98SE or MCE?

ambro25

Odd question I know, but valid considering the material I'm starting from.

(1GHz mini-ITX, 256 RAM PC2100, 20GB 1.8" HDD, slimline DVD, additional PCI risers and CF/1.8"HDD IDE adapter).

I'm brand new to HTPC. Was going to put a mini-ITX in a 2-player arcade pad as a MAME console project, but then once I got hold of hopeful's gear... It's just too good for the purpose (I'll still do the MAME console thing, but with a cheaper fanless mini-ITX board), so I thought I'd give HTPCs a go instead.

For the moment I'm only looking at DVD, DivX/Xvid and mp3 playback + photos, to cut my teeth on something simple, before eventually upgrading to a fully-integrated DVB solution.

So I thought I might as well try and build the HTPC player as silent as possible, i.e.

* with Win98SE and all required apps/drivers on a CF or PCMCIA flashdrive

(seen threads about this, mindful of read/write longevity issues, so have to figure a way to make the OS read-only somehow, once it's fully-built, and probably easier to do that with 98SE than anything NT/XP-based)

* playing DVDs from drive.
* playing files from local or usb2 datastore or over network.

Or should I just install MCE'05 on the 1.8" HDD? As in this case, there's just no point installing XP Home or Pro since, considering the purpose, I might as well just go the whole hog.

Oh, and the PSU is 90W, so can someone please recommend a PCI grafx card with DVI that's passive and low-power?

Opinions? Advice ? Thx in advance to all.
(PS: I already know I need to up the RAM to at least 512 )

8T8

Well I'm not sure about 98SE god it's been a long time since I last used that, if you plan on using a media centre UI under Windows see if any of the third party UI's are compatible.

Two of the most popular free ones are built on .NET so I'm not sure if they will work on 98SE, if the .NET runtime installs on 98SE they should I think, see Media Portal or GB-PVR.

The very best candidate for that hardware would be linux\MythTV but it can be complicated to setup.

If you put more RAM into the machine like 512MB than XP/MCE or one of the two above Windows UI's would be viable there is a guide here for running XP from flash which may help in stripping it down.

As for a PCI graphics card something like this should do.

ambro25

8T8 wrote:

The very best candidate for that hardware would be linux\MythTV but it can be complicated to setup.

Yeah, looked at this but still prefer a WinOS - for now, as I'm much more experienced with Win (since v.2 :eek:) to get the HTPC and all components to work in the 1st place.

8T8 wrote:

If you put more RAM into the machine like 512MB than XP/MCE or one of the two above Windows UI's would be viable there is a guide here for running XP from flash which may help in stripping it down.

Now that is a great linkie, many many thanks for this. I was afraid the amount of writing done by XP would knacker a RAM drive (CFII 1GB) in mere weeks, but this solution looks the part. Gonna attempt a BartPE MCE build. Off to look if MCE can be 'lighted' à la 98Lite / XPLite , and to find out if BartPE and Lite can somehow work jointly.

Oh, thx for the gfx card pointer. I did think a 9250 would be very good, just not sure how power-hungry it is (relative to, say, a 7xxx series).

SouperComputer

TBH I wouldnt use 98SE simply because you have to use FAT32 and that limits your filesize. A major problem with TV shows and movies.

MCE would run, but it could be pretty slugiish. Although those chips clock at 1GHZ, really the peformance is similar to a PIII 800.

MythTV (lookup knoppmyth) or maybe windows 2000 with GB-PVR would be two good ways to go.

ambro25

SouperComputer wrote:

TBH I wouldnt use 98SE simply because you have to use FAT32 and that limits your filesize. A major problem with TV shows and movies.

How so?

I've got an ARCHOS AV400, which is showing as FAT32-formatted (when USB 2.0-plugged into XP Pro PC). No probs playing DivXs/Xvids, from 300MB to 2GB. Is the circumvention of such "file size problems" down to Archos' proprietary OS?

SouperComputer wrote:

MCE would run, but it could be pretty slugiish. Although those chips clock at 1GHZ, really the peformance is similar to a PIII 800.

As you rightly picked up, only 2 reasons why I was contemplating win98SE were
(i) specs and
(ii) (before 8T8 helpful linkie) perceived better capacity for embedding as a read-only OS build, than a write-intensive OS such as XP.

So, sluggish even if I 'lite' it as much as possible and put a Gig of RAM in there? I understand MCE is just XP with a media front-end, and I've had XP Pro fly along just as fast on PIII 750 lappies (256 RAM) as on 1,6 Centrinos (512 RAM) and P4/AMD64 desktops (after trimming unrequired services, of course ).

I should have some time for a 1st attempt tonight. Not getting the CF/1.8" HDD IDE adapter from LinTX until the week-end, so I'll use a 10GB 3.5" HDD instead and try XP 'stripped to the bone' edition with GB-PVR.

8T8

FAT32 has an individual file size limit of 4GB if recording into MPEG-2 you can easily go over this. As for a system like that you will need most likely need a hardware based MPEG-2 encoder if recording TV. If not recording TV then this isn't a big of a deal.

I'm no expert but I'm not so sure the write cycles are a problem for modern flash it I have seen elsewhere that it would be quite a long time before you get anywhere close to the maximum limit of the write cycles for the latest gen flash devices.

I'd say you should still get by with 512MB and GB-PVR running off XP with all the visual effects disabled.

(If it takes DDR RAM just get 1GB of it and it will make XP or MCE run a lot smoother.)

ambro25

Thx 8T8.

Not planning on recording TV, no. For the time being, only DVD/DivX/Xvids/mp3s, for use with bedroom LCD TV.

At a stretch, I'll eventually add a PCI DVB-T tuner (but I'll have to up the PSU long before that) to use the HTPC i/of a dedicated Freeview tuner box thing.

Shortly buying a PCI Radeon 7000 (64MB) with DVI out and 512 or 1024 RAM, whichever I can get cheapest (the board, EPIA M10000 nehemiah, has a single slot for DDR 266 PC2100).

I'll get on with it tonight and see how it goes, using your recommendations of XP and GB-PVR front end, and with the current 256 (the impending 512 or 1GB RAM upgrade will be all the sweeter).

I'm not sure the 1,8" Hitachi HDD I've got lined up for it is a goer (nothing to plug it in to test it until the week-end), so I'll decide after that which form of storage - I just know I can't keep the 10GB Quantum currently in it for testing

ambro25

Well, what do you know... Tried it with vanilla MCE 2005 first, on the off chance...

Installed perfectly well first time, and running sweet at 2% CPU max with all the trimmings on (including MCE UI).

DivX playback is perfectly smooth with no perceptible jaggies/missed frames/pixellation/whatnot, and audio is in synch. Didn't have time to try DVD tho.

Next up, then, is HDCloning the MCE install onto the 1.8" HDD, upgrading RAM and buying the vid card.

Thx for all the input so far guys, very appreciated.

8T8

Cool nice to hear it worked out. If DviX is okay then so should be DVD playback note that XP MCE requires an MCE compliant DVD decoder as such you will need something like PowerDVD installed to be able to playback DVD's in MCE.

There are better DVD decoders available that offload more of the work to the GPU & enhance image quality but you need a recent ATI or NVIDIA graphics card. Something like this or this but I do not know how well they would fair on such a PSU they may work perfectly fine they may not.

By the way MCE actually supports DVB-T so I'm assuming your going after the RTE DVB-T ongoing trials at the moment. There is a card like this that combines analogue & digital or you can get USB external DVB-T cards though they are probably heavily CPU dependant.

ambro25

Got PowerDVD v.4, came bundled with a 9600XT I had for a short while, so that's that. I understand it's one of the better versions to exploit HW acceleration with Nehemiah core mobos + PCI graphics.

Card's gonna be the lowest-possible MCE-compatible card, whichever I can find cheap on eBay (never bought a new graphics card in my life, not about to start for a several-generations old card ). I also understand there's no point in getting the biggest onboard RAM because of PCI architecture.

Re DVB-T, I'm on NTL Cable (digi.) throughout the house, no aerial on the house, no "non-NTL" aerial socket either. I agree that a USB DVB-T would be too much for the auld C3 CPU, but as posted earlier, I think I'll have to up the PSU anyway if I add a DVB-T PCI in addition to the PCI graphics card.

I'd expect the 1.8" HDD to free up quite a bit of consumption (even better if I run off USB flash, as I've since found out the board will boot from USB - Yay!), hopefully enough to power the lot (mobo, 1.8 HDD, DVD drive, graphics card, USB), with some spare.

Well, probably more news next week, can't do nothing this week-end as I'm away.

TTFN

8T8

The RAM really isn't that important on the graphics card the actual GPU core is the desirable bit when it comes to DVD decoding.

Until recently ATI & NVIDIA didn't do a whole lot with DVD decoding & their GPU's only basic hardware acceleration. But in the last generation or so they built their own hardware into the GPU that is accessed via their own DVD decoder which offloads all the decoding onto the GPU.

But it also processes the image & applies various filters that render the image in the maximum quality possible putting it on par with some of the most expensive high end DVD players around that cost several hundred+ dollars & are MCE compliant DVD decoders as well.

ATI calls this AVIVO which is only available on the X1x00 line of GPU's but you do get the decoder free with the GPU.

NVIDIA calls theirs Purevideo which is available on all GeForce 6, 7 & 8 class GPU's but you must purchase the NVIDIA Purevideo decoder as well.

Those PCI cards I linked to should do the trick but if you are happy with the image quality as it stands there is not much point in going down that route.

By the way I'm not sure Power DVD 4 is MCE compliant, there is a utility called deccheck you can install which will tell you which DVD decoders are compatible with MCE.

That's disappointing news about the USB boot I take it there are no bios updates or anything for the board ?

If you haven't already tried I would attempt to plug in a USB flash drive formatted in FAT32 and see if it picks it up as a hard drive.

ambro25

8T8 wrote:

That's disappointing news about the USB boot I take it there are no bios updates or anything for the board ?
(...)

Eh?

I posted that the mobo does boot from USB

Re. PowerDVD4 - do you mean MCE won't use it as a DVD decoding app. because it's not "certified"? a big 'Meh' if that's the case

Re. gfx cards, much thanks for the precisions, they'll come in handy when I start building a 'proper' HTPC (with a dual core, DX10 card w. HDMI, HD-DVD drive etc.).

But for now, considering what I have to play with (EPIA M10000), I'm only trying to keep it cheap and as functional (and silent) as possible given the constraints PCI FX5200 or ATI9250 it is, wanted ad posted on adverts!

8T8

Sorry must have misread that about the USB

MCE can only use compatible MCE DVD decoders to play DVD's inside MCE's UI.

Which of all Cyberlinks PowerDVD versions are compatible with MCE I cannot say with absolute certainty but PowerDVD 6 & 7 definitely are but v4 however might not be, the deccheck program will tell you.

Other MCE DVD decoders;
Intevideos WinDVD
NVIDIA's Purevideo - you can use this even if you don't have NVIDIA GPU but it wont do any image enhancements.
Sonic CinePlayer (I think)

There are one or two other obscure players but PowerDVD 7 is probably the best bet with the current hardware setup.

SouperComputer

TBH, if it isnt being used as a PVR, I would have used Geexbox.