Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

I use a Humax 9200 Freeview PVR, and a Humax Foxsat HDR Freesat PVR.

Both are arguably the best on the market (but let's not go off-topic and
argue that!), but both have infuriating bugs and annoyances. The 9200 is
years old now, and there's no sign that Humax are interested in offering any
more bug fixes. The Foxsat HDR has been out for what - a year? - and it's
still buggy and unreliable.

I'm so ****ed off that even the top-end products in the market are so poorly
supported that I'm determined to ditch the whole lot and make my own.

The turning point for me is an essential (but unpublicised) improvement in
the version of Windows Media Center that comes with the newly-launched
Windows 7. Up until now, Media Center could only support two tuners, which
sometimes isn't enough for me. The version in Windows 7 supports four
tuners of each type: analogue, DVB-T, DVB-S and cable; sixteen in total,
which is more than enough.

So I'm going to build a new Windows 7 machine specifically to look after all
my home entertainment work: watching and recording Freeview and Freesat TV,
in SD and HD; combined with playing all my music and videos, and looking at
photos. Oh, and possibly even a bit of web surfing.

I was wondering if any of you guys have done something similar, and could
offer any hints, tips, experience or advice. I'm aware of the need for
selecting cool and quiet components, and have built numerous PCs before, but
never one for this purpose.

Two questions come to mind straight away. What do you do about a remote
control? What do you do about getting 5.1 sound out, for my surround sound
system?

All comments would be much appreciated.

SteveT

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

On 21/10/09 10:07, Steve Thackery wrote:

I'm so ****ed off that even the top-end products in the market are so
poorly supported that I'm determined to ditch the whole lot and make my
own.

I've built a linux/mythtv based one (actually three), works pretty well,
though not without bugs and annoyances, however opensource means you (or
someone else) can fix them.

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

"Andy Burns" wrote in message
...
On 21/10/09 10:07, Steve Thackery wrote:

I'm so ****ed off that even the top-end products in the market are so
poorly supported that I'm determined to ditch the whole lot and make my
own.

I've built a linux/mythtv based one (actually three), works pretty well,
though not without bugs and annoyances, however opensource means you (or
someone else) can fix them.


I looked into it a several months ago but never got around to it. About
£300-400 should build you a decent one - obvbiously this figure will change
depending on components. Media Center on Vista / Windows 7 is ok. If you
use XP, there is some free media software called "Media Portal". Looks very
good. If it's purely for watching films etc, you don't need an expensive
graphics card. Get a mobo with built in graphics, some of the new one can
decode 1080p bluray absolutely fine. Have a look on www.avforums.com, they
have a dedicated forum on HTPC's.

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

On Oct 21, 10:07*am, "Steve Thackery" wrote:

Two questions come to mind straight away. *What do you do about a remote
control? All comments would be much appreciated.

SteveT

I found an old X10 RF remote laying around at home, subsequently found
this software which allows many types of remote to be configured to do
many tasks on the PC, pretty easy to use:-

http://www.eventghost.org/

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

I use Windows 7 media centre running on a Dell server with 4 freeview
timers and a couple of Linksys extenders connected to my televisions.
It works well for the most part, but it does have bugs and requires
the occasional reboot. You can buy a Microsoft remote control and
receiver from eBay fairly cheaply (I bought one for £12); and that
will work better than a generic remote. No idea about 5.1 I'm afraid.

Thanks,
Rich.

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

"Steve Thackery" wrote in message
...
I use a Humax 9200 Freeview PVR, and a Humax Foxsat HDR Freesat PVR.


Two questions come to mind straight away. What do you do about a remote
control? What do you do about getting 5.1 sound out, for my surround
sound system?

All comments would be much appreciated.

SteveT

As others have said. If you windows Media Centre you can get official (and
compatible) remotes. Regarding 5.1, either get a mobo which has HDMI,
output the sound through this into your AV receiver. Or, get a mobo with
S/PDIF out.

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

Andy Burns wrote:
On 21/10/09 10:07, Steve Thackery wrote:

I'm so ****ed off that even the top-end products in the market are so
poorly supported that I'm determined to ditch the whole lot and make my
own.

I've built a linux/mythtv based one (actually three), works pretty well,
though not without bugs and annoyances, however opensource means you (or
someone else) can fix them.

Yes so have I. The main problems are with DVD playback. I have got BBC
HD to work too, along with 5.1 audio. You do need to be quite good with
Linux though to make it work for you. I've started selling MythTV
system into Schools as it makes sense. Seeing as they already have the
network installed, and the PC to show the picture (via VMWare) it's a no
brainer for them. They also take a maintenance contract too.

Rob.

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

"slider" wrote in message ...

"Steve Thackery" wrote in message
...
I use a Humax 9200 Freeview PVR, and a Humax Foxsat HDR Freesat PVR.


Two questions come to mind straight away. What do you do about a remote
control? What do you do about getting 5.1 sound out, for my surround
sound system?

All comments would be much appreciated.

SteveT

As others have said. If you windows Media Centre you can get official
(and compatible) remotes. Regarding 5.1, either get a mobo which has
HDMI, output the sound through this into your AV receiver. Or, get a mobo
with S/PDIF out.


Agreed, but generally welcome to a whole world of pain (fun?) setting it
all up, when compared to a PVR.

Z

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

Well my advice for an easy set up would be www.mythbuntu.org...easy to
get working. Be careful on the quality of the motherboard as tv cards
tend to do a lot of interrupting. I suggest either nVidia or intel
based boards; nothing else. For the backend machine the speed of the
processor is not a very big issue, but I would recommend having plenty
of RAM, at least 1Gb.

Front end machines are a different animal. For BBC HD, i'm using a
core2quad P4, and that copes ok.

It's worth getting an all in one nVidia motherboard with 3D chip on board.

Rob.

Java Jive wrote:
It's usually considered that open source is the best for hobbyists
doing this sort of thing - there are those that claim Open Source is
better period, but my experience is that both open source and
commercial software have their drawbacks, and are about equally buggy.
However, I do agree that Open Source is generally better for those who
want to tinker.

If you plan on using a PC, that means probably Linux, of which there
are many distributions, but unfortunately, I can't advise as to which
might be most suitable for multimedia applications:
http://distrowatch.com/

Many STBs, a notable example being the Dreambox, are Linux based.
http://www.dream-multimedia-tv.de/en/products
Dreambox software is open source, and is called Enigma, and there are
many customised variants of it - a moment's thought will enable you
to guess why. My now three or four year old model is still pretty
buggy, the most irritating thing by far being the tendency to miss
repeating timers - probably 50% of the ones I set are just ignored.
Something else on the wish list is to make the software confirm if you
want to move the dish rotor to point to a different satellite. I have
set up a Linux PC to hack the software around in an effort to fix
things like this, and while these majore ones remains elusive, I have
succeeded in customising many more trivial but nevertheless irritating
aspects of the OEM build to my liking.

There was a project called, IIRC, OpenEmbedded, but this seems to have
morphed into ...
http://www.handhelds.org
... and there was a guy who created a Dreambox Enigma build based on
OpenEmbedded ...
http://opendreambox.org/
... however, when I last investigated this some years ago, it was a
real pain to adapt my distro to use those required development tools
that were from other distros, and when I finally got everything to
work, I immediately ran out of disk space, because that build system
takes 10GB of disk space to build an image of 512KB or so!

Another possibly useful link:
http://www.linuxtv.org/

As for what hardware to use, AISI there are difficulties with every
choice ...

A PC has the advantage of being a fairly standardised piece of
electronics, so there should be no difficulty with anything like
onboard memory, USB, external memory devices containing photos, etc,
networking, hard disks, DVD, or Blue-Ray. You can get different tuner
cards to record from satellite or digital terrestrial, and perhaps a
capture card to record CV, but how are you going to record RGB from an
external SCART source, and how are you going to manage sound, probably
surround sound, ensuring that it remains in sync?

Although admittedly I haven't tried any of the recent tuner cards, I
tried an analogue tuner card about a decade ago and have tried three
different makes of capture card then and since, the last being about
five years ago, and EVERY SINGLE ONE has failed to maintain sync
between vision and sound!

Another idea might be to use the carcass of a Hard Disk / DVD Recorder
which has developed a fault, or is becoming outdated, perhaps because
it has only analogue tuners. Such a machine will have no difficulty
with recording RGB via an external SCART, and may, like my Panasonic
DMRE100H ..
http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/Audi...cDMRE100H.html
... have sockets to attach external memory devices containing photos
etc, but now, all the things that were easy with the PC are difficult
or impossible. For example, how do you attach a DVB tuner card? Now
that IDE drives are becoming rare, can you attach a SATA one?

Finally, there is the possibility of using something like a Dreambox.
You can purchase tuner cards for DVB-S, DVB-T, and DVB-C, though I
think most models only have room for two cards, and, it being a PVR,
you may wish to have two tuner cards of the same type so that you can
watch one channel while recording another, so that means a wholly sat,
terrestrial, or cable machine functionality, which is an unwelcome
limitation to encounter right at the outset. Then depending on model,
they may only have one output SCART, and either no input SCARTs, or
like mine have one be unable to record from it at all, let alone in
RGB.

There were other things I wanted to solve, like SCART switching and
switching audio independently of video, so that, for example, I could
listen to some music while waiting for a programme to actually start,
or while just keepin an eye of the score of a match.

I couldn't see any way to solve all these problems at a realistic
price, so I still have a festoon of cables around an AV stand
containing 8 different items of kit!

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:07:31 +0100, "Steve Thackery"
wrote:
I'm so ****ed off that even the top-end products in the market are so poorly
supported that I'm determined to ditch the whole lot and make my own.

Anybody made or use a "Home Theatre" PC?
 

On 21/10/09 14:52, brushhead wrote:

Andy Burns wrote:

I've built a linux/mythtv based one

Yes so have I. The main problems are with DVD playback.

Never had any problem with DVDs, infact I like the fact you can skip the
"compulsory" introductions

I have got BBC HD to work too,

been thinking about a DVB-S2 tuner (my backend is tucked away upstairs
and runs under xen along with various other servers)