HTPC for Saorview & Freesat,

darth_maul

Thinking of building a HTPC for Saorview & Freesat,

What are the minimum specs required i.e.

CPU, RAM, hdd size and graphics card.

Also is the black gold the best or would I be better getting separate tuners for each.

Thanks

aFlabbyPanda

I just finished the same setup this weekend. This is the pc spec,

http://grab.by/aeYd

I'm also using 2 hauppauge WinTV-HVR-3000 cards. The htpc isn't connect to a tv itself. Instead I'm using 2 xbox 360s in extender mode. Hope this helps.

desaparecidos

darth_maul wrote: »

Thinking of building a HTPC for Saorview & Freesat,

What are the minimum specs required i.e.

CPU, RAM, hdd size and graphics card.

Also is the black gold the best or would I be better getting separate tuners for each.

Thanks

I'd go with a dual core "energy efficient" CPU. 2.8GHz or there abouts.
Silent HD5450 or Silent GT430 for GPU
2GB RAM
Large HDD. I've a 2.5in 500GB Samsung. Uses less energy and very quiet. a 1.5TB version of this would be nice.

BlackGold BGT3595 is a nice solution. I see no benefit to separate tuners. Probably work out more expensive than the all in one solution.

kuro_man

Only get enough power to go the job (decode/render 1080i h.264) - otherwise you get more heat & more noise.

Are you using Windows? If so, doesn't really matter, probably go AMD/ATI on a single board like Asus m4a88t-m which are cheap. Also has usb3 ports which might be handy in the future if you add external drive.
If using Linux, add an nVidia card like a GT210 or GT220 - you can get fanless ones for around €30 - €40. (still cheaper than buying windows!)

Get a 65w cpu (or less) like an Athlon x2 250 cpu.

2g RAM is fine DDR2 or DDR3 but check motherboard website for list of compatible modules.

2tb western digital green or samsung spinpoint can be bought for around €70

Tuners up to you. Slightly cheaper to get a dual dvb stick + dual dvbs2 card but sleep/wakeup cycle apparently better with single card like Blackgold but I've no problems.

Try amazon/elara

scorn

It doesn't appear that the Blackgold BGT3595 is still available for some reason...

I am using a Pinnacle 7010ix dual DVB-S, dual DVB-T tuner but have recently lost the BBC HD channels as they are now on DVB-S2.

So I was looking for the Blackgold card - no longer available, and no alternative yet.

(Withdrawn from retail sales - and at £109 I would have thought twice anyway)

Might have to look for a DVB-S2 dual card and leave the Pinnacle in for DVB-T. Wonder if Saorview will ever go DVB-T2...?

John mac

could try mailing the sales department. (never know)

Carter P Fly

Several things to consider,

A HTPC box that will be on display is not cheap, I have the antec remote fusion black and love it.

Buying cheap components is a false economy, I have Boxes of parts I bought, wasnt happy with and bought better.

Silence is golden, use a SSD for your os disk, I uses a OCX 32 gig from memoryc.com, Use fanless Graphics cards (I have a HD 5450). Get a PSU with a large diameter fan and use at least 120mm casefans.

I tried all teh different HTPC solutions out there and ended up settling for Windows 7 media center as the best all round option for me as it does TV, PVR, radio, Plays all my torrent files etc. Media Portal, Boxee or xbmc with a mythtv backend are other options.

You do not need a lot of grunt for a HTPC and several folk actually ramp down their spec's in favour of low energy consumption over performance. As long as it can play and record media in HD its good enough.

Build it with it being a dedicated HTPC, most folk like me have a second PC elsewhere in the house. I have no other drive in the HTPC other then the silent SSD boot drive. Eveything else, several terrabytes, is on the PC upsatirs connected over a gig network.

Zimmerframe

Nothing to build and not cheap but works brilliantly is a mac mini running Plex and Eyetv.

kuro_man

Noise is an issue - I have an silverston Gd04 case and its great, but not happy with the chassis fan noise. Might be a good idea to buy a mobo that can adjust the case fan speed.

Given the price, I think an ssd is overkill, I can't hear my hard drive at all.
Better off putting money into the silent heatsinks/fan controllers etc.

It depends if you are going for a 2 box approach (backend has drives/tv cards) or 1 box approach - all drives/tv cards in 1 box under TV.

Antigrav

kuro_man wrote: »

Noise is an issue - I have an silverston Gd04 case and its great, but not happy with the chassis fan noise. Might be a good idea to buy a mobo that can adjust the case fan speed.

Given the price, I think an ssd is overkill, I can't hear my hard drive at all.
Better off putting money into the silent heatsinks/fan controllers etc.

It depends if you are going for a 2 box approach (backend has drives/tv cards) or 1 box approach - all drives/tv cards in 1 box under TV.

Silent is cool, even without a fan :cool:

I'd recommend the frontend/backend approach, but it requires the right wiring. Like Carter P Fly I have a low end Atom/ION/SSD frontend which is totally silent, and a NAS/Medias Server backend with all the drives, cards, etc in a space upstairs. If you offload the storage, you can get away with a 40Gb SSD for <€80 in the frontend. The whole setup isn't cheap, but you get lots of options

I had to route sat and tv aerial cables into my hub, but that was easy enough. We also have Cat 5e wiring around house and get 1Gb on most connections.

My setup is XBMC frontend with Mythtv/Ubuntu backend. This takes a lot of fiddling to get set up correctly, but works great. These fora are pretty good for advice, but you get what you pay for

woop

a good frontend is the new apple tv now you can put xbmc on it and support for playing back recording is available. They are working on setting recording from the frontend

is there a tuner card for a pc thats compatible with linux which is also able to pick up the new irish broadcast format? I can find plenty for uk and europe broadcast standards

dont want to run windows but is it even likely that support will be developed for these cards given that so little countries are using this type of broadcast

sorry I read up on this months ago and forgot the terminology

EDIT- ok now that Ive relearned the terminology, yes I was refereeing to mpeg4. Is there a card that will work with linux and decode mpeg4?

Antigrav

woop wrote: »

is there a tuner card for a pc thats compatible with linux which is also able to pick up the new irish broadcast format? I can find plenty for uk and europe broadcast standards

dont want to run windows but is it even likely that support will be developed for these cards given that so little countries are using this type of broadcast

sorry I read up on this months ago and forgot the terminology

EDIT- ok now that Ive relearned the terminology, yes I was refereeing to mpeg4. Is there a card that will work with linux and decode mpeg4?

I'm using the Hauppauge Nova-T USB stick on Linux (Ubuntu 11.04) and it gives me access to all the Soarview channels, including RTE2 in HD.

The stick does not actually decode the MPEG4 stream as this is a capability of your TV decoding software (in my case MythTV) rather than the hardware.

You may also want MHEG5 support for the program guide.

meob

Carter P Fly wrote: »

Several things to consider,

A HTPC box that will be on display is not cheap, I have the antec remote fusion black and love it.

Buying cheap components is a false economy, I have Boxes of parts I bought, wasnt happy with and bought better.

Silence is golden, use a SSD for your os disk, I uses a OCX 32 gig from memoryc.com, Use fanless Graphics cards (I have a HD 5450). Get a PSU with a large diameter fan and use at least 120mm casefans.

I tried all teh different HTPC solutions out there and ended up settling for Windows 7 media center as the best all round option for me as it does TV, PVR, radio, Plays all my torrent files etc. Media Portal, Boxee or xbmc with a mythtv backend are other options.

You do not need a lot of grunt for a HTPC and several folk actually ramp down their spec's in favour of low energy consumption over performance. As long as it can play and record media in HD its good enough.

Build it with it being a dedicated HTPC, most folk like me have a second PC elsewhere in the house. I have no other drive in the HTPC other then the silent SSD boot drive. Eveything else, several terrabytes, is on the PC upsatirs connected over a gig network.

excellent advice

kuro_man

woop wrote: »

a good frontend is the new apple tv now you can put xbmc on it and support for playing back recording is available. They are working on setting recording from the frontend

is there a tuner card for a pc thats compatible with linux which is also able to pick up the new irish broadcast format? I can find plenty for uk and europe broadcast standards

dont want to run windows but is it even likely that support will be developed for these cards given that so little countries are using this type of broadcast

sorry I read up on this months ago and forgot the terminology

EDIT- ok now that Ive relearned the terminology, yes I was refereeing to mpeg4. Is there a card that will work with linux and decode mpeg4?

H.264 (subset of mpeg4) decoding is not a function of the tuner, it is a function of the codec. Therefore, all dvb-t tuners will work on all dvb-t broadcasts, regardless of compression standard (mpeg2 vs. H.264). They will NOT tune dvb-t2, but that is not widely used - uk freeview HD uses it though.

Most HTPCs use a software codec, which will use the CPU or the graphics card to do the processing. Decoding H.264 is a much higher CPU load than mpeg2 therefore off-loading to the graphics card is best. On Linux Mythtv setups, only nvidia cards are supported (VDPAU), Windows 7 is more flexible. It is also possible to buy dedicated H.264 hardware decoder.