HTPC w/ NAS

S

Strykar

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 21, 2005
Messages
299
Currently, I have a Q6600 with 4GB of DDR2 and an 8800GTS as a workstation and have recently acquired a large 1080p LCD.

Would it be possible to build a cheap HTPC and leave the decoding to the workstation? 1080p is a must.

I'm trying to build an HTPC as cheaply as possible for 1080p and would like to use my existing hardware to offset a lot of the work if possible. If this is not possible through a native ethernet connection, could I share cpu cycles over the network to accomplish this task?

Thanks in advance..
 
any 780g motherboard will do 1080p with almost any x2 amd. you dont need the workstation for the tv. and its not possible from what i have seen.
 
The point of the workstation is to keep my media centralized. I've got almost 3TB of video files on that system that I'd love to play on the HDTV.

Would I basically have to copy the files over every time I wanted to play something? There's no way to efficiently stream 1080p over the network?
 
If you are doing HD over a network, Gigabit is important. Not so much for the bandwidth, but rather responsiveness when accessing that data. Even on 1 MBit streams I have noticed a significant reduction in the latency of actions like skipping ahead 10 seconds with 100 Mbit versus 1000 Mbit.

As for worrying about bandwidth, if the local machine is decoding, then effective datarate over the network will be size of the file divided by the play time of the file. So a 25GB movie from a Blu-Ray disc might be 2 hours. So the rate is about 27 Mbit/sec. If you wish to remain very responsive, the rate should be no more than 10% of the network speed.
 
There isn't any way to share the decoding load over an ethernet connection, however there is plenty of hardware out there that can decode 1080p without a problem.

I recently built a HTPC using:

Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H

and

Athlon x2 4450e

I used the integrated video on the motherboard and it plays back 1080p blu-ray rips from my NAS just fine. I agree with Trepidati0n, you should make sure you have gigabit between the storage and the HTPC to make sure you don't saturate the link.
 
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