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Check google for Harmony (Logitech remote) + software/platform you're planning on using. There are some apps for phones, but last I heard, they're really picky.
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Jul 7, 2011 03:41
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Right now I'm just using my netbook running XBMC to stream from my desktop, and controlling it entirely using my iPhone. The app cost like 3$ I think, but it works wonderfully.
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Jul 7, 2011 04:34
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Roctor posted:So I think I'm going to build my first HTPC, and what I'm most interested in before I commit is options for couch-sitting peripherals. I know there are wireless keyboard/mouse combos and I know that there are such combos that are the size of remotes. If you use XBMC (you should) the Android and iOS apps for controlling it are both pretty great.
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Jul 7, 2011 05:10
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Until this very instance I though xbmc stood for x-box media center. I don't own an xbox so surely the mistake can be forgiven...?
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Jul 7, 2011 06:24
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Roctor posted:Until this very instance I though xbmc stood for x-box media center. I don't own an xbox so surely the mistake can be forgiven...? XBMC originally started on the Xbox and gradually became what it is now, so that's quite an easy mistake to make. 
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Jul 7, 2011 07:14
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I use HippoRemote on my iphone for controlling my HTPC, works great. It has lots of different profiles which give different screens for controlling different applications.
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Jul 7, 2011 13:03
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Roctor posted:Until this very instance I though xbmc stood for x-box media center. I don't own an xbox so surely the mistake can be forgiven...? Fun fact: XBMC is no longer developing builds for the Xbox.
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Jul 7, 2011 14:16
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if you want a remote for boxee running on your htpc, buy the boxee remote. if you want a remote for xbmc, get the nyxboard remote control.
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Jul 7, 2011 17:27
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Guitarchitect posted:i guess I'm wondering what "decent computer" means - i'd love something small and sexy that I don't have to hide away, and people seem to have problems with Revo? and what about on-board storage vs networked? I wouldn't even know where to start in terms of networking and how to, say, connect my desktop and a set-top with a server... I've seen too many gotcha's and issues with SFF boxes like the Revo, I'm personally going with a lower power i3-2100 setup that should play everything and anything I throw at it and and be able to run SABnzbd+ and whatever else I want to in the background as well. If price is an issue you can build an Athlon X2 250 box with 4GB of ram and onboard AMD 4250 graphics for under 300 bucks and that'll be a great HTPC machine.
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Jul 8, 2011 19:28
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I'm looking to build a cheap quiet htpc for playing full HD movies and internet-loving-around-on-a-tv but this would be my first time building a midget pc, so I'm thinking the following: (mainboard:)Sapphire E350M1 pure fusion (AMD E350 dual core cpu )(On-board Radeon HD6310 1Gb ) (RAM:) Cheapest 2x2GB (Storage:) Kingston 64GB SSD, with an external HDD (optical drive:) LITE-ON Blu-Ray Combo Will this fit into any ITX chassis or is there something specific you guys would recommend? How about the Antec New Solution NSK2480 or Antec Minuet 350? KinkyJohn fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Jul 9, 2011 |
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Jul 9, 2011 11:08
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My parents have expressed some interest in a HTPC setup, so I'm trying to design them something as simple as possible. The last few pages didn't help me out, so can someone help me out and point me towards a rundown of my options in grabbing content from a cable/satellite feed? If possible, I'd like to axe the set-top box altogether. I think I heard something about cablecards and got the impression that's what they'd do, but I'm also perfectly aware that any self-serving corporation would despise supporting such a device.
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Jul 9, 2011 21:13
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Really the only options at removing a set-top box all together are: Ceton InfiniTV 4 - I personally use this and like it. SiliconDust HDHomeRun PRIME InfiniTV 4 comes with 4 tuners, and soon a 6 tuner model. HDHomerun Prime comes in a 6 tuner and a soon-to-be shipped 3 tuner model. There are other tuners out there, but these are the only ones that can really replace a set top box with DVR capabilities. And it should be noted that these only work with Cable TV. Not sure if it is at all possible to use a card with satellite.
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Jul 10, 2011 16:09
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Mughe posted:Really the only options at removing a set-top box all together are: No, it can't be used with satellite. At one point, DirecTV had plans to release a nice WMC integrated sat tuner, but that project was canceled.
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Jul 12, 2011 20:31
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Now that we have a $129 Cablecard dual-tuner and a $250 triple-tuner and a $300 quad-tuner and a $500 six-tuner, I wonder if soon we will be seeing DVRs made using Windows 7 Embedded and these low-cost tuners. For instance, a Windows 7-powered dual-tuner DVR for $299 that's easy to use, with no monthly fees. I know that I could build my own, but I've had trouble with WMC and jerky playback on the HTPC, and hiccups and macroblocking on the 2 DMA-2100 extenders that it's connected to. So I canceled my order for a quad tuner, because I don't have enough excess sanity to constantly be debugging these things on every TV in the house. Embedded devices purpose-built around these tuners, though, might work in a bug-free way. A cheap, turn-key whole-home DVR solution.
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Jul 15, 2011 21:25
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Ok all, I'm specing out my HTPC (and storage solution as well for that matter). To make life easy, the nitty gritty of it is here in spreadsheet glory: http://j.mp/oVZr3W Total price is higher than I would like at $499 I'm basing it around the Zotac ZBOX-ID41-U (Zotac's Product Page - NCIX's Product Page). My main question is around that Intel Atom D525 Processor and NVIDIA ION GPU, I've been reading the horror stories in the thread, but for every one I have plenty of people saying the opposite. Are we reasonably certain it will do 1080p playback? Second question, anyone actually have a Zotac box and want to reflect on your experience? Third, and I feel very relevant question, do you think the approach of having a large amount of external storage like that is a good thing? I'm not finding having a separate NAS as useful, as I'm still using uTorrent for downloads, and there's nothing I do on the NAS that a properly configured Win 7 box can't do... I may as well consolidate both... is there something I'm not considering?
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Jul 18, 2011 00:52
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Heners_UK posted:Ok all, I'm specing out my HTPC (and storage solution as well for that matter). To make life easy, the nitty gritty of it is here in spreadsheet glory: http://j.mp/oVZr3W I have a Zotac ZBoxhd-nd22 and I'm really happy with it. I run Win 7 Ultimate x64 and it has no problems playing 720p and 1080p content as long as the ION is doing the decoding. I use xbmc for this. Since flash has hardware acceleration now, YouTube content plays just fine too. I also run my torrent, usenet, and other file-sharing programs on it. I have a 1TB USB2 drive hooked up to it that I keep all my media on. I tried the xbmc live disc one time, and it's performance was even better than what i'm getting under windows. I've considered installing Ubuntu and seeing if xbmc performs better under it, but my external is NTFS and I don't know how well ubuntu would support reading and writing to it.
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Jul 18, 2011 03:39
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I'm toying with the idea of building a HTPC that would be used for general purpose stuff on the side. I presently have an aging Athlon-XP 2800 (2 GHz) with a TV tuner. It's a little on the slow side, but copes with pretty much everything. It couldn't quite manage with those super-high res videos (sorry, don't have the exact specs, but about 8GB). I came to this thread looking for any discussion about the ASUS e35m1-i. I can't find any comparison (even at asus.com) that specifies what the difference is between this model, and the e35m1-i-DELUXE version, other than about $80 extra in price. Anyone know?
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Jul 18, 2011 13:04
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I've been having this really weird problem lately, and I'm having a hard time isolating it to a particular device. My HTPC stays on most of the time, and occasionally when I turn the TV and receiver on, my TV starts acting weird. The info panel will come up (where it shows what kind of signal it's getting) and it stops responding to any remote commands. I have to unplug the TV to get it to start working again. The weird thing is, when I unplug the TV from the wall, XBMC freezes. I never noticed it before, but yesterday I was playing some music and turned the TV on and noticed it "freezing". When I unplugged the TV, the music stopped. I thought that was a bit weird, and sure enough XBMC was froze up. Could there be some weird signal my HTPC (or XMBC) is sending along the HDMI cable that is freaking my TV out? I thought the TV remote was freaking out at first, but I've removed the batteries and it still occurs (I use a Harmony-like remote). The HTPC is a custom built box that I built a few years ago, with a newish GeForce card I put in for video decoding. It's connected via HDMI to a Onkyo receiver, which is then connected to the LG TV I bought a few months back. I don't think I have this issue with my PS3 or 360, but I haven't been playing either enough to know 100% for sure.
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Jul 18, 2011 13:29
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Sounds like another casualty of HDCP. If I turn the HTPC on while the TV is off or on another input sometimes there will be no sound until I unplug the HDMI cable and replug it. Or restart the HTPC.
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Jul 19, 2011 07:34
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Well, I've been using a WDTV Live Hub that's streaming from my 3TB external hard drive for all my media needs for about 6 months now. I like it pretty well, but I've recently come across an HP Pavillion s3507c (for free) that just needs a replacement mobo. Everything else in intact and works. I've figured out that the refurb'd board would be ~$220ish. Or I guess I could order this sucker for only $90 and gain HDMI-out while I'm at it. Anyone have thoughts? Am I right in thinking that I could have a nice HTPC for $100ish? Or am I barking up the wrong tree here? BTW, I was thinking about loading either WinXP and XMBC, or just an XBMC Live disc.
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Jul 20, 2011 06:30
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Argh. Help me decide A/V Arena. Either I can go small form factor and have a silly little box computer or just buy a new mobo/ram/cpu to replace the aging one I have already. Aesthetics plays little or no part in it. For SFF it'd be one of those recent all-in-one mini-ITX jobs. SFF Pro
Con
I just can't seem to arrive at a decision on this.
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Jul 20, 2011 18:14
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quiet, low power, sff htpc with xbmc. should only cost a few hundred. i recently built this same thing, minus the tv tuner and 320gb drive (i chose a 16gb ssd). http://biggzdesign.com/2011/03/amd-fusion-e-350-htpc/ wolfbiker fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jul 20, 2011 |
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Jul 20, 2011 18:23
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If anyone was looking at a Mac Mini HTPC, Apple dropped the price of the Mac Minis back down to $599 again, and added a Core i5 and Thunderbolt. They made the case smaller, but you do end up losing the optical drive now.
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Jul 20, 2011 19:15
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I'm looking to add TV streaming to my media center setup. Basically I want to plug in my antenna to my PC using (I assume) a tuner card, and then stream that to other PC's in my house. Is there a specific tuner card that I need to use, also what's the best software solution for the streaming? (Or should I just suck it up and buy the Sling Dish receiver for my satellite?)
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Jul 20, 2011 23:34
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spidoman posted:I'm looking to add TV streaming to my media center setup. Basically I want to plug in my antenna to my PC using (I assume) a tuner card, and then stream that to other PC's in my house. Is there a specific tuner card that I need to use, also what's the best software solution for the streaming? (Or should I just suck it up and buy the Sling Dish receiver for my satellite?) HD Home Run. It's a network tuner that can be accessed by the PCs. It tunes ATSC (over-the-air digital) and ClearQAM (unencrypted digital cable, generally the same channels + some shopping channels and the occasional ESPN2). Not to be confused with HD Home Run Prime, which is a CableCard tuner.
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Jul 21, 2011 02:07
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wolfbiker posted:quiet, low power, sff htpc with xbmc. should only cost a few hundred. Nice. I need something like this but with a dvd drive in it.
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Jul 21, 2011 02:31
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FCKGW posted:If anyone was looking at a Mac Mini HTPC, Apple dropped the price of the Mac Minis back down to $599 again, and added a Core i5 and Thunderbolt. I just purchased the base model today. Im waiting on some ram I ordered from NewEgg and I'll be hooking it up to my new tv that I'm awaiting as well (my old DLP finally kicked the bucket). Since I don't have a monitor, I have to use the TV via HDMI as the monitor while I set everything up. I hope it's not infuriating. This will be the first time I'm trying out XBMC for years, so I'm hoping it goes ok. This will be my first real HTPC; I've always relied on half-assed methods such as Connect360 or an ATV2.
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Jul 22, 2011 05:08
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I've been drooling over this prebuilt HTPC from Asrock, but the price is way too steep for me ($1000): http://www.asrock.com/microsite/Vision3D/index.asp?c=Models I want to build something similar for myself and hopefully save some money. I don't have a NAS at the moment, so it'll have to to store the files locally. I'm mostly going to be playing 720P and 1080P videos through XBMC. I'd also like a blu-ray drive. I really like the size of the Asrock case, and I'm hoping to find something of a similar size. Also, noise is a very big issue for me... I want it to be completely or almost silent. Are their any good resources on what parts to use? I'm having a hard time figuring this out.
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Jul 22, 2011 12:48
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Footy posted:Are their any good resources on what parts to use? I'm having a hard time figuring this out. How about the parts picking megathread? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3371605
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Jul 22, 2011 12:59
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Hob_Gadling posted:How about the parts picking megathread? Oh right, sorry... Forgot about that thread. My biggest challenge is the case. I want it to be somewhat small and with a low profile.
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Jul 22, 2011 13:18
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Footy posted:Oh right, sorry... Forgot about that thread. My biggest challenge is the case. I want it to be somewhat small and with a low profile. I have Antec NSK_2400 Fusion case. It's quiet, comes with a good quiet power supply and two 120mm fans. In normal operation I can't hear it over background noise. http://www.silentpcreview.com/Antec_NSK2400_Fusion If you want something physically smaller, maybe Dell Zino HD would work for you? http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-zino-hd-410/pd
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Jul 22, 2011 13:36
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Hob_Gadling posted:I have Antec NSK_2400 Fusion case. It's quiet, comes with a good quiet power supply and two 120mm fans. In normal operation I can't hear it over background noise. Through your first link, I found this case as well: http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1033-page1.html (Silverstone Grandia GD05/04) I might actually pick up that one.
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Jul 22, 2011 14:28
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This is for anyone who has an Asus AT5IONT-I and wants to run Ubuntu (Natty w/Unity) and XBMC. code:My system: code:
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Jul 22, 2011 14:55
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Its been a long time since I've had an actual PC in the living room. In 1999 as I occupied approximately 120 sq. ft with my room mate - plugging the TV into the S-Video output of my sweet sweet GeForce 2 was a no-brainer. The computer speakers (I had TWO 2.1 sets on opposite ends of the room) were more than enough to satisfy us cheap college kids. 2001 rolls around and in a larger place the extra-long S-Video cable and 1/8" extension cable hold us over until a friend is giving away a DUAL SLOT 1 333mhz (x2) with SCSI controller and drives! This thing ran HOT, and since it was 666mhz - was named Diablo. Cue the release of the classic Xbox - then fast forward to the first reliable solder-less "mod-chip" because that's when we finally invested in one. This relegated Diablo to the closet and server duty - linux was always better on this box. Used XBMC for a long time until... 2009 and I finally get a "Hi-Def" entertainment option. 1080P LCD and a PS3. PS3 Media Server is the greatest thing ever. Most of the time. Except on FreeBSD where some things just "don't work" Refusing to lose Linux support on my PS3 I was locked out of Netflix (and PSN but who gives a poo poo?) - so a WDTV Live Plus was purchased. And while a fantastic value, it has always left a little to be desired... And that brings us to this week, Wednesday specifically. I put together this box and a moment long in the making has arrived. Once again I have a full-fledged PC in the living room and I can waste countless weekends tweaking and polishing. It will be glorious!
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Jul 22, 2011 15:30
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I'm considering purchasing a Mac Mini for a HTPC. My only question is would the Intel HD Graphics 3000 card be enough for 1080p playback? All my media is network based so no need for hard drive space, just something simple.
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Jul 22, 2011 20:04
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Case: Silverstone Grandia GD04 PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA380D Green Motherboard: ASRock H67M-GE/HT CPU: i3-2100T CPU cooler: Scythe BIG Shuriken Ram: Kingston ValueRAM 2 x 2 GB Disk: WD Caviar Green WD20EARX 2 TB Blu-ray: Samsung SH-B123L ...and maybe a OCZ Agility 3 60 GB SSD disk, but I'm not sure if it's worth the cash. I'm planning on using it to play locally stored 720P and 1080P files and the occasional blu-ray. I'm not sure how good this build is, and I'm especially not sure about the quality of the motherboard. Any comments or recommendations? Footy fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Jul 24, 2011 |
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Jul 22, 2011 23:35
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My Ceton card is coming in today so I'm gonna set up a PC for Media Center set-top box kind of thing. I was wondering if I can bring up Boxee or something through Media Center so I can watch any web things/media files?
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Jul 25, 2011 19:06
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My hypothesis: The easiest DVR-capable HTPC to set up is to set up Sickbeard + usenet and to hell with tuners and poo poo. This gives you a ton of flexibility with regards to front ends and hardware choices. Personally, I want to pay the legitimate owners for their content, so I keep a Dish Network (with all the premium channels and whatnot) and Netflix subscription so peeps be gettin' paid, but I don't use them at all. It's just infuriating all the hoops the content industries make us jump through to use content in a legit way and the legit solutions are still inferior. Ok, done ranting.
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Jul 25, 2011 20:32
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ShinAli posted:My Ceton card is coming in today so I'm gonna set up a PC for Media Center set-top box kind of thing. I was wondering if I can bring up Boxee or something through Media Center so I can watch any web things/media files? As a matter of fact... http://boxeewmc.teknowebworks.com/
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Jul 25, 2011 21:29
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Thermopyle posted:My hypothesis: The easiest DVR-capable HTPC to set up is to set up Sickbeard + usenet and to hell with tuners and poo poo. This gives you a ton of flexibility with regards to front ends and hardware choices. Personally, I want to pay the legitimate owners for their content, so I keep a Dish Network (with all the premium channels and whatnot) and Netflix subscription so peeps be gettin' paid, but I don't use them at all. This. The hoops my father in law jumps through to watch TV that he wants at his house are crazy to me. TiVos, receivers, cable cards (with separate tuners!)...it's all poo poo. Sickbeard, Couch Potato, and SAB are super awesome.
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Jul 25, 2011 21:58
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