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Strictly speaking this should probably be ‘lessons learned from building and running HTPCs.’ My media centre has been the hub of home entertainment for the last 12 months, so I thought it was probably time to do a rundown of the things I learned along the way.
- Silence is Golden
Making a PC totally silent is hard and can be expensive, but well worth it. My top tips are to pick a good case and case fans, don’t scrimp on these. Another rule of thumb is that if it’s got a fan it’ll never be silent (CPU coolers and PSUs) no matter what they say. Fan controllers are a great way to help reduce noise to a minimum though.
- It’s All About the Case
Definitely don’t scrimp on your case, but research it well first, my Silverstone LC17 wasn’t cheap and is nice (if big), but I built an HTPC for my brother using an Antec NSK 2480, which is their budget HTPC case and it was infinitely easier to build, had nice separation of PSU and main compartment (to keep heat down) and vibration dampening mounts for the HDDs as standard (not quite as quiet as mine, but it didn’t take a fanless CPU fan, fanless PSU and some fan controllers to get it that way).
There’s also a massive range of sizes and styles out there, so take a look around. Silverstone, Antec, Thermaltake and Lian Li are a few quality makers but are by no means a complete list.
- Trade Horsepower for Less Power
HTPCs need very little processing power, playing back even HD video is not CPU intensive, just make sure you have reasonable graphics, onboard generally suffices depending on the type. Recording TV likewise takes very little power. Where you’ll need it is transcoding (changing the format of recorded material) or ripping DVDs. An Atom processor on the ION platform works perfectly well to deliver content, so it doesn’t need to be a beast.
Review your CPU choice to see if there are lower-power options available, some of the new processors require 95+w to run, mine works fine and only draws 45w, the Atoms only draw 10w. That means less heat is being generated so you need less cooling, which means the computer can run quieter (and you can have a smaller case).
If you plan on doing any transcoding (and some of the add-ons to strip adverts do this too) bear that in mind when picking your CPU, you can get around this by scheduling the work to be done overnight to minimise impact too.
- Regular Servicing
HTPCs are not for the faint-hearted, this isn’t a ’set it and forget it’ piece of kit, it’ll need you to keep it running (installing updates, rebooting, finding drivers, etc) and it will freeze and crash occasionally, it’s not as slick as a bought solution. The pay-off is you can do a lot more with it and the options are endless, plus you can upgrade at will, rather than being locked to the hardware.
I’m not sure I’d recommend one to someone who isn’t prepared for that and knows what to do when you find it non-responsive after a Windows Update or it blue screens midway through playing back a movie (i.e. the relatives, you’ll be doing endless support).
26th January
Part of the reason for the Building a Cheap Media Centre article was to use some of the research I had done leading up to building a media centre for my brother (as a birthday present).
Anyway, I thought it was time to get around to writing up my experience with that build.
This build came in for under £400, I could have shaved more off if I had used the included remote that came with the tuner (but I wanted to be able to wake the machine using it) and had bought cheaper case fans.
The Hardware
Case: Antec NSK 2480
PSU: 380w included in the case
Mobo: Asus M4A78-VM
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e
Cooler: Stock AMD supplied with CPU
RAM: 2 * Kingston 1gb DDR2 800mhz
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 500Gb
DVD: LG GH22NS40 SATA Black
TV Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD 500 (dual tuner)
Keyboard: Nexos 2.4Ghz Wireless Multimedia Keyboard with TouchPad
Remote: Generic Windows MCE IR remote look-a-like
Other: 2 * 120mm Sharkoon ‘golfball’ case fans
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24th January
The rise of streaming media services such as the BBC’s iPlayer and downloadable content means more and more people are looking to connect their computers to their TV so they can view it sat on their sofa rather than hunched over a computer or sat at a desk.
There are a number of different options for connecting your PC depending on what ports you have available. Listed below are the most common options for picture and sound.
It’s also worth noting that if your PC doesn’t come with one of these connections you can buy after-market cards to fit to your PC which have the relevant port.
Picture
Some connections include both video and audio signals so you get pictures and sound, but two of the most common options don’t, and you may still want to have separate connections to allow things like digital audio into a separate device, such as an amplifier (not covered here).
VGA
The VGA port is probably the most popular type of display connector that is available on PCs. The quality is inferior to DVI, so if you have both, use the DVI port, and fewer TVs are likely to have a connector, but it’s likely to be the port present on any older PCs.
Assuming you have a port on your TV (it’s usually used for a PC source) you just need a standard VGA cable to connect to your TV. This port does not carry sound so you’ll need a separate cable to carry sound depending on what your PC and TV offer. See the Sound section below.
DVI
DVI is the replacement for the older VGA connector and is typically present on most new PCs. This is a digital connection so offers higher quality than VGA, so use this one if you have both.
Few TVs have a DVI port to plug in to, but DVI-to-HDMI cables, which have a DVI connector on one end and an HDMI connector on the other, are readily available.
DVI ports don’t carry sound, so you’ll need a separate cable to carry the audio signal. See the Sound section below.
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23rd January
A while back I moved my HTPC to Windows 7 so I thought I would do a quick write-up of the experience. I wasn’t unhappy with Vista, it was running well, but I had done a W7 install on a media centre I built for my brother and I was impressed with some of the new features (dragable timeline, red button support, support for more than two tuners). I had a slight issue with the upgrade where I managed to wipe out 1Tb of ripped DVD images (which I thankfully have on physical disks), in retrospect I think that was my fault rather than the installers (I blamed it initially).
As before I installed Astrotoy7’s black theme (I used Media Center Studio to install) and the latest beta of Mediabrowser.
As with Vista I installed the codec pack from Shark007.net (obviously picking the Win 7 version this time).
The installation wasn’t pain free, however. After installing I found that my TV tuner kept giving me an error about no tuners being available, despite the fact that none of them were being used. Thankfully it wasn’t affecting recorded programs (it did initially, it did improve after some tweaking). Initially I assumed it was the Hauppauge tuner drivers and Win 7 but I tried installing the latest drivers and no joy. In the end I tracked the answer down to a Green Button forum post (I had seen others to be fair) which suggested it wasn’t the tuner but the graphics card, the onboard ATI HD3200, more specifically the catalyst control centre it comes with. I had the latest drivers but these don’t help, I had to downgrade to the 9.8 drivers and low-and-behold that seems to have sorted it and I now have a fully reliable HTPC back. The new drivers also seem to have sorted some other reliability issues that meant random freezing and reboots.
Another issue I had, which seems to have sorted itself too (after the graphics upgrade, though it could have been a Windows Update fix), was connecting to the network after waking, for some reason no matter what I did it only found it as a public network rather than my home network, so wouldn’t connect to the internet.
All in all not a great changeover, normally I follow the old rule of ‘don’t install a new MS OS until the first service pack has been released.’ I thought Windows 7 was a service pack for Vista, so went ahead, probably not the wisest choice on reflection. Maybe it doesn’t need the service pack anymore, but certainly give it couple of months to bed in. The ordeal is over now though and everything is running smoothly again, I hope.
21st January
Lifehacker has put together a comprehensive list of tips for staying safe online. Worth a read for anyone who isn’t too sure online.
9th December
