HTPC components
 

I'm about to build a new PC to replace my Sky HD box and am in search of tuner cards, a sound card, a video card, and a remote.

What i'm looking for are PCI cards if possible (and a PCI-express video card), as I don't fancy the idea of USB cards being knocked out of the back of the PC, and I need the following (I think):

2 x DVB-S2 HD tuners
2 x Terrestrial Freeview tuners
1 x HD sound card with SPDIF output
1 x PCI-Express video card with HDMI
1 x Windows Media Center remote

Does anyone have any recommendations for good cards which would hopefully cover many of the above options?
I'm hoping that I can get a single PCI tuner card to cover all the tuner options, and a single graphics card to cover the possible sound output too. I can obviously cope with separate cards but it would be nicer to have a single card to do multiple functions as it means my choice of motherboard is greater. PCI-Express would be fine as a tuner card too if possible.
Advice on a remote would be useful too.

Cheers,
Mike.

Media pc builder here.:)

I've built them since xp media centre edition & I'm yet to see a solution that gives more bang for your buck than a well built, fully exploited machine running Windows media centre. It's the excellent answer if you want one box that does everything.

Tuners. You say two freeview tuners. If you want to have capability for watching one whilst recording another, then go with Hauppauge's Nove t-500. 2 x DVB-T on one card and one input. However, if you're anticipating HD satellite then there are a few twin tuner dvb hd cards around - TBS for one. Of course I'm assuming you're not greedy and don't want four inputs! remember that with Sky, last I looked, you will need a box per input which is a turnoff when pitted against freeview where a split signal off one input will work a dual tuner.

As for sound & gpu, opinion is split. I have pals who go with onboard. Personally, I find a gpu to be better. I use a geforce 9800gt with passive cooling & for sound, a Creative xfi xtreme music running to a venerable Cambridge soundworks dt2250 5.1 system, which is still a quality system. The gpu is hdmi out & overall the system works great. The box is an Antec fusion black and for a remote, I use a MS media centre remote, into an infra red blaster, it all works perfectly.

I hear good things about Logitech Harmony remotes, but they start at £50 and you can have 2 ms remotes for that and they're fine for the job.

My system is 2 x 500gb drives running off an intel dual core E300 cpu (old hat) on Win 7 ultimate & it's fine for the job. I'm entertaining the idea of a new cpu & maybe a 1tb drive as I'm filling up with media, but even given the age of the system (3 years) and with a blu ray drive & gpu upgrade, I can't see many problems ahead. I have it extended round the house with Linksys DMA2100 extenders over powerline networks and I can't fault it.

I'm watching breakfast news whilst my daughter flips between cbbc & Lady ga ga upstairs & it all just works.

Brill :ok:
I have a Sky HD box currently, and hence 2 F-type coax cables into the living room. However, i've also got a terrestrial aerial on the roof and the signal quality from that was pretty good (until I disconnected it when I got Sky). What I want is the same range of channels without paying Murdoch £60 a month and I want to cover most options since I guess there'll be a fair exodus away from Sky once the Crystal Palace transmitter is converted to Freeview in 2012.

I hear that Windows Media Center doesn't natively support DVB-S2 which leaves you a bit devoid of channels, but I see that Hauppauge has got past that issue which leads to the question of whether others have too?

I've also seen this card which looks interesting: TechnoTrend . Performance on your side - especially since it seems to have HDMI and SPDIF output, but i'm not sure as to whether that's going to be usable or good, and the second issue is whether buying a tuner from a German firm will give me a whole world of incompatibilities etc?

The PC it'll be going into is currently a Dell Optiplex GX620 (but may get swapped with something more "hi-fi" if/when I learn more about things). This gives me 1 x PCI-E x16, 1 x PCI-E x1, and 2 x PCI slots. It also gives me pretty crappy onboard graphics, but I might live with it for now.

It's going into a Samsung 40" LED b-series TV (which explains why I'm not streaming TV directly to it as Samsung screwed us early adopters of the LED TV with dropping support for the in-built widgets and the on-board DLNA sucks!), and I also have a Yamaha DSP-A5 which has been a rock for me but doesn't do HDMI (I also have no space for the extra pair of speakers to make 7.1).

Can you get the MS remotes to do other tasks such as power on/off the TV, amp, etc?

I intend to rip all my CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays to lossless and stick it on an iSCSI NAS in the study which should cope with the storage demands.

I'm glad you mentioned the Linksys boxes as I was wondering how I was going to deal with the bedroom TV. Do they cope well enough with the bandwidth limits when using Powerline? or am I going to need to run another CAT5e cable to the bedroom for gigabit? Also, how much is the box?

I'm also struggling with finding a single, up-to-date resource website for all this stuff. Any tips?

Cheers,
Mike.

The Green Button

That's the resource to check out.

As for inputs, we're similar. I have Freeview & Virgin, so there's a dvb-t dual tuner & an analaogue tuner in my box for Virgin (it's that whole digital signal converted to analogue by the box & back to digital by the tuner thing) so I have three tv inputs, but only on Freeview can I watch one watch one whilst recording another I.e. if I want to record say sky movies premiere and watch Sky Sports 1, I have to choose between them, but if it's Dave vs BBC1 I'm laughing. In practice, with 90 odd channels, it's really not too much of an ache.

AFAIK Win 7 does support DVB-S2, it certainly supports H.264, but do do some reading on TGB before parting with cash. Presently, I'm strictly standard def, so it's not my strongest suit to advise upon.

As for cards, as you know Windows has got better and better with driver support, and since Vista, I've never had to do more than drop in the occasional driver to run a tuner card through media centre. Although I don't know the card you're referring to, I can't see an impediment unless you hear noise from the forums.

MS remotes are learning remotes, so 'should' do what you want. As ever, read up first.

Cabled networks are always better, but my experience of powerline has been ok, even for live tv and movies with the powerline network. The boxes are discontinued, but you can always find them on ebay for 50-100 quid or so. Since I live in a Victorian terraced house with 9 inch solid walls, running cat 5 discreetly is a non starter for me, so powerline is the expedient.

Thanks, I had just found out the Linksys boxes were EOL and was coming back on here for a sob! I just don't want an Xbox 360 - I don't play console games and would only need an extender for the bedroom anyway (where I don't really want a whirring hard drive all night).

I assume since you're SD only, you can't verify whether the Linksys boxes do HD? and do they do 16:9 ok?

16:9 is on but they're sd & given that they were the 2nd effort at the extender market, you're probably stuck with it as a solution unless you're prepared to throw money at the problem. The DMA2100 is a straight extender, the DMA 2200 has a dvd reader bunged in. QED.

:ok::ok::ok::ok::ok::ok::ok::ok::ok::ok:

I do think that in the midst of a technical discussion it is worth keeping in mind that inspite of the well spotted shortcomings, you do get tv, music, pictures, video, streaming media, internet and full pc functionality in one box and all for about 500 quid if you're canny with the build.

For example, I'm typing this whilst recording a movie, listening to LCD soundsystem and watching a slide show of my daughter playing in the garden scrolling on a Ken Burns effect through a 42" LG screen.

It really is a powerful application once you get it going.:)

:ok: Cheers - i'm definitely looking for DVB-S2 and DVB-T2 cards though, although i'm not so sure as to how much bandwidth they're going to take and whether i'll have an issue with an HD card in a PCI slot? Something's going to have to give though, because the motherboard only has one spare PCI-e slot after an add-in card.

I have learnt from expereience that (stating the obvious) it pays to choose a mobo with as many expansion slots as you can run to. I built an old media box based on a micro atx board to fit in an MSI case & ended up with usb hubs & all manner of external cards hanging off it.:uhoh:

Hmm, might need a new i5 sandybridge box for that then.

Quick queries: Do you still get the ability to pause live TV? (and is there a pause limit or is it the limit of your hard drive's storage?), and what do you do about an EPG? (and can you do series link, etc?)

You can still rewind, pause & fast forward Live tv. There is a buffer limit, but I forget the tech specs. I think you can mess about with the settings within WMC itself. In practice, from memory opn my system, the box simply restarts live tv once the buffer is full after about thirty forty minutes or so. There is also a bug in some win7 systems where pausing live tv causes the screen to go blank. It resumes when you resume tv & doesn't affect everyone. I haven't looked lately to see if it's been resolved & I should because I'm one of the affected!

EPG is provided & it's better than previous versions in that you can colour channels by genre - news, sport, movies etc. and it's far more searchable than previous guides. For example select a movie starring Will Smith & you get a review of the film, and a cast list. You can select a cast member & the EPG will open a page showing any other movies it finds in the guide starring that cast member, which you can then set to record.

You can do series record and set whether or not to record the first, 2nd or all screenings of a show and set when to start & end recording for example, 1,2, 3, or 5 minutes before & after start time. You can also set the size of your recorded tv folder & the quality of recording - remember that your tv folder will likely be the most fragmented on the machine, so I keep a partition solely for that purpose.

In all, the EPG won't disappoint!

"i'm definitely looking for DVB-S2 and DVB-T2 cards"

You'll be looking at the Blackgold BGT3620 then, still the only PCI (-E) product to support the unique British DVB-T2 standard. Yours for about 100 quid.

An excellent product, I have one in my HTPC. Having used Blackgold products for many years I can heartily recommend them.

I also have a Nova T500 as mentioned earlier - it's ok in almost all respects, the only niggle being that it presents itself through the PCI bus to the system as a USB device. As such there is a small lag each time the PC resumes from sleep whilst the machine "discovers" the card.

Check out the other Blackgold products as they really do cover all the bases (Analogue,Freeview, Sat, Cable)and are designed with Media Center compatibility in mind from the outset.

BTW someone mentioned MST as "must have". Presumably you'll be loading Windows 7 in which case MST will not work. Win 7 standby has generally worked well for me though. Ensure you enable the S3 standby state in BIOS before you install the OS - in older versions of MCE this was essential, it may still be so.

EDIT: oops, looks like I was talking hoop on the MST issue. It would seem they're working on a win 7 version - see here:

Solved Win 7 Sleep and Wake Issues - Page 3 - Windows 7 Forums

download link at the bottom of the thread. Hopefully you won't need it though!

Thanks for the heads-up. I had previously avoided the BlackGold products as the forum posts (quite old it appears) had reported delivery issues with them, but on further reading it appears they've been cleared up.

I think i'll go for a BGT3595 though, as that appears to be a twin DVB-S2 card with a twin DVB-T tuner as well - and I can always add a DVB-T2 PCI card in the next 12 months to get Freeview when they turn up the power from Crystal Palace.

Nice price too!

Now I just need to avoid being tempted by the lovely aluminium cased ATX PCs and tell myself I need to cost-justify the move from SkyHD to HTPC :)

Cheers,
Mike.

I've heard good things of Blackgold too, though beware, that particular card does not support UK DVB-T2. Itwasme has the steer on that in his post.

OK one other question as i'm confused....

If I have an AV amp which does SPDIF but doesn't do HDMI, and I have a TV which does HDMI, what do I need for my HTPC?

Do I need to find a HDMI video card which has an SPDIF connector on it?
Do I need to find a sound card with SPDIF output?
Do I need to find a little black box that'll split the sound from an HDMI cable and present me with SPDIF and HDMI?

Aargh!

My motherboard has an SPDIF header, which connects to a little backplane card offering optical and coax SPDIF to the outside world.

My video card has an SPDIF input on the PCB, and came with a cable to connect it to the motherboard header. Connecting this up routes the audio through the HDMI connector.

So, depending on the motherboard and video card, it should just be a question of connecting the motherboard's SPDIF header to whatever you want. If you have a discrete audio card, it may have an internal SPDIF header as well as the backplane one(s).

Edit: a quick Google suggests that nVidia-based cards tend to have the SPDIF input header, while ATI/AMD cards tend to have on-board HD audio. Oooh. I may have to decamp on the next box.

Thread resurrection alert
 

I've come in to a bit of spare cash so I want to finally go all 5.1 surround.

My current Vista MCE PC feeds into a very old Aiwa mini stereo amp. Fine for now but limited.

Been searching all morning but there is so much choice.

Any recomendations for a 5.1 surround amp and speaker set up?

Budget is about £500 tops.

Cheers. :ok:

Either Yamaha or Denon. Personally I prefer the Yamahas, and have had 3 so far.

Oh, and i'd not go for an all-in-one package, but go to listen to a bunch of separate speakers instead and match them to the amp.

One heads up on the question of speakers. If, and this is a fairly narrow scenario, but one that's hit me - you want to use a bluray drive in win7 mc, you need to use 3rd party software. In practice, that means Powerdvd, Corel Windvd & Arcsoft something or other. I've tried all of them & They have all had trouble detecting my 5.1 set up & defaulted to 6 speaker output.

It may well be because my soundcard is Creative & their support is appaling but the upshot is I often lose the vocal track on movies & have to dive into the control panel to set the system to 2 speakers which defeats the point of having high end bluray on tap.

I have done my reading & the forums do throw up repetitive themes of problematic software, particularly with Arcsoft & Cyberlink, so if you're travelling down that route, be sure to gather advice and other peoples experiences before parting with cash.

Thanks for the replies.

I should have said, the pc is already configured and alegedly 7:1 capable. I just never bothered to buy the external amp and speakers.


I'm in two minds, one to go with something off the shelf such as this or do a bit of research and get the best amp/speaker combination.

I agree. This is what is wired up in my front room:

http://i56.tinypic.com/nve742.jpg

Luckily for me I have picture rails & so can hide the wiring very effectively. These Cambridge soundworks DT2250 5.1 speakers are from the first pc I bought in 1993 I think & coupled with the bass bin which hides behind the LCD tv, are far more powerful than anything I could ever need for a domestic set up. Must be worth all of forty wing wangs by now:rolleyes:

There's no doubt you could spend thousands on really pure, high quality audio set ups, but sometimes it's a matter of asking yourself what you need rather than what you want.

That is precisely the kind of info I need.

Thankyou again.

Off to brows the shops and have a listen. :8

Back to this old chestnut again, sorry.

I've been trying to source a Yamaha RXV667 but they are like hens teeth now!
Richer Sounds has a few dotted around the country for about £300 but (insert long south american river here) is asking over £600!!!!:eek:

Trouble with the Richer Sounds stock is that they are all ex display or repaired ex-service with no remote or manuals etc.

Now, if it saves me 300 quid I could do without the remote as long as it's not an essential item. IE Initial setup and programming. The manual I can download.

Any help appreciated. :ok:

They'll be hen's teeth as they'll be obsoleted. Have you checked the Yamaha range and seen whether a newer amp would suit you?

Nothing in the price range has the connectivity I need. IE 6 audio inputs from the PC.

I really think you may be overkilling it going with external amps & speakers. You ought to try a 7:1 set up off a soundcard - something like Creative or Logitech. Unless you're trying to fill a village hall, or are a serious audiophile, you'll find it's more than adequate.

I'm confused now, Para. :confused:

Post 21 above suggests that there are problems with that.


Whereas you agreed with CBA_Caption's post regarding the Yamaha Av set up. (Post 24).


I'm running Vista MCE by the way so I really don't want to start screwing around with new hardware and buggy software.

In addition, the way things are going, a stand alone blu ray player in addition to my HTPC, that will run through an av receiver seems a lot less hard work. I know, the concept of 'all in one box' is getting stretched but you know what I mean.

Thanks again for all the advice. :ok:

I confess. The vocal track trouble was a dodgy connect to my centre speaker which is the channel set aside on blu ray for the purpose.

Although I agree if you're adding external boxes here & there an a/v amp will give you flexibility. What I was getting at was that you can have really good quality sound for much less than you might think.:)

OK, no worries.

I'll have a think. :ok:

Finally, managed to find a Yamaha RXV667 with all the kit at the right price, less than £300. Set up complete. Sounds terrific and lots of scope for when the little un wants to plug boxes in (wii, ipod etc).
Only bug bear is getting the TV sound to play back through the HDMI cable when watching direct tv instead of through the HTPC. Not a big issue but it should do it shouldn't it? All the bumpf says it should. Ho-hum, one to fiddle with if I ever feel the need.

Thanks again for all the help.
:ok:

You might have to take that back to the RXV667 with a TOSLINK.

Where did you find it anyway? I've found myself suddenly in need of an HDMI-capable tuner amp

Sorry for the tardy reply Mike.

I found it on an internet search, brand new but obviously 'out of the box'.
Just had another look and the cheapest was £636. :eek:

Thread Resurrection, again!
 

Right. everything was fine with my set up until I replaced the graphic card (See previous thread) and linked it all up with a HDMI cable. (The previous card only had DVI output and I had the sound coming direct from the sound card with audio jacks into the AV receiver).

I now have problems getting the sound to work. I've disabled the Analogue output and have it straight form the graphic card through HDMI to the AV receiver. It works but the volume indication graphic in MCE freezes.
I can still alter the volume direct with the AV receiver remote.

I must be missing something obvious.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

The sound output from the hdmi skt is in digital form and is decoded by AV device, the MCE volume control on the PC only adjusts the analogue sound level after it has been decoded by the sound card. You cannot adjust the volume of a digital signal. (well not easily anyway)

Ah. That all makes a lot of sense. Thank you both very much. Twiddling required.