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The Otaku's Guide to Building a HTPC

I've had many of the same problems. I don't think they really design PCs intended to be used as media centers, even though so many do, and there are so many different formats of video to deal with. I'm not even interested in Blu-Ray but it's complicated enough.

I do agree that ATI makes kludgy drivers, and more to the point, the software that actually performs the functions of a media center are not well-designed either.

This article was an interesting illustration of the Laws of Technology at work. For instance:

1. Being first to market is more important than making it work right.

2. Success lies in setting the standard, not conforming to it.

3. More is always better.

4. If it can be done, it must be done.

4a. Never ask if it should be done.

5. First market release is a beta test in drag.

6. If at first you don't succeed, release an update.

(^_*)

5.

Nice article, I run my own HTPC right now, and I'll have to say that the pain you went through is pretty common for running one. A couple of notes on some problems you mentioned.

The screen saver is a bug in media center. No way around it and Microsoft doesn't seam to care about fixing it since the bug has been around for years. I just turned mine off, but from what I understand if you turn off requiring a password on resume (in power control) and requiring passwords to come out of the screen saver, it will prevent it from occurring.

The other thing is the passwords on boot up. If you want windows to automatically log in a certain user, just do this.

Go to the command prompt, type "control userpasswords2" and then turn off the option "Users must enter a user name and password to user this computer". When you click Apply or OK it will ask you for the user name and password to automatically log in as. Then from that point on that user will automatically log in when you start up.

I mean no dissrespect but, why did you go to all that trouble? You could have, like be, just BOUGHT a "HTPC". It came already assembled, and cost oly 400$, including a better HDTV output video card and another 1 GB of memory. Then I just connected it to my LCD, and that was that. It runs everything. It dose't record TV cause...well.....I don't watch TV.

But either way, it does not matter now. You agrre, just like me, that the only way to truly enjoy anime, espeially HD anime, is connection a high-End PC to a HD-ready (at least) LCD.

The quality.......? When I was watching Toaru Majutsu No Index........I was drooling.

Also, my new video-card is ATI, and I have no problems whatsoever with it. It runs like a charm, and comes with it's own ventilator. It need an extra slot for the ventilator, but it's worth it.

Awesome article. I know I've thought about toying with the Media Center PC (MCPC) thing in the past though mine would be more customized to cutting down on equipment clutter and normalizing file formats rather than trying to have one box to play tons of different formats. Still a great read; I liked how you got into some of the technical aspects without getting too technical (like some other reviews I've read talk about how they selected processors for the boxes which delved into how many nm of threading each core had or which had the best process management @.@ ).

As far as Vista and the issues out there, I think there are several that are legitimate issues, a few "issues" that are actual improvements and the rest is just fanboy-noise. Hell, I remember when XP was getting trashed because it 'hogged system resources' (Holy crap, what do you mean minimum 128MB RAM?!?!). Most of my circle of friends will trash Vista at the drop of a hat however, my girlfriend has used it for over a year now with very little issue. She likes it a lot and it gets everything she needs done, done. Granted, she hasn't tried using it as a dedicated media PC but since there are people out there who've adopted Vista and are still plugging along, it's far from the worst Windows operating system released.

Though, the fact that you felt compelled to go with Vista is kinda worrisome to me. I'd hate to drop the money on it because of lock-in and it would probably delay plans for a MCPC for quite some time. Though, perhaps it may have also been due to the desired end product.

Again, nice article. It's making me head back to the drawing board for what I want (or, what I call, THE DREAM) and what is the most likely reality.

You could have saved yourself time and money, and not to mention got a better system, if you had simply researched into what TV cards have decent drivers under Linux.

You give the impression Linux is hard to set up and use, which is rubbish, an instalation of Ubuntu, as an example, is rediculously easy, and if you are building a new rig sepecifically for it, if you take the time to look into how well your components will work, it'll be 100% working off the bat. In fact, unless you want to, you should never need to touch a terminal window. (Of course, for some tasks, it's easier to give a list of commands than a list of places to click, and some distros require more setup, I, for example, run Arch Linux.)

Frankly, I prefer to watch Anime on my 24" monitors (which will display full 1080p, and you don't have to be a mile away for it to look good) on my normal PC.

As to software, the CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) has never let me down under Windows, and mPlayer is the king under Linux, plays nigh-on everything off the bat (the only thing I can think of now is the thing where OPs and episodes are split to save space, but it's not killer). VLC is always a nice backup for all platforms, although it does have its bugs.

As to nVidia vs ATI, I would have said nVidia had the edge. Until recently, however, ATI are putting out much better price/performance cards now, and also, their drivers (particularly the Linux ones) are coming on in leaps and bounds. nVidia are probably still slightly better from a performance POV, but for an HTPC, ATI are going to be the best choice for now.

Opting for XP instead of Vista is a foolish choice, in my honest opinion. Those "horror stories" just aren't true anymore.

If you want more than 3 gigs of memory, Vista 64-bit is also the way to go. XP 64-bit is not an option.

First off, the article is a great starting point for the interested newbie. But, in my opinion, learning a little about the technical side of video playback can make more of a difference than fancy and expensive hardware and software. My "HTPC" is just a basic, cheapo Walmart box that I added a cheap ATI card, a decent soundcard and a Blu-ray drive. Using freeware software like ffdshow and Media Player Classic I can get fat superior picture quality to any standalone I've compared it to and can playback almost any format.

DVDs especially benefit since most commercial media players and portals have piss-poor deinterlacing when it comes to anime and just leave it up to the videocard. I scan a little of the DVD before hand and can select what, if any, deinterlacing (or more significantly 3:2 pulldown removal) method to use.

I also can selectively postprocess the video. My favorite feature is the ability to "deband" and remove the ugly banding in color gradients. Also I can be a lot more picky about denoising, sharpening, color corrections, RGB conversion, etc.

HD... where do I begin. Yes, I agree we need more HD content here but if you've ever seen real HD (Blu-ray @20+mbps ) you wouldn't be giving so much praise to the fansubs (< 2mbps) your downloading which don't look much better than a well authored DVD on my rig. Playback of HD content can be difficult on a lot of PCs so it might be worth it to invest in CoreAVC, the fastest software AVC decoder so far. If you have a Blu-ray drive it probably came with OEM software like PowerDVD which will save you some money since good freeware Blu-ray playback is still a ways off.

As for the debatable stuff: The OS debate is pretty much a mute point. XP/Vista is your best option. I've been running Vista for over a year and it's fine and XP still works good too. Linux is workable now but I don't recommend it unless you a.) really can't afford Windows b.) are really just that stubborn. And Mac, well you can edit video but watching it might be another story. Ati vs. nVidia is another story. Both have pros and cons. I went with ATI for it's full VC-1 acceleration. I might switch back to nVidia since it's VC-1 has improved (ATI is still better) and it upsamples chroma better plus CUDA support might just be taking off. 32bit vs. 64 bit isn't a big deal. I recommend sticking with 32 bit Vista since it's the most supported OS right now and 64 bit doesn't offer much of an improvment to make it that worth while (unless as someone else said, you want excessive memory).

Another piece of software for the anime fan to look at is Slysoft's AnyDVD(HD). It removes most restrictions from DVD Blu-ray. This includes region locks so you can import discs. It also removes annoying user operation prohibitions like locking you out of skipping trailers and such. It also removes copy protection like the Macrovision RipGaurd rootkit found on some Geneon discs, including recent FUNimation released ones like When The Cry.

http://www.popcornhour.com/onlinestore/

The Popcorn hour even plays Mkv's and downloads torrents, all for around $220! I am really thinking about getting it when the A-110 comes out. Of course I would love to play around with MythTV but I really don't use my TV enough.

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Forum - View topicThe Otaku's Guide to Building a HTPC

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The Otaku's Guide to Building a HTPC