Building an HTPC…..some thoughts

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In August 2006 I had two computers in my house. One was a recently purchased and low spec Acer laptop that I bought to do the basics, surf the web, online banking, email etc. The only other PC I had was an ancient 667MHz desktop PC running XP (albeit very slowly). I also had a Digifusion 40GB dual DVB set top box thing. Anyway….because I am one of those people who like to bugger around with things the idea dawned on me of building a HTPC. Of course, I had been into the local PC store and seen XP MCE on a huge flat screen and was wooed by it’s silky animation and apparent ease of use.
 
By way of justifying the cost of building a new PC I told the missus that the following great things could be accomplished with a new PC….
 
1) watch and record DVB-T (freeview TV)
2) have easy access to our mp3 music collection
3) play decent PC games
4) video/voice call our relatives in Australia from the living room
5) edit our camcorder footage
6) be “HD Ready”
7) play DVD’s 
8) transfer recorded TV/films etc to DVD.
9) stream content to elsewhere in the house.
 
So, buoyed by my new sense of geeky purpose…I set out to find some ingredients. I came up with the following:
 
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Zalman HD160S HTPC case
Zalman ZM460B-APS ATX PSU
ASUS P5B Deluxe Wi-fi AP mobo
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz cpu
2 x 512MB Kingston Hyper-X PC-6400 DDR2 ram
Samsung Spinpoint HD400LJ 400GB HD
Sapphire ATi Radeon X1950PRO 256MB GDDR3
Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT MCE
RICOH MP5240 DVD+RW (already owned)
 
An OEM version of MCE 2005

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With this lot, I considered, I would be able to accomplish all of the above tasks and more. So here I am in late December 2006 having used the system for a month or so now. I have purposely delayed posting any reviews until I had an idea of how it all performed. Before getting into the nuts and bolts of it all (in a seperate post, don’t worry) I wanted to make the following points about my choices…….
 
1. My experience of MCE 2005 is one of half-expected dismay. Having used it for about, oh, 45 minutes or so, the EPG corrupted or some such nonsense and the thing went t!ts up. I don’t really know what happened….there are plenty of threads about it – “MCE hangs after repetitive actions” blah blah…..I also had to try to patch it up with other little utilities (MCE standby tool for example) as the power button on the remote didn’t seem to work. There was various stutterings in live TV, failing to execute scheduled recordings, losing channels, failing to download the EPG, failing to do alot of things. The sad thing is I wasn’t suprised.
 
2. As a result of this it took me about 10 minutes of surfing to find the excellent open source program MediaPortal http://www.team-mediaportal.com/ After a brief and painless installation it was set up quickly and I consider it to be vastly superior to MCE. Yes, it is more hands on – I had to manually select the EPG source and manually program the MCE remote to work with it. But it is all possible for anyone with half a brain (until last night I had no idea what XML was but neveltheless got to grips with some basics to sort the remote out). As an aside, I note that Tescos is selling an opensource version of Office for £19.99 at the moment…..Microsoft better watch out because before long people are going to properly ditch their overrated* software for something that works (do I sound bitter??)
 
*perhaps not overrated – overpurchased
 
3. I admit that I tried to kill too many birds with one stone with this build. It was daft to think that one box could provide PC and TV functionality to satisfy both myself and my partner. I mean – my other half dominates the TV anyway with a plethora of trash programming to digest – when did I think I was going to play my PC games with X-Factor being broadcast 24/7 ??? It’s a great idea to have a one box solution but unless you live on your own I suggest that it’s a little unrealistic. I initially had in mind a TV and monitor running through a dual head graphics card but couldn’t make this work properly with MCE. As a result I went a bought a nice little 22″ Fujitsu monitor which has now found it’s way into my study together with the HTPC (DOH!) TV is now back to being viewed on the Digifusion set top box……hmmmm
 
By way of a very short opinion on my various purchases see the following……
 
Zalman HD160S HTPC case – excellent purchase but if i’m being picky, it’s a bit large, VFD is a little dim, 80mm rear fans are a tad noisy (need to find a way to slow them down yet)
Zalman ZM460B-APS ATX PSU – superbly quiet, no nonsense PSU
ASUS P5B Deluxe Wi-fi AP mobo – excellent mobo with many connectivity options, wifi works out of the box of course.
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.13 GHz cpu – much acclaimed, hasn’t even broken sweat yet and it’s not even a high spec core 2 cpu.
2 x 512MB Kingston Hyper-X PC-6400 DDR2 ram – memorises things…..er what can i say, works well.
Samsung Spinpoint HD400LJ 400GB HD – fast drive but needs insulating some more in my HD160 to be truly quiet
Sapphire ATi Radeon X1950PRO 256MB GDDR3 – runs most games at high settings, quiet, good value for money in my eyes…
Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT MCE – blamed by MCE for various problems but works superbly with MediaPortal – great reception.
 
By the way, have found these forums very helpful along the way…………
 
cheers.