HTPC help needed

S

shadow-13x

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 23, 2003
Messages
175
I'm starting from scratch, with no spare parts. I would like to build an HTPC for recording of TV shows in HD from satellite and to have the ability to save them to DVD or playback on an HD tv. What would you recommend? I would like to stay with AMD for the cpu. Not planning to use for any gaming. thanks.

edit:I dont want to say money is no object, but whatever it takes is what I am going to spend. and I do have this tuner card MSI TV@nywhere Master tuner card from the computer in my sig.

so far it looks like:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Windsor 2.4GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor - Retail
Asus nVidia GeForce 8500GT Silent 512MB DVI/HDTV PCI-Express Video Card
Kingston 2GB KIT DDR2-800 PC2-6400 CL5 240-pin DIMM (Retail)
Asus M2N Motherboard
ATX form factor is fine with me.
MS XP OS
 
How much are you looking to spend max on the htpc?

I can tell you right now you'll probably be looking at an nvidia 8500gt for all the HD playback features it offers. An athlon X2 cpu since dual-cores would be put to use, and a gig or two of ram depending on what OS you want to use (MCE/XP or Vista?). Use an matx motherboard for a smaller form factor or use a full atx mobo since it offers more features and expansion slots.There are tons of cases to pick from, you can narrow down your choices by first choosing between ATX or mATX. Be double sure that you choose a silentpsu, otherwise the fan noise will irritate you to no end (sorry i'm not updated on newer silent psu's).

Don't think there's an easy and inexpensive way of capturing HD video from your satellite box. This is where htpc's are falling behind imho. Hopefully somebody will correct me with some updated info or product (?)
 
The athlon X2 4200, 4400, 4600 ought to be plenty fast enough to cover you for a while. A faster cpu will hold off upgrades for a little while longer.

Ram should match your motherboard speed, DDR2 800 would work fine in most cases. Lots of ram deals floating around, check our hot deal forums.

Motherboard? Not sure about that one. Perhaps pick your favorite, feature-filled, reliable AM2 mobo you know of, one with an nvidia chipset would be preferable. Try to pick one with passive cooling on the northbridge chipset since those little fans can be noisy suckers.
 
ok, thanks for the info. I'll do a little window shopping and come back to update the original post with what I found. Then if there is something extra I need, I'll get some more help.

Hard drives? one? two? RAID?
DVD Writer?
power supply size?
sound card?
TV tuner?
 
shadow-13x said:
Hard drives? one? two? RAID?
DVD Writer?
power supply size?
sound card?
TV tuner?
Click to expand...

The more HDD space the better -- you'll be surprised at how fast it goes away, with recordings, music library of, uh, country and western 78s, collection of DiVX "home movies"...

PSU -- get a quiet one. Noisy computers should not be in the forefront of your mind while watching a touching love scene or whatever in your lounge. I got a Zalman PSU recently, dead quiet to my ear.

Soundcard -- depends. If you're worried, just grab a Creative Labs card with good SNR ratio. Personally, I just run off the m/b sound. It only breaks up at 100% volume, so I leave it at 80% or so.

TV tuner -- look into digital. You dont want analog TV tuners in your HTPC, analog quality sucks. I include frame grabbers, mpeg2 encoding cards, things that capture from aerials, and things that are hooked up to set top boxes. Go digital. Search terms are DVB-S, DVB-C, and DVB-T. The quality is mindblowing, compared to traditional bunny-ear transmissions. Best part is that DVB transmits a mpeg2 stream, so no CPU time is required to encode, basically free compression.
 
Theres no way you can get HD off of a Sat or Cable system; the only way to get HDTV into your PC is through OTA or QAM tuning and even then it's just the free stuff.

Those tuners you linked to are for FTA style systems commonly used overseas, if you're in the States they won't work.
 
get those Energy Efficient models for processor. even with the stock HSF, then run really quiet.
 
CrimandEvil said:
Theres no way you can get HD off of a Sat or Cable system; the only way to get HDTV into your PC is through OTA or QAM tuning and even then it's just the free stuff.

Those tuners you linked to are for FTA style systems commonly used overseas, if you're in the States they won't work.
Click to expand...

Could you recommend a tuner?

What if I wanted to record a channel that was broadcast in HD? Could it be done in standard def? The channel in question is HDNet, could it be recorded in any format or am I SOL? Is there something I could read to get a better understanding?
 
HDnet on pretty much any cable/sat company's network is encrypted from what I've seen. The only caps I've seen of that channel come from DVB-S2 cards on SkyHD satellite network in the UK.

The only way to get that capped and watchable on the PC at the moment is with a CableCard home theater pc from a company such as Velocity Micro. A CableCard system will get all the HD channels and pay channels on your PC with no problem at all... assuming your cable company knows what they are doing and aren't total newbs with a CableCard setup.
 
Would it be possible to take the signal coming out of the satellite set top box, go through a splitter and send one signal to the computer and the other to the TV? This would eliminate the encryption problem for recording HDNet. Would anyone care to recommend a tuner card?
 
shadow-13x said:
Would it be possible to take the signal coming out of the satellite set top box, go through a splitter and send one signal to the computer and the other to the TV? This would eliminate the encryption problem for recording HDNet. Would anyone care to recommend a tuner card?
Click to expand...

The only high def outputs you get from a set top box would be DVI, HDMI, and Component. Unless you have a way of bringing those IN to your HTPC, it won't happen. The only things that do that as of right now are professional quality capture cards.. and they aren't supported as 'tuners' under a media center application.

You might want to do a little reading on HDhomerun though.
 
Would anyone care to recommend a tuner card?

So far I have:

ASUS M2N-E MB
AMD A64 X2 4600+ 65W AM2 2.4G
ASUS EN8500GT SILENT/HTD/512MB
Corsair MEM 1Gx2 TWIN2X2048-6400C4
Seagate 500 gig x 2 Sata 300
Windows XP home
 
Features

Receive FREE over the Air HDTV broadcasts on your PC

Supports normal TV broadcasts and cable TV signals

Control TV with IR Remote Control

Record HDTV, Analog and Cable TV to your computer hard drive.

Schedule TV Recordings in Beyond TV Express

Search the Electronic Program Guide for your favorite shows by title or keyword

Time-Shift TV Watching

Pause, Rewind and Fast Forward live TV

Display information for a summary of the program you are watching

Archive TV shows to CD or DVD for playback on your home DVD Player
Minimum System Requirements

Pentium IV 2.4 GHz or higher recommended

Available PCI slot

Microsoft ® Windows® XP SP2 (Home or Professional), Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005

512MB of RAM recommended

15 GB of available hard drive space - for software and record space.

1 hour of HDTV recording requires approx. 10GB of hard disc space.

Sound Card (AC97 compatible sound card)

Microsoft® DirectX 9.0 or later

CD-Rom drive for software install

CD-RW or DVD-Recordable drive required for saving movies onto CD or DVD

HDTV Antenna and available HD signal in your region

ATI Radeon 9550 or NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 or above video card
Click to expand...

Does that fit what you need? It can be found here. It has both analog and digital tuners. Will receive from the standard antenna as well as cable.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1697093&CatId=1427
 
Will this work for Direct TV signal? I just want to get the right thing the first time. Is Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 absolutely required as I dont have it. I am not looking to get OTA channels and have given up on getting HD into my computer.
 
shadow-13x said:
Will this work for Direct TV signal? I just want to get the right thing the first time. Is Windows® XP Media Center Edition 2005 absolutely required as I dont have it. I am not looking to get OTA channels and have given up on getting HD into my computer.
Click to expand...
For that you need a regular tuner card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815310002

You need to go with the analog outs on your directTV unit to the tuner card, pretty much svideo out from the directTV box to svideo in on the tuner card.
 
Thanks for the help. So basically any basic tuner card will work for Direct tv? Is that one you would recommend (new egg link)? What if the budget was $150 for this piece, any other ones better, more features?
 
shadow-13x said:
Thanks for the help. So basically any basic tuner card will work for Direct tv? Is that one you would recommend (new egg link)? What if the budget was $150 for this piece, any other ones better, more features?
Click to expand...
Thats the one I would get (I have one actually) even if my budget was $150 or more because what you need to do for TV input is very simple: you need a good card that has really good analog in filtering cause you have an STB that would require such a thing.

You don't need something fancy to do that. You see, when building an HTPC the hardware is the easy (and comparatively less expensive) part. Software is going to what kills you but picking out the right hardware for the job is going to make the software part a bit easier.
 
Other than Win XP home, what other software would I need to acquire? This will not be used for gaming, only for recording of direct tv and burning to DVD, maybe some internet browsing and replaying the recorded shows on 55 inches of an HD TV. Thanks for everything so far, you guys are the best.

edit to ask: would this tuner work at all? MSI TV@nywhere Master tuner card, as it's leftover from a previous computer.
 
I never work with satellite TV so I would call Tiger on that and ask them. I own the card I gave the link for and wouldn't reccommend it if I weren't convinced its good. Don't just believe me, it has three other 5 star reviews there on the site. One guy running it on a much slower system who even had five star results.

The other card this guy is trying to tell you about is 30 dollars less but its not HD and it does not have its own remote. Plus the remote IR receiver plugs into the computer in back and can be hidden discretely anywhere so you do not even have to see the computer.

Plus it's got two tuners in it, much better and more sophisticated software. Saving HD onto regular DVDs. Huge plus because when I bought it that was virtually unheard of. The memory consumed would be enormous without incredible compression. It's sharp as can be on my 100 inch DLP LCD screen.

Also, yes, I run windows xp. No need for home media edition.

If you want my electronics opinion on it the one I pointed out also looks much better shielded while the thirty dollar less one has no signs of shielding on it. For RF applications that is a sure sign of low quality to my eye.
 
I went through my wizard again and it has five or six options for inputs including SATELLITE, cable, ATSC (HDTV), NTSC(regular analog) and so forth.I imagine you would want to set it up this way. Start with the first set up being ATSC for OTA HD and then use the second tuner and plug for your satellite. Then you are set to record one while you watch another.

So I would not give up on getting HDTV into your computer, this card really makes it a piece of cake. You just need your standard RGB coaxial cable. Use as many splitters as you need. It also lets you watch live TV and timeshift it like TiVo. Plus I forgot to mention a legal copy of Nero is included with it so you can burn anything you want to DVD, except HD I believe. But you can still store High Def on your HD at about 10 Gigs per hour of TV time. It used to be 130 and went down to 99 bucks.

I did check again and I notice ads website says they stopped selling this card, but TigerDirect has it. I wonder if the next upcoming one has more features or not? Since I am not buying again I didn't research into it but you might want to. Maybe this one?

http://www.adstech.com/products/MCE-4000-EF/intro/MCE-4000-EF_intro.asp?pid=MCE-4000-EF

Check that out, it went down another twenty bucks since I last looked, 79 dollars:

https://www.adstech.com/cart/shoppingbag.asp?pid=PTV-382-EF&id=PTV-382-EF&item_type=product

Slightly newer version, but still full featured. Almost identical to the one I have. For a dual tuner I don't know how you can complain about that or how you are going to find a better deal. If you do let me know and I will convince some of my friends to put that in!
 
Any recommendations for video capture software? I am using the stuff that came with Nero, but it's kinda lame. How about "video editing for DVD burning" software?
 
SageTV, BeyondTV, MCE or Vista's built in PVR app (if you're running Vista or MCE).

Even Media Portal or GB-PVR could work for you.
 
I am running Win XP Home.

Are SageTV, BeyondTV, just video capture or can I use them to edit out commercials and for rendering?
 
I need the video capture as well, so I'll choose one of them for my capturing software. But I'll still need editing software. Can anyone recommend some?
 
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