HOME THEATER PC UPDATES

My Home Theater PC has been evolving over a few years now, every once in a while i'll upate my blog with the latest and greatest, usually after i've done a few upgrades.

Here's a list of my previous HTPC blog postings. Some of the info in the older posts may not be totally useful now two years later but you can see where we've come from.

9/12/09 : Xonar HDAV (protected audio pathway) audio card added to my HTPC, full 192khz bitstreaming lossless audio

7/20/09 : New video card, new DVD/BR playback software, TrueHD / DTSHDMA (protected audio pathway) capable audio cards

5/31/08 : WiFi, HTPC Remote, BluRay playback, Audio Codecs and pictures

4/12/08 : Encoding DVDs for full 5.1 surround sound playback on HTPC or Xbox360

3/23/08 : The original post, discussing all the original components

Now on to the new additions / Changes

ATI 5000 series video cards support full bitstreaming HD audio

One problem with HTPC's and BluRay was that you really had no options for being able to play full 192khz bitstreamed lossless audio formats, Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio. You could downsample them and play them just fine but I always knew something was missing whether or not I could hear the difference. If you wanted full HD audio to go with your HD video, you only had two choices, the Xonar HDAV Slim card or another even more expensive brand (can't recall the name). I laid down 140 bucks for my Xonar card and have enjoyed it for a year now, but it would be nice to have the video cards actually do Protected Audio Pathway (basically HDCP for audio) and give us full resolution HD audio.

Well the good news is that now ATI does have PAP support in their 5000 series video cards. So now instead of spending ~$200 for a Xonar and a 3000 or 4000 series video card, you can spend ~$90 for an HD 5570 and get everything in one single card. That being said, my current recommend is a Sapphire HD 5570 card, i have their 4650 card right now with a Xonar audio card and the combo works great, the fan is really quiet. If i didn't have the Xonar or was building a new system for scratch, the Sapphire 5570 would be my choice, HD audio and video plus a real quiet fan, $85 @ newegg.com .

Manufacturer card info

ZALMAN VNF100 passive video card cooling

Video cards usually come with loud fans which is fine in a desktop PC but I can't stand the fan screaming away inside my home theater PC. I had an MSI video card which prompted me to seek out noiseless cooling.

Zalman makes a pretty universal passive cooling system. It comes in quite a few pieces and the directions for assembly aren't great, but with some effort I figured out how to put it together. In general it works like this, you fit the correct headsink mounting bracket to your card, then clamp that down to the GPU. Once that's done, you fit the big blue radiator shown on the left onto the back of the card and the heat pipes then come down the front of the card to where your GPU is. The last step is to put a screw down another heatsink on top of the GPU which clamps onto the heat pipes. Here's a front/back pic of this mounted on a card. The idea here is as the GPU heats up, the heat travels to the first smaller heatsink on the front then up the heatpipes and distributes across the blue radiator. So far in my HTPC using a temp monitoring program the GPU (ati 4650) sits around 50 degrees C just in windows and goes up to 60 degrees C playing a bluray movie full screen 1080p. Not bad and best of all, no noise! Paid $19.99 from some obscure internet mailorder company , other places are charging $30-$4

Website Link

QUITER CPU cooling, CNPS7700-AICu LED

Once I solved my GPU fan noise problem, I then started to notice the whine of the CPU fan as the motherboard spun it faster to compensate for heat. So I hit up Zalman again since I was happy with the cooler i bought for my video card. They have a ton of options for CPU coolers, almost all of them with fans, they have a few wthout fans but they weren't even close to fitting into my HTPC case. Actually most of their fan CPU based coolers also wouldn't fit, so i went with a more horizontal form factor cooler than a vertical one.

This one is all copper fins, no heat pipes and a 120mm fan along with a fan speed controller with enough cable to mount it outside your case if you want, i just stick mine inside the case.

Installation difficulty will vary depending on your system board, my stuff is socket 775 which required me to take the motherboard out of the case becasue the mounting bracket had a part that went on the underside of the mobo and on the top of the mobo. From there it was just a matter of applying thermal grease and screwing the clamp that runs through the middle of the heatsink down to the mounting bracket.

The heatsink is quite large, it's a little more than 5 inches across and it's also pretty tall, it tapers to small and narrow at the bottom to large at the top, this is to help clear any components mounted on the top surface of your mobo. This particular one also has a red LED in it so it lights up red when it spins, cool if you have a clear case but useless if you don't . Here's a picture of it mounted on a motherboard

As impressed as I was with my GPU cooler, i was not really impressed with this cooler. When i fired it up initially, it sounded like a fan blade was dragging on the radiator fins. After looking and looking, icouldn't see any dragging so i took the assembly apart separating the fan from the radiator and i still had the noise. I think it has a blowl ball bearing inside it, either that or they use shitty fans. So I arranged an exchange with Amazon.com (great customer service there) and hopefully the new one will sound quiet. But I wasn't about to take everything apart again either, taking the mobo out of the system and putting the old stock Intel fan back on. So i mounted it all up, clamped it down and then messed with the RPM adjustment knob. I wanted it to spin at it's slowest setting for reduced noise but i found that a slightly faster speed than it's slowest produced the least amount of noise. Happy with that i put the cover on and gave it a go, I can hear a dull hum at 5 feet away which is an improvement over the stock Intel fan which had a whine that was much louder BUT it's far from silent. I'm hoping when the replacement kit gets here on Tuesday that the new assembly won't make as much noise.

WIth the fan spinning at slightly faster than the slowest setting, my temp monitor reports the CPU at 32 degrees C just idle inside windows and it gets up to 40 degrees C playing back a bluray movie at full screen 1080p. I think the real test will be when i do an encoding job, that really makes the processor work (which is a 2.2ghz Core2 Duo)

Manufacturer info link $35 @ amazon.com

TRENDnet TEG-PCITXR gigabit wired eithernet controller

I did originally have a WIfiN class network card in this HTPC but after we moved the router ended up in the same room so I decided to just go wired. Problem was, my MoBo only came with a 100 meg network card built in. This is fine for streaming DVD rips with no problem but it was choking hard on BluRay rips. The size difference is about 1.5-2 gigs for a Divx AVI DVD rip vs 17-23 gigs for a H264 .mkv BluRay rip.

I needed to buy two cards though, one for the hosting server and one for the home theater server. Gigabit network cards are not all built equal but I decided for what I needed, I could get away with a budget gigabit network card. Frys happened to have them on sale for $9.99 each so the price really was what won me over.

Windows 7 will auto-install the Realtek RTL8169 chipset driver which isn't a high performance chipset by any means. But i figured you can stream HD video over WiFi N which tops out at 300 mbps so if i get at least that much out of these cards, i figured i'm good. My initial test showed the transfer speed was 20 MBps which isn't great for a gigabit card, so i tweaked the properties of the card to do 'jumbo frames', this card will let you go up to 7k of data per frame (9k is the max i think) and once I did that the transfer speed doubled to 40MBps.

Transfer speeds aside though, i was really mostly intersted if i could stream my 20gig MKV files between the server and the home theater PC without sputtering. I'm happy to report that the speed is ample for that. So now I have the option of just quick ripping BluRay movies in their native resolution to H265 MKV files which are huge, or I can continue to do a second phase process of that huge mkv file and down-res the movie using two pas encoding 3000kbps and i end up with a 3 gig file, but this process takes upwards of 8 hours. So drive space or time, that's the tradeoff. Either way though it's good to know which ever way i want to go, the networking can handle it.

Manufacturer info page

the WINDOWS 7 upgrade

When windows 7 launched I also took the opportunity to move to that over Vista. Additionally I ended up upgrading to the 64bit version as well from 32bit Vista.

I went with the Home Premium bundle because it was cheaper and ultimate didn't give me anything extra I needed for a home theater PC. The new windows 7 media center front end is really very nice. The one pitfall I had to 'hack' around is being able to play back MKV files, windows media player doesn't support it and at the time Total Media Theater had also removed their support for MKV files in a patch so i was pretty screwed for a while. But with some help from the internet, I eneded up getting around these problems and TMT has also been updated to play MKV files again after a very loud outcry from the community.

Overall i'm very happy with windows 7 as my media center OS.

Samsung 1.5TB HDD added to system

Two things happened at once that made my previous 500 meg HDD really kind of obsolete. First, I never really got into DVRing on this system. I won't get into the details but it boiled down to the windows media center TV guide didn't match my channels so I could never really get it working. I hacked together some DVRing with WinTV but it was pretty unreliable so I just abondoned it altogether.

What I eneded up doing instead was doing automated RSS feed downloading of TV via bittorrent and while doing that, I also started ripping BluRay movies. Usual 1 hours 720p shows take up 1.09gb of storage typically, 1080p is double that. While ripping the raw files off a BluRay disc will consume 30-40 gigs of hdd space, then another ~20 gigs on an intitial MKV rip and 3 gigs after a secondary down-res processing job. So the space adds up fast.

Frys had a Samsung 1.5 TB drive on sale for 70 bucks on day so i drove over and picked it up. I tend to try and stick with seagate drives whenever possible and today you can pick up a 1.5TB seagate for 80 bucks on sale. At the time though, this was a new breakthrough in price per gigabyte. It's standard SATA, not sure what all the specs are but it doesn't matter, I was just concerned with storage capacity.

So when picking a hard drive for your home theater PC, i would say a 1 TB drive is your entry point. The whole thing with going through the expense of building a home theater PC is file based HD video so you'll want the space. Even if you DVR your own stuff rather than downloading, HD content takes a lot of space so if you want to save seasons of shows, you'll need a decent amount of storage. 2 TB drives are actually quite affordable these days at around 120 bucks.