Just wondering if this Home Entertainment sys is do able

cubix

The mate wants to build a pc system to stick under his stairs/utility room to use as an entertainment system. The main role is to play movies/music, but if its possible from one pc he wants to be able to play different movies at the same time in different rooms ie: lounge/bedroom/kitchen etc. Everything needs to be able to be remotly controled from each of the rooms. He is doing a revamp so running cables should not be a problem but more so is it do able or is it a case you would need to spend thousands. One last thing if it is doable on a reasonable buget,if he wants to have internet access in each room and do it through the tv what kit would he need. To get the best resolution I take he would need a tv with a pc connection

Thanks Cubix

irlrobins

Moving to HTPC forum

toffo

Yipp, have a similar setup in the attic. The machine up there is a server, stores all movies music ect, all accessible through the wireless network. Works fine with MCE, only problem i find is when somebody tries to watch the same movie.

Will be expensie if he wants it for mutipal rooms, a pre built Media center PC is arround a grand, and would be netter off using an LCD tv too.

hshortt

I would suggest that the limitations of a single pc will mean you will need one PC per room required. They can all be located under the stairs for example but you will need to run dedicated cables to the screens in each room and the lenghts of cables could be an issue.

You could use central storage for music and ripped movies that each pc accesses for playback, even this is expensive depending on the sizes you want to scale up to.

Cheerio
Howard

layke

If you get faster disks (SATA RAPTOR) you will be able to watch movies on multiple PC's at the same time. If you go that way your going to sacrifice a lot of space you would get with a normal HDD.

The ideal option of course would be a mini raid system, but it's not usually in the budget and most don't fit Media cases.

Tip :: Don't waste money on MCE when there are things like freevo about.

8T8

How much in spare parts does he have as if this if for multiple rooms a PC in each room would be required along with a NAS or central PC server setup, not even factoring in the cost of the OS if its MCE he wants for each machine.

If he does have windows XP licenses already then use media portal a very good free media center program & has good community support.


An alternative system would be to have a central server running MCE on a reasonable PC, then use Xbox 360 consoles as extenders, there are a few good reasons as to why;

Price €300 per console, cheaper than building PC's for each room if he doesnt have the parts.
Easy connection to the TV.
Supports MCE interface, live TV, guide, recording etc.
Supports MCE remote, pressing the green button on the remote will turn on the console & bring up the MCE interface automatically.
Can do most of what MCE can (there are workarounds for things not natively supported like DivX).
Multiple extenders supported (Up to 5 per PC & number allowed is dependent on the power of the PCs CPU).

Downside:
No net browsing access possible via the console.
Not possible to stream DVDs you would have to convert them into another format.

Thats said this would be an easy method of distributing the HTPC around the house (and provide some games for distraction over the Xbox Live service though you need the HD add-on or a memory card for that I think).

One other thing definitely do have wires put down for CAT5e around the house a wired network will be more reliable than a wireless one and deliver better performance when dealing with multiple extenders.

cubix

Thanks lads 8T8 nice idea with the consoles, will pass on the info

hshortt

Yeah the extenders are good but you'll all be watching the same movie.

SouperComputer

If you get faster disks (SATA RAPTOR) you will be able to watch movies on multiple PC's at the same time. If you go that way your going to sacrifice a lot of space you would get with a normal HDD.

/scratches head.

What do you need raptors for to serve at max 15GB per hour?

The answer is that you dont. I have a PII550 with multiple PATA drives here happily serving 4-10 clients with negligable workload. Media is generally not resource intensive, although it seems to be percieved that way. People forget that computers with TV cards shipped in the early 90's!

@cubix, if he just wants to play movies and music, then only a very light machine is needed. Basically all you need is a fileserver. For this you can run linux (Clarkconnect being a handy one), FreeNAS, or windows 2000. Of course you could run XP, but its a bit pointless on a low spec machine. You just need to add a modern IDE\SATA PCI card to support more modern HD's.

On the client end, you could use a PC with freevo, mediaportal or even geexbox. There are also some networkable "DVD" players that can play divx from a network drive.

If you want to watch live TV and recorded TV then you need to really use MythTV (Server is linux only) or Microsoft media centre. In terms of using the XB360 as extenders with MCE, you can watch most formats of video on them, but the "server" machine will need to trancode the video on the fly for each of the XBoxes. This means more computing power, possibly dual core, is needed.

MythTV is probably the best out there, but it is fairly involved to setup.

One thing I would say is that if you have the chance to lay cable, do it. Wireless is generally unsatisfactory in media situations that entail less than ideal conditions and multiple clients..

8T8

hshortt wrote:

Yeah the extenders are good but you'll all be watching the same movie.

I don't understand that last bit is there some sort of limitation with multiple extenders

(you mean like live TV obviously everyone would be stuck watching the same thing with something like Sky/Chorus etc)

But music/video/pictures/radio should be no problem at all right ?

(I only have one Xbox 360 so cant test that out myself but MS's pages didn't flash any warnings in this regard)

hshortt

If you use five x360s as extenders into the one MCE PC, you cannot control different parts of MCE from the different PCs. My understanding is that if someone is watching a DVD using MCE, that you cannot select a different movie from the other extenders, so you'll all be watching the same one.

I'm not an expert on it, but I expect that you will find you can't have more than one audio stream at once. I'd like to see it differently however, so if you've seen it or done it please share your experience.

Cheerio
Howard

8T8

hshortt wrote:

If you use five x360s as extenders into the one MCE PC, you cannot control different parts of MCE from the different PCs.

That last bit PCs is a typo you mean extenders right ?

hshortt wrote:

My understanding is that if someone is watching a DVD using MCE, that you cannot select a different movie from the other extenders, so you'll all be watching the same one.

But you cant watch DVDs though the MCE interface over the extender anyway, to watch DVDs on the extender you have to use the actual built in DVD drive & player on the X360 console.

hshortt wrote:

I'm not an expert on it, but I expect that you will find you can't have more than one audio stream at once. I'd like to see it differently however, so if you've seen it or done it please share your experience.

I don't know either, most of the info I gleaned was from the TheGreenButton here is a quote from one of their members in this thread;

Yeah, everyone is saying 5 if your pc and network can handle it. personal experience may vary depending on what all 5 and the mce pc are doing at that exact moment.

By the sounds of it you need a decent PC & network to handle the load.

From Microsofts extender FAQ website

Is it possible to have two Xbox 360 consoles connected to the Media Center PC ?

Yes. When you connect an Xbox 360 console to a Media Center PC, a unique user account for the console is created on the PC. This account contains settings that are specific to the Xbox 360 console. The settings include such information as locations on the Media Center PC containing the music you want to listen to on the Xbox 360. The settings are unique to the console.

Since the settings are unique, you can connect additional consoles to the PC. Depending on your Media Center PC, you can connect up to five Xbox 360 consoles.

If I have two or more Xbox 360 consoles connected to a Media Center PC, can each console stream different media from the PC ?

Yes. Since each Xbox 360 console connected to a Media Center PC has a unique user account, each console can stream different media from the PC.

SouperComputer

I havent used multiple extenders myself, but it would be pretty pathetic and usless if each XB360 cannot access its own, chosen content. Be it Recorded TV, Music or videos. As 8T8 says, the limtations of LiveTv are a seperate issue.

I doubt its an issue TBH. The only thing I would be worried about is codec compability and transcoding for the XB360.

adrian.s

SouperComputer: On the Mythtv front, it's getting a whole lot easier. Maybe it's coming from experience but I've found with recent releases of ubuntu and myth it really doesn't take very long to get up and running. apt-get is your only man!

From the point of view of distributing the media, I've got a mini-itx box (which is totally fanless) as my front end and sits behind a plasma tv on the wall. It connects to the backend via a wired catv connection and there is absolutely no problem in streaming. I am planning on putting in a hauppauge mvp for my other tv and get all tv / music / dvd feeds from the one box. At €99 from komplett it's great value, stick mvpmc on it and your up an running. For the mini-itx box there's a thing called minimyth, which boots over the network and there's no messing around with installing any software on the box. It's completely customised for the VIA architecture so the only configuration that it needs is where to find the myth back end server.

The one big problem I found with having consoles running (or pcs) in my living room was noise. Fanlesss is so the way to go, and with this solution I've managed to avoid a bunch of difference techie boxes in the sitting room (a requirement from the other half!).

A.

cubix

How did you manage to go Fanless Adrian with your ITX,does your ITX power supply not have a fan

Cubix

adrian.s

cubix wrote:

How did you manage to go Fanless Adrian with your ITX,does your ITX power supply not have a fan

Cubix

Nope, no fans anywhere. Bought this gizmo: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=27

together with 512MB of ram and that was pretty much it. The power supply is like a laptop power supply.

A.

SouperComputer

SouperComputer: On the Mythtv front, it's getting a whole lot easier. Maybe it's coming from experience but I've found with recent releases of ubuntu and myth it really doesn't take very long to get up and running. apt-get is your only man!

I agree its easier now than ever, but for someone with little linux experience apt-get will only get them so far.

What hardware are you using on the backend? Are you using a STB?

sarahn11

if you didnt want to fork out 300e for an xbox 360, you could pick up a few second hand xboxes (1st gen) and soft mod them to run XBMC (xbox media center) they will do all the mentioned things as about, however i dont think you can watch live tv on them......pity....

SouperComputer

sarahn11 wrote:

if you didnt want to fork out 300e for an xbox 360, you could pick up a few second hand xboxes (1st gen) and soft mod them to run XBMC (xbox media center) they will do all the mentioned things as about, however i dont think you can watch live tv on them......pity....

/slaps own wrist

Good call actually, its a disgrace that the original Xbox has been forgotten about so quickly.

You can get a MythTV frontend for the XBox, but ideally you will want to upgrade the RAM in the system. Still a nice system for little money that might actually be more media-frendly than the XB360!

sarahn11

i know, shame on ya for forgetting!!!


xbmc will play everything,dvix, xvid bin/cue, iso .....pity about the tv bit.....it would have been perfect!

cubix

Thanks Boys+Girls,SC what kind of memory does the old Xbox take. Anybody know why this lad would be have lockups with with his controller
http://www.killefiz.de/k/machines/xbox-mythtv-frontend/
Cubix

SouperComputer

Xbox takes SDRAM PC133 IIRC:

http://www.xbox-linux.org/wiki/Upgrading_Xbox_RAM_HOWTO

If you are just going to run XMBC (XBox Media Centre) then the standard 64Mb should be A-OK.

adrian.s

@SouperComputer - Running an AMD 3200 / 1GB RAM / Hauppague 350 on Ubunutu 6.06 taking in NTL's basic analogue feed. Agreed it does require some Linux saviness, but I guess if you're going to tackle building your own PVR (and as in this thread a number of remote clients) there will be a certain degree of experience required!

mjsmyth

The cheap option, instead of buying Xbox 360's or PC's is to buy some 2nd hand xboxes and use the software mod to install Xbox Media Center (XBMC) on them. 2nd hand Xboxes are going for between 50 to 80 euro.

Once networked back to a server under the stairs, anyone can look at any movie, listen to any song, view any picture. You get the idea. As for ease of use, I don't think there is an easier media center out there.

The setup is a little tricky, by that I mean installing the software mod, but if you can do one, the others will be simple.

mj

mossym

mjsmyth wrote:

The cheap option, instead of buying Xbox 360's or PC's is to buy some 2nd hand xboxes and use the software mod to install Xbox Media Center (XBMC) on them. 2nd hand Xboxes are going for between 50 to 80 euro.

Once networked back to a server under the stairs, anyone can look at any movie, listen to any song, view any picture. You get the idea. As for ease of use, I don't think there is an easier media center out there.

The setup is a little tricky, by that I mean installing the software mod, but if you can do one, the others will be simple.

mj

one problem..no tv on an xbox...onerreason my xbox with xbmc is almost retired

CiaranC

The two posters above might consider reading the thread before posting in it.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbmcmythtv

mossym

apologies, i had read the thread...i presumed incorrectly that the mythtv link was the equivalent of xbmc, and since you can't install a tuner in an xbox..

anyway, in sc's link the guy states that the thing locks up once in 5 times? hardly a robust solution...it'd drive you nuts after a while..and installing more ram in an xbox is a dicey solution

hshortt

Ran a little test at the weekend. Wired my MCE and X360 to the Router. Configured connect and the extender on the PC and connected the X360.

My 3.2Ghz, 1.5GB RAM MCE machine handled the x360 well. When you configure the extender MCE automatically loads a network resource monitor in the system tray. So when you play content from your X360 you can look at the monitor to determine the load.

I played music and a picture slideshow on the x360 and a stored video on the MCE itself, the resources were at 30% utilised on a 100Mbit full duplex connection.

Taking this as a rule of thumb or baseline, I could connect a total of 3 extenders but I would expect performance issues.

Cheerio
Howard