Media player

[looroll12]

hi folks

this has been covered i'm sure to death but need some advice please

i am getting a new 1080p TV soon probably something around the 37"-40" size

and i would like to build a media player to play 1080p off a HDD and maybe a optical drive

i realise a blu-ray drive would be 100-150 quid depending on wether i need a writer

but what do you think about the rest ?

i have a amd 4200+ and some ddr2 533ghz memory (2gig) too

would this be sufficient or would i need better spec

open to any suggestions tbh as i'm not really sure i spose a budget of maybe £350-£400

i have seen in another post about using it as a PVR, maybe freeview too?

are they easy to use/set-up again advice needed

many thanks

[edp33]

Well you could keep the cpu and memory and get a hdtv graphics card, but I would be tempted to get a 780g motherboard and AMD 4850e CPU, it uses little power so is great for a PVR and plays 1080p content from the integrated graphics. Other chipset options include the 8200/8300 again for AMD processors, or the soon to be released? 9300/9400 chipset for Intel.

To use it as a PVR you will need a TV Tuner card, if your using freeview then any DVB-T card will be fine, a twin tuner card doesn't cost much more and is handy for recording two programmes at once. If you want to use Sky or Freesat you will need a satellite TV Tuner card, DVB-S.

You can probably pick up a blu ray optical drive for £65 if your not bothered about writing blu ray. The LG one is nice and quiet.

Finally you need to decide what operating system to use, popular ones are WIN XP Media Centre, Vista Media Centre and Linux

You could easily get a media pc for £350-400. See this thread http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...center-pc.html

[looroll12]

thanks for that

with the DVB-s card would the sky channel have to be left to the channel i was recording ?

what sort of sound output too would i get

would i need a seperate sound card or would i use onboard sound ?

[Alfie786]

sound output depends on the motherboard else a seperate card would be needed. But im sure the on the board shoudl be fine.

check out the ANtec casing for media centre case looks nice !! highly recommended.

good luck

[patdee]

Your cpu and ram will be fine, I have the same running my HTPC and it plays 1080 movies just fine, I have a ATI 3450 graphics card hooked up to a 42" plasma tv, sound wise I use a creative x-fi sound card with a set of 5.1 speakers, and it looks and sounds superb. I also have a blu-ray drive which cost around £66. I've got an analogue tv card in mine and its not brill, gonna swap it for a dual digital card like the Hauppauge Win TV Nova-TD 500 Dual Digital DVB-T Tuner.

[edp33]

"with the DVB-s card would the sky channel have to be left to the channel i was recording ?"

If you had just the one tuner card then yes, but you can buy dual tuner cards, or just buy as many tuners as you need. Say you had 4 tuners, or 2 dual tuners, you could watch one channel, and record 3 different channels.

"what sort of sound output too would i get
would i need a seperate sound card or would i use onboard sound ?"

For sound
DVD audio uses either Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1
HD AUdio uses Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD 7.1

The 780g motherboard has integrated sound for outputting 5.1 digital sound over the HDMI or SPDIF. The 780g can only achieve 7.1 sound via the analogue outputs.

If you want 7.1 HD audio output then you can either use the integrated sound from the 8200/8300/9400/9400 chipsets, or get an ATI 4xxx series graphics card which passes 7.1 sound over the HDMI. If you decide to go for the graphics card then as patdee say's above it should run fine, I just mentioned the 780g and 45w cpu to help make it use a little less power

Or you can get a sound card, I haven't looked into these, maybe other forum members can help

[looroll12]

Wow so much advice, many thanks

so it looks as though i will get a ATI 4350/4550 as this is blu ray compatable and i won't need a seperate sound card ( i assume/hope thats right )

so to connect to the TV i will need a HDMI lead and a convertor for the card (which i suppose should come with the card) ?

And a dual DVB-s tuner

many thanks for the help/advice

[DanceswithUnix]

Will be interested to see what you come up with for a satellite card. I was trying to find one with a CAM interface so I can use my sky card and record something worth watching Trying to find something with Linux support was too much, but then it looks like I will be wanting to switch my HTPC to Windows early next year anyway when they release TiVo for PCs in the UK.

Linkey