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12 cents for a kilowatt hour? Geez, my bill is only 2.21 cents for a kwh. Either way, I agree with your point completely, any time or money invested in saving power, only ends up being a waste of time and money.

I've played this game before, don't get your hopes up that it's going to dramatically lower your electric bill. Using my electric bill, I did the math to figure out that for every 100w of electricity I use non-stop for the entire year, amounts to less than $20. Going from 300+ to 35W should save...

You shouldn't need a special mount just for brick. Any regular mount will do, you will just need to tap the holes first and put anchors in for the screws. I'm even pretty sure both of the mounting kits I used even included the anchors and instructions. BTW, I wouldn't plan on using the...

Since it's already been pointed out that you can go cheap with your surrounds, I would like to play devil's advocate and point out why it might be worth it to "match" your speakers. The way I see it, the benefit to "matched" speakers isn't better sound quality - rather the benefit of having...

I agree, as I currently have a 3 year old 50" Samsung plasma with an image burned into it. Most of what people are talking about here is common image retention - it's kinda par for the course when it comes to a plasma. It's nothing to really be worried about, and it should go away rather quickly...

Sound like an HDCP handshake issue over the HDMI. Most likely, it's the receiver having an issue passing it through to the other devices. Have you tried temporarily eliminating the receiver and going straight to the TV with an HDMI cable?

For the sake of your sanity, please ditch the thought of using wireless or powerline. It seems you have your heart set on it, but it's making baby jesus cry. I know it's been beat to death, but trust the group consensus here, you will spend 10x more time and money screwing around with a wireless...

I don't believe you can use the 7.1 audio stream when encoding. AFAIK, you can only get 7.1 when playing the disc (or possibly an iso...) through playback software that also supports 7.1 - Cyberlink is the only one I know of off the top of my head. Once you can play 7.1 with software, then you...

I can't speak for handbrake, but I re-encode all Blu-rays (Movies and TV Series) with Ripbot264. HD space is cheap, I refuse to delete or compress files whenever possible. In a perfect world, I would do just a straight rip and it would work perfectly on all my devices.;) Since that's not the...

The raid array would be used to maintain uptime, not as a backup solution. I have an additional 8x2TB bare drives in protective encolsures stored at my parents house down the street that are the backup drives. Every month or so I update them. I should do it more often, but since I store them...

I have been very pleased with running Win7 on my light usage fileserver for my wife and I. Gives us centralized storage for all our pictures, music and files since we both have a desktop and laptop each. It has 16TB (8x2TB Segate drives) of storage space, mostly for our saved movies and TV...

Did you try switching your default playback device to the HDMI jack? Right clicking on the speaker icon in your taskbar should give you the the playback devices option.

I don't think too many TV's support 1920x1200, since 1080p is only 1920x1080. Since a receiver is designed to be used in conjunction with a TV vs. a monitor, I don't see why any receiver would support anything higher than 1080. I'm sure there are probably a handful out there if you were to look...

Pay for guides?:rolleyes: If the guides he has in his free section are any indication, I'm not seeing the value of his content. The free guides I just took a look at there, specifically the one about Media Browser, tell you nothing more than what you would pick up by briefly skimming the...

Are you sure you don't have a deeper issue, possibly a codec issue? My reasoning is that I would expect a 3.2 phenom to have more than enough balls to make up for any shortcomings of the 4250, unless you are running some ridiculous post processing...

This may sound stupid, but in what order are you turning the devices on? Very well could be a HDCP handshake issue. Try firing up the receiver before you turn on the TV, you might even have to give it a couple seconds if your receiver takes a little while to fully kick on. As for the computer...

Amen. Rocks, don't worry, you have the correct mentality for this so you will do just fine. We just need to take a couple steps back. It's easy to get ahead of yourself with this stuff since so many different things all have to come together and understandably, no one wants to make a mistake...

I would definitely go with a Z chipset, as I have been very impressed with my Asus P8Z68. I'd also bump up the i3 to an i5 for good measure (I picked up an i5 2500k @ Microcenter for $170 out the door, so hopefully the extra $50 doesn't break the budget) and skip any sort of graphics card for...

Not trying to split hairs here or anything, but my rule of thumb is to go one (Or maybe even 2) tuner(s) over the amount you think you would need. The reason being is that say you have 6 tuners and are recording 6 shows at once. With all of the tuners currently in use, there are no available...

Thanks for the advice, I'll take a look at diyaudio to figure out what I'm going to do with the 4 surround speakers. I avoided going to a dedicated audio site first, because I'm afraid the recomendations will be way beyond what I'm looking for. I was hoping to build these new speakers for...

I was over at my grandparents today, and out of dumb luck, I stumbled upon my old college 5.1 surround sound system. I worked at Radio Shack while in high school around 2000-2002, and during that time I had the opportunity to grab a few items at ridiculously low prices when they were...

Long story short, I've recently moved and have decided to centralize the A/V equipment for my place into one room (The computer room). I own the place, the cable runs are fairly short (Longest run is a 40 ft. HDMI cable) and I have easy access to run them all under the floors through the...

I believe you need the "Premium account" these days to get ISO's to work with My Movies. I'm out of the loop when it comes to MyMovies though, I lost interest when they started limiting certain features to the premium account holders. Not that I have any problem with paying for software, but I...

I agree, Remote Potato has become a necessity for my HTPC these days. Someone made a similar thread a couple months ago, which convinced me to finally give it a whirl, and I have been plesantly suprised. I don't use it much to stream TV, but the few times I have used it, I have had no...

I'm running a similar setup as well. Small HTPC for the TV side, and a mid-range "desktop" as my fileserver to house all the media drives. Transcoding issues can be mitigated with more power, but I never could iron out all the kinks. I still ended up frustrated with it due to the lower video...

Thanks for the info Danny. I've been waiting to switch from my MLC drives to something sandforce based for a while now. I've skimmed a few reviews about the Vertex3 drives over the past couple weeks and it seemed like everyone was raving about the speed jumps the new sandforce controllers were...

It's do-able for sure. If anything, the problem is figuring out which of the 50 options available would work best for you. The 2 biggest things to pay attention to would be; 1 - What your long term plan is, 2 - what your budget is. Basically, if this is something you are serious about, it would...

You didn't mention network tuners, but the HD Homerun hasn't been mentioned yet...

I'm just not seeing how this is any better than XBMC or MyMovies/Media Browser for WMC. It looks nice, don't get me wrong, but it also looks like it's missing features that other solutions have been providing for quite some time now.

Media Browser or MyMovies are two popular media library add-on's for MCE that will get all of your titles to display properly along with info and cover art (MCE's built in movie management system is jacked up from the start and neutered to top it off). It sounds like you have some codec and/or...

We must have a telepathic connection, because I did the same quick math and though about dual NIC's as a solution.:p Even though the math says it should be fine, it could be a different story in the wild, especially if we throw a few extenders in the mix. I knew people were running 2 HDHR's...

The Harmony 880 will be perfect, all you need is a USB IR receiver for the computer. Some cases have them built in, but the easiest way to get one is to buy a cheap MCE remote package. The remotes are usually crappy, but it's handy to have a spare...

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but it is making me curious the more I think about it. If you are exclusively using network tuners, how many HD streams could one computer handle? There are a number of factors here, but specifically, I'm wondering what your NIC utilization would look like...

Don't let my misguided humor fool you, you're not being picky, input devices are important. Half of the humor I'm finding here is that we have all been there before. I never gave mice and keyboards much thought myself until I needed something a little more out of the ordinary for a HTPC...

I'm a little drunk, but I just have to ask, are these serious questions? I find it funny that you seem to have put a lot of thought into just about everything, but then get indecisive about the mouse. ;) 1 - Go with whatever is a better deal. The power savings you would get with a low power...

I'm loosely using the word "upgrade" here. They system has actually been up and running for a while now as a "proof-of-concept" phase, using parts borrowed from my other machines. I want to move these parts back to their original setups and purchase new parts that are better geared towards the...

This won't work for all movies, as sometimes the movie is broken into several m2ts files that will need to be combined, but it is the quickest and easiest method. This topic has been debated many times, so some quick searching should give pleanty of results. AnyDVD HD is pretty much going to...

Unless, the 6 tuner version is cheaper, I think I would still prefer using 2 of the 3 tuner units. I was thinking I could pick up one asap and see how it goes, before I commit to the second one. I'm hesitant because I currently want to chuck my HDHR out the window and piss on the damn thing. The...

I'm really tempted to bite on a pair of these to replace my 2 2250's, as I'm currently running 6 tuners with 2 2250's and an SD HDHR. I was planning on just going with a Ceton and my SD HDHR, but 6 tuners for $500 sounds much better than 4 for $400. I'm hesitant though because I'm not interested...

EDIT: Sorry, double post.