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Martytoof posted:What do you guys do about cable clutter? I tried to be incredibly neat and organized in my arrangement of cables and connectors but everything still comes out looking like a bird's nest. Main culprits are the IDE cables for my DVDRW and two IDE drives. SATA cables are no problem, but these flat IDE cables just seem to get in the way everywhere. Also, there are some power cables that are dragged around the case everywhichway but I guess there's not much to be done about that -Use zip ties to bundle excesss length on every cable -For the power cables, go under the motherboard (applies to IDE as well) or behind drive cages if they're long enough. -Fan cables and button/LED cables can be taped to the sides of the case. edit: Go to the silentpcreview gallery forum, open a dozen threads, and take a look at different cable ideas.
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Jul 10, 2008 19:31
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Kreez posted:Read through a couple pages of the threads on it at various message boards, and then see if that statement still applies.
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Jul 10, 2008 20:35
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Martytoof posted:What do you guys do about cable clutter? I tried to be incredibly neat and organized in my arrangement of cables and connectors but everything still comes out looking like a bird's nest. Main culprits are the IDE cables for my DVDRW and two IDE drives. SATA cables are no problem, but these flat IDE cables just seem to get in the way everywhere. Also, there are some power cables that are dragged around the case everywhichway but I guess there's not much to be done about that I was pretty hardcore with mine. I am using one of coolermaster's old, original HTPC cases which is think is amazing considering it cost 75 bucks when the closest competition was in the 200's. I used nothing but rounded cables that were as short as possible and routed flat on the edge of a support. I then took my power supply and removed all the excess connections. It was an old PSU I didn't care much about so I just cut it down till it had a single lead for the video card , one for the optical drive and 2 for the hard drives. Obviously if you have one of those detachable cable supplies this is a on issue
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Jul 11, 2008 00:02
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Crackbone posted:That's incredibly hit or miss, since what channels are encrypted is totally up to the provider and can change whenever they want. My provider, for instance, only has music channels unencrypted. Hell, some providers even encrypt the OTA channels, which is against FCC rules, but too few people notice/complain for it to matter. Well at the point that you basic cable already in your house and a hdtv with a QAM capable digital tuner built in, it is easy enough to check and see what channels you get without the cable box. Once you have the information you can make the decision whether it is worthwhile. Like I said in my previous post, in my own experience I get quite a few channels. No cost in trying it to find out... quote:It's a stretch to say PQ is going to be bad just because of that. Most of the reviews from people using it on AVS have been positive (at least PQ, not build quality so far). If anything the signal compression cable companies do on the signal before it hits your house does more damage. I've never used it, I'd just be surprised to see if it was really worth the hassle to capture HD this way. I guess if you have premium channels and your provider doesn't have DVR equipment it may make sense. But, as you pointed out, alot of cable HD streams are already compressed and take a big hit to PQ. Saying that the additional PQ hit would be a stretch seems dubious to me, I suppose you'd also advocate re-encoding lossily compressed audio as being not too bad; I guess it comes down to personal preference. But, suppose that comcast receives an mpeg2 master bit identical to what you'd get over ATSC broadcast, they recompress it to mpeg4, which your cable box recieves and decompresses to component analog, which then gets pulled into your electrically noisy computer over standard rca interconnects, then recompressing it to digital again using h.264. I'd want to see some of the captured video personally before endorsing the product to others, and as I said before I'd be surprised if the hit to PQ was not readily apparent. Which isn't me saying it is bad, since I haven't seen it myself, but your comments lead me to believe you haven't seen it either.
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Jul 11, 2008 01:55
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dfn_doe posted:Well at the point that you basic cable already in your house and a hdtv with a QAM capable digital tuner built in, it is easy enough to check and see what channels you get without the cable box. Once you have the information you can make the decision whether it is worthwhile. Like I said in my previous post, in my own experience I get quite a few channels. No cost in trying it to find out... True, I was coming from the perspective of somebody building a new box. HD tuners can still be pricey and it's a chunk to change to pay just to find out all you can get is 40 easy listening stations and a bad-reception OTA signal. quote:I've never used it, I'd just be surprised to see if it was really worth the hassle to capture HD this way. I guess if you have premium channels and your provider doesn't have DVR equipment it may make sense. But, as you pointed out, alot of cable HD streams are already compressed and take a big hit to PQ. Saying that the additional PQ hit would be a stretch seems dubious to me, I suppose you'd also advocate re-encoding lossily compressed audio as being not too bad; I guess it comes down to personal preference. But, suppose that comcast receives an mpeg2 master bit identical to what you'd get over ATSC broadcast, they recompress it to mpeg4, which your cable box recieves and decompresses to component analog, which then gets pulled into your electrically noisy computer over standard rca interconnects, then recompressing it to digital again using h.264. You're right, I haven't seen it either, and I agree that it's probably not worth the hassle - all the options for HD cable recording are massive pains in the rear end. I say the quality hit can't be that horrible just based on the fact that AVS members are usually howling rhesus monkeys when it comes to PQ, and that hasn't seemed to be a big complaint on the device (although they have a litany of other issues). But to say it's going to automatically be bad/unwatchable IS a stretch. And I hope nobody got the impression that I was endorsing using it - just listing the options available. Anybody who's trying to do this stuff without investigating it themselves is just asking for trouble. Crackbone fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Jul 11, 2008 |
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Jul 11, 2008 13:17
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Kreez posted:-Round off the IDE cables as much as possible by scrunching them together and duct taping. Or if you have steady hands, use an exacto knife to slice them into thirds and stack them on top of each other. Cleaner looking than just scrunching them. I'm about 4 for 8 lifetime on doing this without slicing into copper, but I always have 80 calbes lying around, so it's no big deal. Thanks for the suggestions. I destroyed one of my IDE cables so I just went and bought two rounded cables for $8, hopefully they help with some of the clutter. I'm going to ziptie that and the SATA cables into one small bundle. I'll be checking out the silentpcreview site, thanks! Edit: At the moment it looks like one of the loudest components I can hear is the VGA fan. I'll have to look at either replacing it or I don't know what 
some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jul 12, 2008 |
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Jul 11, 2008 18:47
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Is anyone here skilled with MeediOS? I'm having some issues and I'd love to chat with someone on AIM/IRC/whatever about it.
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Jul 12, 2008 00:48
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Alright, I recently purchased the parts and put together a blu-ray HTPC and everything went together perfectly without a hitch in terms of hardware. I got the ecs gf7100pvt-m3 with an e8400 from fry's (169.99 for both) so I used the board that came with it, and since the chipset is the nforce 630i with a 7100 gpu it is supposed to support HDCP. However, whenever I start playing in PowerDVD it gives me a hdcp connection failure and shuts down. So I was wondering, does anyone here know exactly how to trouble shoot this lovely rear end HDCP stuff? I have an HD3450 on the way but it took a little longer than I expected to ship here, and AnyDVD HD actually a) won't let you get the update required to play the movie I have (Batman Begins) when you're on a trial and b) is retarded expensive to buy just to use for 5 days. Oh, the connection is through DVI to HDMI on the tv, which is a samsung lnt4661f and it's windows XP. Edit: Man, what the gently caress; I decided to just try it over VGA and it plays the fbi warning, the wb logo and then the rating and then shows a spinning disc and sits at a black screen and freezes. What kind of hassle is this going to be to just watch purchased movies? Next-Gen fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Jul 12, 2008 |
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Jul 12, 2008 15:16
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Does anyone have experience with playing their video/audio files off of a network drive? I'm starting to draw out how I want to configure things and was thinking about having an always on PC that housed my files, and then my main HTPC/PC wouldn't need to be always on and have a bunch of drives installed into it. Example: I'd use gigabit network cards/router, and the file PC would have a low power usage processor and a few 1.5TB drives. Also, what OS would be recommended for the storage PC? The HTPC would be using Vista 32 bit Ultimate. Hardware raid or software raid? Uziel fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Jul 12, 2008 |
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Jul 12, 2008 17:13
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I bought a Hauppauge 1800 for my HTPC, but sadly, did not get the one with the remote and the IR receiver. I have a Harmony 550 that I'd like to use to change channels on the PC, but for the life of me, I can't find anywhere that sells a USB IR receiver on its own. The only thing close is to get the Microsoft media center remote, but I'd rather not get a remote that I don't plan on using. Anyone know where to get a cheap reliable IR receiver? fnkels fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Jul 13, 2008 |
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Jul 12, 2008 18:52
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Uziel posted:Does anyone have experience with playing their video/audio files off of a network drive? I'm starting to draw out how I want to configure things and was thinking about having an always on PC that housed my files, and then my main HTPC/PC wouldn't need to be always on and have a bunch of drives installed into it. I bought a dedicated NAS box to house all my media (ReadyNAS NV+), but you can use anything really. And by "anything", I really mean that. The network bandwidth for high def video is nothing compared to what your gigabit network can provide. My NAS in RAID5 is quite slow, with 10MB/sec sometimes being all it can push (it varies, and I've no idea why) to my Vista boxes, and I get no dropped frames with my 1080 stuff. [edit: 10MB/sec is what I can write to it at. Reads are more like 20MB/sec or more.] I went with RAID5 just for the data protection, seeing as I've got terabytes of data. It's also an expandable RAID5, so if I want to put bigger drives in I just need to swap them out 1 by 1 and once the last disk is replaced it automagically lets me use all the new free space. This saves you from the common household RAID5 issue of needing to move masses of data off it if you need to expand and recreate the RAID, and not having the space to do it. In my box, that feature is called XRAID. I presume this is available on a FreeNAS box or something if it interests you. Gromit fucked around with this message at 09:16 on Jul 14, 2008 |
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Jul 13, 2008 01:43
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Is there a HTPC frontend that's what I'm looking for? I pretty much need something really basic: -Simple to set up, I have no need for plugins and scripting and stuff like that. -I don't need PVR or tv guide functionality -Ability to do everything with folders instead of needing to sync a library -Support for windows shares without messing around with drive mappings -Support for streaming video channels. I used to use the program that comes with nVidia's PureVideo decoder, but it's been out of development for a long time. XBMC for Windows is really, really close (and surprisingly it runs fine on my htpc's geforce 4 mx), but the streaming video support is broken. I also wanted to try MediaPortal but it won't even let me install it.
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Jul 13, 2008 17:43
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I am in the process of piecing together parts for an htpc. I want to be able to do things like record live tv in HD while I am watching something on bluray. From what I understand, the processor is the most important part in all of this. I've seen a few places recommend a quad core for heavy encoding like this. If I am only going to be encoding two sources at a time, am I going to see any benefit from a quad core over a dual core?
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Jul 13, 2008 20:17
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O.E.T.K.E.R. posted:
If I remember correctly MediaPortal might require that Microsoft's .Net 3.5 software be installed for it to work. .Net 3.5 can be downloaded from here. There is also a thread that is dedicated to HTPC Front End's here. You could possibly get more help there as well if installing .Net 3.5 doesn't work either.
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Jul 14, 2008 01:02
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Uziel posted:Does anyone have experience with playing their video/audio files off of a network drive? I'm starting to draw out how I want to configure things and was thinking about having an always on PC that housed my files, and then my main HTPC/PC wouldn't need to be always on and have a bunch of drives installed into it. I play all my media off a shared folder on my linux desktop. 720p content plays over a 100Mbit network without any issues. I believe I've watched one or two 1080p videos over the network, there were one or two times where it stuttered, but that may be related to a codec issue I had. If you like, I can play another 1080p video and verify that. As for wireless, anything HD is poo poo.
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Jul 14, 2008 05:15
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I stream 720p from my iMac to my 360 all the time. I'm not too big up on HD formats and codecs so I'm not sure whether the fact that it's WMV 720p makes it any more wifi friendly, but I've never had a problem streaming that stuff over 54mbit.
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Jul 14, 2008 05:34
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Martytoof posted:I stream 720p from my iMac to my 360 all the time. I'm not too big up on HD formats and codecs so I'm not sure whether the fact that it's WMV 720p makes it any more wifi friendly, but I've never had a problem streaming that stuff over 54mbit. IIRC VC-1 1080p bluray movies are about 20Mb/s. You'd be hard pressed to find a 1080p source that would require much more than that.
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Jul 14, 2008 07:44
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Ashex posted:I play all my media off a shared folder on my linux desktop. 720p content plays over a 100Mbit network without any issues. I believe I've watched one or two 1080p videos over the network, there were one or two times where it stuttered, but that may be related to a codec issue I had. If you like, I can play another 1080p video and verify that. I used to have a 100Mbit switch and high def playback of 1080 was stuttering a bit. I bought a cheap gigabit switch (<$100) to replace it and the stuttering went away. Nothing else was changed, so I can only assume bandwidth was the issue for me.
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Jul 14, 2008 09:19
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Thanks, that's good news. I looked at some of the NAS solutions Gromit, but I think I'm just going to build my own based on an Intel Atom mobo/processor combo.
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Jul 14, 2008 11:26
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NotJoe posted:If I am only going to be encoding two sources at a time, am I going to see any benefit from a quad core over a dual core? To answer my own questions, after doing a few days of research: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cores-rampage,1316-14.html quote:The future belongs to HD content. If we take our benchmarks into consideration you can no longer get by without a quad-core processor. Test results with the software packages Main Concept with H.264 encoding and the WMV-HD conversion make this very clear. We noticed performance jumps of up to 80% when compared to the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed (2.66 GHz). A Core 2 Quadro at 2.66 GHz and higher is the answer for HD video (editing and rendering) at full HD resolution (1920x1080). So it appears that a quad core processor will net a huge benefit in encoding over dual cores. They do use more power, of course.
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Jul 14, 2008 17:42
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Uziel posted:but I think I'm just going to build my own based on an Intel Atom mobo/processor combo. Yeah, that's why I mentioned FreeNAS. There's no reason not to build your own, unless you have specific needs that require something prebuilt. I wanted low power usage, a neat looking little unit, and wanted to buy myself a new toy.
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Jul 15, 2008 00:19
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NotJoe posted:To answer my own questions, after doing a few days of research: For HD video editing, which was already a given.
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Jul 15, 2008 00:41
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Gromit posted:Yeah, that's why I mentioned FreeNAS. There's no reason not to build your own, unless you have specific needs that require something prebuilt. I wanted low power usage, a neat looking little unit, and wanted to buy myself a new toy.
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Jul 15, 2008 00:59
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Has anyone had a chance to play with the Acer Aspire X1200-U1520A yet? I've been Google searching like mad but haven't found much in the way of a product review yet. Just thought this would be a good place to see if anyone had heard anything. http://www.cybertheater.com/acer-x1200-sff-desktop/
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Jul 15, 2008 03:00
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What's the cheapest way to use a remote control to control Media Player Classic. Actually I guess my question is what do I need to buy to be able to control Media Player Classic. I don't even have a remote so suggestions for that would work as well. I'm running Windows Vista 32 Bit.
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Jul 16, 2008 20:48
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I'm using LM remote keymap with a firefly remte: http://www.lmgestion.net/@en-us/4/22/60/article.asp It's free and very configureable.
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Jul 16, 2008 20:59
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O.E.T.K.E.R. posted:Is there a HTPC frontend that's what I'm looking for? I pretty much need something really basic: MediaPortal is for you my friend. I don't know why you cannot install it, I ran it for 2 years on an old HP Desktop with 1gb ram, XP2600+, and a Geforce4mx440. It would play all of my media (streamed from another pc, or local) and with CoreAVC I was able to play 720p videos in 2.35:1 ratio, but not 1.85:1. What happens when you try to install?
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Jul 16, 2008 21:06
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HardCoil posted:I'm using LM remote keymap with a firefly remte: http://www.lmgestion.net/@en-us/4/22/60/article.asp Got a recommendation for a cheap remote control and receiver so I can use that? I've tried googling but everyone comes up with getting the Microsoft Remote Control and IR unit that comes with it. I'd rather not spend the $70 or so that it is if I can as I just want to control Media Player Classic.
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Jul 17, 2008 02:47
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Peacebone posted:Got a recommendation for a cheap remote control and receiver so I can use that? I've tried googling but everyone comes up with getting the Microsoft Remote Control and IR unit that comes with it. I'd rather not spend the $70 or so that it is if I can as I just want to control Media Player Classic. I use the $39 StreamZap.
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Jul 17, 2008 03:23
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Peacebone posted:Got a recommendation for a cheap remote control and receiver so I can use that? I've tried googling but everyone comes up with getting the Microsoft Remote Control and IR unit that comes with it. I'd rather not spend the $70 or so that it is if I can as I just want to control Media Player Classic. I've been looking into IR Receivers and I came across Tira, but I have no experience with them. Says it works with Girder, so I'd assume that most remotes would work for it. http://www.home-electro.com/tira2.php I was going to grab the Ira-3 which is a serial connection instead of the USB(and its cheaper). Does anyone have any experience with these?
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Jul 17, 2008 03:32
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I looked through the thread a little bit, but I might have missed some of the answers here: Me and my friends are looking to buy an HDTV and then set up an HTPC as well at about the same time. 1. We would like to run some emulators (older stuff, MAME and old-school junk), so we'll need to be able to launch external applications through it. Does Vista MCE support this? 2. We have some extensive video collections on file servers we'd like to be able to access. Is there a way we can access these through vista MCE without doing any weird windows mucking about? One or two of our file servers are linux-based, so accessing junk on a samba share is required. 3. We're planning on getting a TV that'll support 1080i, how should we plan to output video to it for the best quality? I'm a little new at the AV scene.
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Jul 17, 2008 03:54
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I'm excited and need some place to let off some of my excitement. My HTPC was an eMachines with a P4 3.4 GHz, an ATI Theater 650 Pro, and a 100 GB drive to store Vista and my recorded TV. I shuffled around some computer parts I had, and changed the motherboard out to one that supports dual-core processors, so I'll be updating that P4 in the near future. I also bought two Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1600s to replace the 650 Pro, and I'm putting in a 250 GB drive so that I can record more stuff. I bought a new power supply and heatsink off of SA-Mart, so the noise level should go way, way down. I also ordered the Antec Veris 430 case so it'll just look like a piece of stereo equipment instead of an ugly eMachines tower sitting by my TV. The case gets here tomorrow, and everything else should be here Friday. 
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Jul 17, 2008 05:25
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Wood for Sheep posted:I've been looking into IR Receivers and I came across Tira, but I have no experience with them. Says it works with Girder, so I'd assume that most remotes would work for it. http://www.home-electro.com/tira2.php looks expensive. It seems that there really is no place that will sell a cheap IR receiver by itself.
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Jul 17, 2008 06:20
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fnkels posted:looks expensive. It seems that there really is no place that will sell a cheap IR receiver by itself.
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Jul 17, 2008 23:39
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Can anyone help me with an upgrade path for a PC that is going to be used to playback 1080p? At work we have a 22" LCD on a wall near the front entrance that just loops promotional videos all day. They're crappy, low res, and 4:3 on a 16:10 screen. It makes the company look incredibly cheap. Recently someone finally did a 1080p video and tried to play it on the system behind the wall (that drives the monitor). Resolution looked great, but the PC couldn't keep up. Fade transitions had awkward pauses, and at one point in the video there was a lot of movement and it caused artifacts everywhere. So my question is, what specs need to be upgraded for good playback? The system has a P4 2.4 ghz, 1 GB ram, and a Radeon 8500. I wasn't sure if playback like this was CPU or GPU limited. The codec of the video is WMV3. Also, when the low res videos are played, there are often green artifacts in various places. This did not seem to occur with the 1080p video. Was that just an upscaling issue? Thanks guys.
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Jul 18, 2008 15:43
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Aglar posted:Can anyone help me with an upgrade path for a PC that is going to be used to playback 1080p? There's really no upgrade path for that PC to do HD. I assume it's a VGA slot? If you're doing a custom intro, without knowing how it was encoded, the bitrate, etc, there's no way to give you a good estimate of what it will take to play it. Ideally, you should be shooting for a PC with at least 2.4Ghz (Core 2 chip)if not higher. RAM's not terribly important for this, 1-2 Gigs should be fine. There are video cards that can decode 1080p video themselves (and thus don't require a higher end processor) but those videos have to be encoded specific ways to enable video card decode (and thus it's not a "sure thing" that they would work with a homemade video). Probably a good way to check is burn it to a disc and take it to best buy/circuit city and see what machines can play it without choking. Alternatively you could have them render it in 720p, which that chip could probably handle, with minimal quality loss. As for the greed spots, that sounds like a video decoding error, not something that upscaling would cause.
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Jul 18, 2008 15:51
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Well, I just got in my Asus HD3450 to get HDMI and HDCP and I have to say it's an awesome card for the price. The 3450 series cards all do hardware decoding for vc-1, mpeg2 and h.264 so blu-ray run without a hitch now. It's also drat cheap at 20 dollars after rebate on Newegg + shipping, but it's out of stock right now. I believe chiefvalue and ewiz both have them, though. Oh, it comes with the low profile bracket too. The only drawback so far was the installation of the onboard HD audio drivers. I had to install the drivers from the CD instead of using the latest catalyst from ATi's website, and there was an issue with underscan on my tv but the panel does have an option to scale overscan/underscan to correct it.
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Jul 18, 2008 17:41
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so if I get a capture card of some variety, is there a way to stream the video it captures across a network like a slingbox? I'd really like to be able to pipe live TV to my upstairs computer from the media center, without having to put the cap card in my regular PC.
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Jul 18, 2008 18:04
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Crackbone posted:There's really no upgrade path for that PC to do HD. I assume it's a VGA slot? Ahh, that's pretty much what I was afraid you would say. Alright, time to try and draw blood from a stone (money from the budget).
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Jul 18, 2008 19:18
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Aglar posted:Ahh, that's pretty much what I was afraid you would say. Alright, time to try and draw blood from a stone (money from the budget). Well, remember that you can try encoding in 720p. Upscaling that to 1080 is not a huge quality hit (several networks broadcast in 720p), and it might reduce the bitrate down low enough that the PC can handle it. Also, VC-1 is less demanding than x264 - if you have any control over the encoding you can tell them to use less demanding codecs/lower the bitrate.
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Jul 18, 2008 19:34
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