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Need some advice

S

SXT14

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 26, 2006
Messages
126
Okay all heres the situation:
My dad is tired of all the scratched dvds and wants me to build him an htpc.

my questions are:
What hardware should I use (pref on a 500 dollar budget) not including hdds I have 2 500gb that im using
What software should I use?

Also in advance I do not need to record any T.V what so ever. This is just for movies.
 
If I understand it, then, all your father wants is a media player?

You're in luck. If all you need to do is play DVDs, then something even as lowly as a Pentium II will be plenty, unless you want to do lots of fancy post-processing. I'd still recommend something a bit more beefy, though. Maybe a P3. You can find those for super cheap--under $100 easily, perhaps even less, for the whole box (PSU, MB, CPU, RAM, etc). Check your local classifieds, craigslist, yard sales, or mom-and-pop computer stores. Depending on what kind of TV your father has, you may need to add in a cheap video card to get TV-out, but there's no need to spend lots of money on that (an MX4000-based board will have MPEG2 hardware acceleration and is dirt cheap).

Unless it's a whitebox PC, it'll come with a Windows COA sticker that will allow you to install WinXP + your choice of media center software (MediaPortal, GBPVR, or any of the commercial packages, but there's no need to pay for those), or you can be a bit more adventurous and install MythTV (which, despite it's reputation, isn't such a big deal to install and configure, especially since you're just doing the media jukebox thing). For your situation, I'd recommend Windows + MediaPortal.

A remote might not be a bad thing as well, same goes for wireless keyboard/mouse, but that depends on how nice you want to make it.

For ripping the DVDs, see this thread.
 
okay maybe a little misunderstanding:

I want to be able to also convert the dvds to avi etc... and also make back ups all from the system.

my big question is what is the best software???
 
Converting DVDs to AVI's and ripping DVDs is the same thing. That thread I linked above has lots and lots of suggestions for software that works fine. Playing back those AVI's will take considerably more horsepower than just plain DVDs, but you still won't need a whole lot. A 90-minute movie ripped to a 700MB AVI in XviD can play back smoothly enough on anything stronger than a P3-500MHz, provided the computer's not chewing on anything else at the same time (I remember a friend doing it on a 366MHZ P2 several years ago). And if you have a video card with MPEG-2 hardware acceleration, your CPU requirements will go down even further.

For ripping DVDs, I use DVD Decrypter in ISO mode to remove the restrictions, and then Handbrake to transcode it into an AVI file. Both are free (as in beer), and there are some excellent guides on doom9.org on how to use them (it's not hard, really!).

What kind of backups are you talking about? Do you mean making backups of the DVDs? In that case, you'll probably want DVD Shrink, which will allow you to cut out extras from the original DVDs in order to fit the whole movie onto one single-layer DVD-R (dual-layer DVD-R's are stupidly expensive). I've never used DVD Shrink, so I can't say much more than that.
 
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