Early stages of HTPC

[Jarod888]

I am considering building an HTPC.

I want it to be a robust machine. I am also considering using the same machine a dvr for a home security system-- thoughts?

For the last few months I have been looking at the Gigabyte H57 USB3 Micro Atx MB, but it has and seems to have always been pretty hard to come by.

It looks like I am probably going to go with Socket 1155, and as such I was considering the following board:
ASUS P8P67-M PRO (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard.

I was thinking about going with an i5 2400s 65w.
I already have 8 gigs of gskill sniper waiting for a MB and processor.
I will also be picking up a Ceton InfiniTV4 Digital Cable Quad-Tuner Card.

Win 7 ultimate 64 bit and a few 2 tb storage drives. I will probably use a 750 gb scorpio black LT hd as the OS drive.
I have a Bluray / HDDVD combo drive so I don't need one of those.
I am undecided on a case, but it needs to be 15 inches deep or less. Height / width are not really a problem, I was thinking about going with a origen s16v

I need advice on a video card, power supply (must be modular), and software, ( playback of ripped dvds, organization, etc).
I also need your thoughts on the multipurpose use of HTPC and security recorder.

Thanks in advance.

 

[visionviper]

If you aren't going to use the onboard Intel GPU (which can handle HD fine, unless you want 24p output) then go with an AMD card. You don't really need anything do special, just a low range mainstream card with the outputs you want.

 

[Activate: AMD]

I'd go with an H67 instead of the P67 chipset. that would let you use the onboard graphics, which would be enough for your application. with a non-k processor you can't overclock anyway, so the more expensive P67 boards are a waste.

for playback and organization of ripped DVD's, I use windows media center with Media Browser plugin. Media Center Master does all my metadata updating and all rips are played with MPC-HC/ffdshow which gets launched automatically by Media Browser

 

[unwire]

MediaPortal is also worth a look, as it is pretty robust across various media formats and has fairly decent community support. It takes a bit more 'tinkering' than WMC to work nicely, but well worth it in my opinion..