Wondering about components and problems with software!
Wondering about components and problems with software!
I just built one with a P4, running vista prem. on it.. works great. love it.
Ram? Vid card? Capture?? Audio?
Don't let me hang dude! Brag about that puppy a bit!
3.4GHZ P4, 1GB ram, 7800GT 256 Video, 750GB HDD (1 x 250, 1 x 500). Windows Vista Prem. Cheaper capture card that I had laying around, Onboard sound.. Put it in a Memex HTPC case.. Bought a Microsoft Media Center wireless keyboard... I stream all my dvd's, avi's, mpeg's, mp3's, live tv, radio and whatever else I want to another PC in the house as well as 2 x Xbox360's. I run the HTPC at 1920x1080P on a 71 inch Samsung DLP. Downloaded some full HD movies, they look like a million bux. My only concern is the TV tuner picture quality.. it's ass compared to going straight in the TV. Vista runs good on the PC as a media center, but I wouldnt run it normally on a PC of those specs if your planning on using it for a normal PC. I love it.. its wicked.
The part I'm interested in is streaming from the HDD to the 1080p tv...How's the audio for this? Are you getting 5.1
Thru a receiver?
Have you tried the H264 encodes?
Yes, all dvd movies are in the video_ts format, played through optical out on the onboard soundcard to my amp. I don't know about that partical codec, but for my movies I do get 5.1
What Main board are u using?
just built one building a new one.
i'm gettin the asus "somminn sommin" w/ HDMI mother board...fuckin amazing board mmade for htpcs..
hdmi, dvi, componenet, s-video out
spidif in out
x1250
all builton
one thing to note is that nvidia doenst have decent drivers for vista yet, u cant do overscan compensation with nvidia cards + vista....so if u think u want vista, go with an ATI card. u dont need a mainboard dedicated to being an HTPC, as u can get DVI->HDMI converters readily, and almost all motherboards have high def sound (spdif coax) output...thats all u really need to get a high def htpc setup going
fuck ATI they suck nowadays. The Geforce 8500 and 8600 do full hardware decoding of H.264. Drops CPU usage from 90%+ to about 25%, and the cards are cheap. They have almost no worthwhile gaming performance but if you want to watch H.265 HD-DVDs or Blu Rays, that is the card you basically need for an HTPC.
Overscan support in Vista will come soon enough. In the mean time, just run XP.
im not a huge fan of media center anyways, its really only useful if u use it as a Tivo, other than that its kinda useless...doesnt run as smoothly as jus using keyboard+mouse and something like bsplayer or even windows media player to play vids...for some reason media center is always a bit sluggy compared to anything else...both vista and winxp versions