Home Theatre Computer

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by NoWorries

Hey Mick,

I was looking at building my own HTPC, but I keep coming up with a bit more than $400...do you mind my asking which components you used? Does your system play bluray no problem?

Thanks!

Yeah I added it up again today and it was $420. Not including the OS cause I already, uh, had a copy of Vista.

I got most of my stuff from nxsource.com, they had some really good deals on at the time (tigerdirect.ca, ncix.com, and atic.ca have good deals sometimes too). Memory Express had the case for $130 at the time but that was over a year ago. I got an AMD 780G chipset motherboard for $75, AMD 4850e CPU for $65, 2GB of RAM for $60, and just recently got a 1TB HD for $85.

I don't have a blu-ray drive in it at the moment, I just download 720p rips. Hope I didn't mislead anyone...

[Draug]

Mick, have you tried any 1080p x264 rips yet? How does your hardware handle those?

[NoWorries]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

Yeah I added it up again today and it was $420. Not including the OS cause I already, uh, had a copy of Vista.

I got most of my stuff from nxsource.com, they had some really good deals on at the time (tigerdirect.ca, ncix.com, and atic.ca have good deals sometimes too). Memory Express had the case for $130 at the time but that was over a year ago. I got an AMD 780G chipset motherboard for $75, AMD 4850e CPU for $65, 2GB of RAM for $60, and just recently got a 1TB HD for $85.

I don't have a blu-ray drive in it at the moment, I just download 720p rips. Hope I didn't mislead anyone...

No, ya didn't mislead me at all! I'm finding it hard to find the balance between enough power and cost - I always want more power! LOL! It's nice to see what others have done and what is working for them. Thanks a lot for posting!

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by Draug

Mick, have you tried any 1080p x264 rips yet? How does your hardware handle those?

Just tried a 1080p x264 DTS sample out of curiosity and it played perfectly. I'm using Haali media splitter and FFDShow.

[d_phaneuf]

For those who said they didn't use wireless with PS3 streaming

have you tried PS3 media server? I have been able to stream from my computer to the PS3 1080p HD stuff and it works great

[MickMcGeough]

Just checked out some more SageTV plugins. The main knock on SageTV is it's UI but they've opened up the software to allow for 3rd party plugins to take over the UI in most areas. These are taken from the MovieWall plugin - pretty awesome stuff so far:

List View
3D Wall View
Wall View

There are plugins to automatically download the fan art backgrounds and everything. Just found another plugin that runs a web server interface so you can schedule your recordings from work, your phone, whatever. Great stuff.