My HTPC Build Experience

[SnakeDoctor]

So, I jumped in and built myself an HTPC.  So far, it has been a fun experience and I have learned a lot along the way.  I would like to share some of my experiences with this group hopefully to provide some information and also to get some of my yet unanswered questions answered.

Based on reviews I read, I decided to go with the Zalman HD-160 case.  It looked good (high WAF) and apparently was well built.  To briefly sum it up, yes the case looks nice and is well built but:  Installing the fan under the drive cage required removal and modification of one of the feet.  Not really a big deal.  Mounting the DVD cover plate on the drive took some work because the drive had to be mounted far enough back so that the eject button was not being permanently pushed in.  This resulted in the cover plate not allowing the tray to fully retract.  A extra layer of double-sided foam tape fixed this.  Again, not a big deal.  To date, I have not yet determined the use of the VFD – see below.

I’m not an overclocker and I don’t like dealing with motherboard ‘issues’ so I went with a basic Intel motherboard (DP965LT).  To this I added a Zalman ZM-460 power supply (very quiet), an E6400 processor, a Zalman CNPS9500 CPU cooler, a Foxconn 7600GS video card (passively cooled – quiet), a Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer sound card (so far, I would classify this as a mistake – more on this later), a 500GB WD hard drive, and a generic (Hitachi I think) DVD burner (not very quiet).  I turned this system into an HTPC by adding a Beyond TV bundle which consisted of an NVidia DualTV tuner card and a Firefly remote.  Even though Vista is out, I chose XP so I would not have to deal with ‘beta’ drivers and go through new operating system ‘issues’.  Maybe I’ll upgrade to Vista after SP2 has been released  ^-^

The physical build went without a hitch except as noted above.  I fired up the system, loaded the latest BIOS, installed XP (SP2 with all of the latest patches) and the latest drivers (network / video / chipset / tuner / sound), installed BeyondTV and my HTPC was up and running.  So far, so good.

Next, I connected the HTPC to my HT receiver with some basic cables (2-speaker configuration) and tested out the TV portion of the system.  Everything worked great.  My next task was to get the DVD burner in the HTPC to operate as my DVD player (using Windows Media Player).  Here is where the trouble started.  After going several rounds with the Creative tech support group, I was informed that (despite what the documents say) the Xtreme Gamer supports only optical output on the SPDIF port (I was trying to do it via coax).  I finally obtained a mini Toslink adapter and connected the HTPC to the HT receiver via optical.  Currently, the only signal being sent through the Toslink cable is PCM data.  Any time I select DTS on a DVD, I get no sound and my HT receiver shows no indication of receiving DTS data (as it does with my standalone DVD player).  The Creative documents say that I must go to the ‘Decoder’ tab in the Creative Console and configure the sound card to pass the DTS signal through.  The problem is, there is no ‘Decoder’ tab in the Creative Console.  Creative tech support seems to think the drivers have been installed incorrectly.  Installing the drivers is a pretty straightforward process so I don’t really see how this is possible.  In order to placate the tech support group so that we could move forward on resolving the issue, I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled them.  Still no ‘Decoder’ tab.  I had some time on my hands so I reformatted the hard drive and reloaded the system from the ground up.  Still no ‘Decoder’ tab.  Out of desperation, I actually did this twice (no, I did not expect a different result).  Call me crazy but, I don’t think this is a driver issue.  I wonder if this card really supports DTS pass-through.  As it stands right now, the system is working with the exception of DD/DTS pass-through.  When (if) I get this working I will be quite pleased with the system.

Now, maybe someone can point me in the right direction for the following issues…

1.  The HD-160 has a VFD display.  Currently, all this display does is show the time and date (which is off by one hour ever since we switched to daylight savings time).  Is this display supposed to do anything else and if so, what else does it do and how do you make it do it?  I loaded the drivers from Zalman but I want to use the Firefly remote that came with BeyondTV rather than the one that came with the HD-160.  I’m not sure if the function of the VFD and the remote are related.

2.  When using the Firefly remote with Windows Media Player, some of the buttons don’t do what they should.  For example, the Volume Down button actually increases the volume.  Yes, the Volume Up button also increases the volume.  I have no idea where to go to investigate/correct this problem.  Any ideas?

3.  If I ultimately cannot get the Xtreme Gamer sound card to pass the DTS signal to my HT receiver, does anyone have a recommendation of a descent sound card that will do this?  I have read that the motherboard sound is not very good so I would like to avoid that if possible.

4.  Can anyone recommend a DVD burner that is quiet?  Performance (in terms of write speed) is not an issue.

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