townhouse, I really have no place to put a dedicated server where noise is not an issue. Whatever I build must be self-contained and quiet.

From anecdotal evidence only, I would judge that system more than capable of recording two channels and playback simultaneously.

Bluray … the bane of all *nix-based solutions. At present the only way to get Bluray playback is by dumping the entire disc to your drive and juggling with the content-protection keys which are periodically updated. In short: there is no way you can have a *nix-based HTPC playing back Bluray without hassle. You will require some technical knowledge (or a very well thought out script) to “automate” it.

And yes, the 350 Micro is probably what I’ll go with. It is the cheapest, but I can’t see what benefit the more expensive models provide to me – a control knob on the front? What is the point?

e l i 06.25.09 / 10am

Microsoft is for nubs, it gives me the shits, why oh why does it insist on paging – I’ve got 16GB of ram and after boot it’ll have 500mb of page file in use, WHY??. I just hope Win7 will be better, not that I spend much time in windows anyway. It also seems to have trouble scheduling across processors/cores, or maybe I’m just setting it up wrong.

I saw that knob, what the hell could it possibly do??

I want the micro but I’m not sure if i’ll be able to get the hardware I want into it, which blows since the bigger ones are ridiculously priced.

I thought there was going to be trouble with Blu-ray, I’ve got a separate player but it would have been nice just to have one box for media sources.

On the noise issue, I’m hoping that by having this system and the main storage separated, I can have it pretty quiet, the 15K disks I’m not sure how loud they will be but I have a couple in my main computer and I can’t hear them. Lounge room will be different obviously, will have to see. The less fans the better.

When are you planning on building yours? Any opinion on the Mythbuntu distro?

Owen 06.25.09 / 10pm

I’ll build mine when I have a real purpose for it … currently we’re sporting an awesome 1999-technology CRT TV of some description, so at the moment there’s really no point.

That isn’t to say I won’t have a geek indulgence session and go out and buy it all anyway, but I’ll let you know when that happens.

No opinion on Mythbuntu, but if it’s anything like the Ubuntu it’s based on, it should be pretty damn good.