Windows Media Centre Edition - questions about tv tuners and vista upgrades?

[Shmee150]

No, not the shuttle, want more PCI ports etc... I'm thinking along the lines of a SilverStone TJ08 (the new mATX one) but I want to make it quiet if possible - although I appreciate not really possible with masses of hard drives...

If they're not available in the UK yet that would throw everything upside down! But it would never be a bad thing to have xbox360 cores lying around - they're only £200ish so not too bad. (I have two premiums at the moment - 1 upstairs, 1 down).

ShMeE

[kojak71]

Answering one of my own questions here... but according to this scan product page for the Hauppage dual freeview WinTV thingy:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=176820

Except that's not a freeview tuner, it's analogue. However they've just announced at CEBIT the WinTV NOVA-T-500 which is a dual freeview PCI card (http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/sho...ghlight=cebit). This is a bit of a strange beast as it's actually a USB device housed on a PCI card (using a USB-to-PCI bridge chipset). There are other manufacturers who have released similar products, some using the PCIe slot, but I've got no experience with them, you'll need to ensure that they have MCE specific drivers for them (also known as BDA drivers).

[kojak71]

No, not the shuttle, want more PCI ports etc... I'm thinking along the lines of a SilverStone TJ08 (the new mATX one) but I want to make it quiet if possible - although I appreciate not really possible with masses of hard drives...

Depends on what components you choose. My MCE Rig is as follows:

5 DVB-t tuners (4 Hauppauge Nova-T PCI + 1 Avermedia USB2 A800)
Accent HT-400 Case + Acoustipack silencing kit + Seasonic S12-500 PSU
Asus P4C800e-Deluxe + 2 x 512Mb Corsair RAM
P4 2.8GHz (Northwood o/c'd to 3.2GHz) + Thermalright XP-120
nVidia 6600GT (fanless) + nVidia Decoder
1 x Samsung 40Gb Notebook drive (OS - MCE2005)
2 x Samsung 250Gb in RAID 0 array (TV recordings)

To all the people that have witnessed it, my system is silent (even passes the girlfriend test). If I was being really picky I can just about hear the soft seeks of my hard-drives but these are drowned out at even the lowest of speaker volumes.

The Samsung Spinpoints are class leaders in terms of noise. You can reduce it even more by setting the AAM of the drive's bios to "Quiet". I'm impressed with a new HTPC case from Zalman (HD160). It has some classic mods which are commonly used by the silent PC crowd (i.e. rubber mountings for hard-drive cages, air-duct for PSU, optional air vent for CPU). It's large size ensures that you can use ATX powersupply (Seasonic S12 have no equals in the efficiency and quiet stakes), ATX or mATX motherboards, and full sized CPU coolers. Although the price might seem overly expensive (when compared to other HTPC cases) it does include the VFD (which is normally an extra £50) and also the MCE Remote control + IR receiver (the receiver is integrated into the case) which normally costs another £30.

If I had that case, I would use take advantage of the PSU air duct, have something like a Thermalight XP120 with the fan pulling up into a duct for the CPU vent. That way you've taken two heat generating components out of the system. The two 80mm case fans would be enough to exhaust the heat generated by the rest of the components in the case.

If they're not available in the UK yet that would throw everything upside down! But it would never be a bad thing to have xbox360 cores lying around - they're only £200ish so not too bad. (I have two premiums at the moment - 1 upstairs, 1 down).

The only downside is the noise they make. Extenders might eventually reach these shores and look like they'll be affordable http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/15/p...-on-the-cheap/. Maybe we'll see these come out when Vista is released?

[Shmee150]

Except that's not a freeview tuner, it's analogue. However they've just announced at CEBIT the WinTV NOVA-T-500 which is a dual freeview PCI card (http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/sho...ghlight=cebit). This is a bit of a strange beast as it's actually a USB device housed on a PCI card (using a USB-to-PCI bridge chipset). There are other manufacturers who have released similar products, some using the PCIe slot, but I've got no experience with them, you'll need to ensure that they have MCE specific drivers for them (also known as BDA drivers).

Thank you for pointing that out! whoops!

Depends on what components you choose. My MCE Rig is as follows:

5 DVB-t tuners (4 Hauppauge Nova-T PCI + 1 Avermedia USB2 A800)
Accent HT-400 Case + Acoustipack silencing kit + Seasonic S12-500 PSU
Asus P4C800e-Deluxe + 2 x 512Mb Corsair RAM
P4 2.8GHz (Northwood o/c'd to 3.2GHz) + Thermalright XP-120
nVidia 6600GT (fanless) + nVidia Decoder
1 x Samsung 40Gb Notebook drive (OS - MCE2005)
2 x Samsung 250Gb in RAID 0 array (TV recordings)

To all the people that have witnessed it, my system is silent (even passes the girlfriend test). If I was being really picky I can just about hear the soft seeks of my hard-drives but these are drowned out at even the lowest of speaker volumes.

The Samsung Spinpoints are class leaders in terms of noise. You can reduce it even more by setting the AAM of the drive's bios to "Quiet". I'm impressed with a new HTPC case from Zalman (HD160). It has some classic mods which are commonly used by the silent PC crowd (i.e. rubber mountings for hard-drive cages, air-duct for PSU, optional air vent for CPU). It's large size ensures that you can use ATX powersupply (Seasonic S12 have no equals in the efficiency and quiet stakes), ATX or mATX motherboards, and full sized CPU coolers. Although the price might seem overly expensive (when compared to other HTPC cases) it does include the VFD (which is normally an extra £50) and also the MCE Remote control + IR receiver (the receiver is integrated into the case) which normally costs another £30.

If I had that case, I would use take advantage of the PSU air duct, have something like a Thermalight XP120 with the fan pulling up into a duct for the CPU vent. That way you've taken two heat generating components out of the system. The two 80mm case fans would be enough to exhaust the heat generated by the rest of the components in the case.

The only downside is the noise they make. Extenders might eventually reach these shores and look like they'll be affordable http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/15/p...-on-the-cheap/. Maybe we'll see these come out when Vista is released?

Wow, thank you for that deep run down of your system.

I wasn't planning on ever watching anything from my media centre direct, because although it will be in the same room as the main television, it won't be underneath so to speak. The current PC in the same place is about 2 years old (P4 3.0, 512mb, 200gb, 9550 256mb) and I am basically trying to understand all the possibilities for new computers before I do.

The other problem is that I fill up hard drives very quickly and because case size is important to me, getting even the 250gb samsung drives will be short on space (my current terabyte and a bit is full) and will of course be recording more straight to the computer rather than to dvds as at the moment.

That Zalman case looks wonderful (just googled it a bit) especially with the zalman psu and heatsink. Only problem is that it's designed specifically to go underneath a television, and unfortunately for me the television if any for it to go under does not have a VGA or DVI input - silly older plasmas!

Is there anybody who has used Media Centre PCs with xbox 360s as their extenders to tell me what it does signal wise? I mean at the moment I have one Netgear MIMO router and I have spent ages and ages getting it in the best possible place. Problem with this is that still in some places the signal can be quite low, possibly just 11mbps - does it still work with video at this? or does it really have to be 100mbps cabled?

Thanks again,

ShMeE

[kojak71]

No problems. My TV is a CRT, so I only use SVideo. Ever since nVidia integrated the TV-out on their cards, the image quality is extremely good (even better than RGB from my freeview set-top box!).

Hard-drives, I understand what you're saying. With 5 tuners, a 500Gb array can fill up in less than two weeks (I record far too much telly than I can possibly ever get around to watching). Price per GB, the sweetspot is 250Gb/320Gb. Going for 400Gb/500Gb means 4-5 platters, means heat and noise. Possibly best to house them in something like a Thecus N2050 which has eSATA connectivity (as well as USB2). I believe that higher density drives will be coming out soon utilising perpendicular technology (Samsung has a 3 platter 400Gb coming along).

11mbps is too low (I think). I seem to recall that 22mbps is the minimum for wireless. I guess you won't know until you actually try it. If you are going to go with a wired network, you might as well have a gigabit network, although the XBox360 is 100Mb, a Gb network will alleviate any congestion problems.

[MDPlatts]

Answering one of my own questions here... but according to this scan product page for the Hauppage dual freeview WinTV thingy:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=176820

Except its not a freeview card - its analogue only - so it can do the 5 normal channels or take input from a cable/freeview STB via s-video.

The freeview version is not out yet - the NOVA-T-500 (mce) - its rumoured to be available next week.

M.