Building a near perfect HTPC !

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vinayaga

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My quest for a perfect (or as close to perfect as possible !) HTPC has made me change my HTPC setup multiple times over the last few years to find the right balance between power consumption, noise, size and flawless 1080p movie play. After the last upgrade this month, I think I have the almost perfect HTPC player.

CPU/Motherboard : AMD Fusion E350

The AMD E350 is the perfect CPU and motherboard for media playback. A 1.6ghz dual core processor combined with the AMD Radeon HD 6300 on-board graphics takes care of any media that you throw at it, more importantly has on board component and optical outputs for Audio and HDMI that is capable of doing Video+Audio.

It is important to note that XBMC live works by default with a Geforce based solution because of native geforce drivers, butI prefer the Windows 7 combination with DVXA2. The second option works perfectly with both Radeon and Geforce solutions.

The best part of the solution is that the whole platform takes a measly 19watts of power. It is really unbelievable that such a powerful HTPC can work off just 19watts for the CPU and motherboard.

I got the MSI E350 board, available everywhere for less than 7k :

Msi E350IA-E45--AMD Fusion Platform | eBay

Note that when I got the motherboard from the shop, the fan was running really fast and making more noise that I liked. After a BIOS update to the latest on the MSI speed, the fan is hardly heard and is really silent now.

RAM : 2gb or 4gb DDR3

DDR3 is dead cheap now and it makes a lot of sense to get 4gb of memory to run Windows 7 comfortably.

The cheapest ram I got, 1600 for two sticks of 2gb each : EVM Strontium 2GB DDR3 Desktop RAM Memory Module | eBay


Cabinet :

Choice 1 : CFI Cube A8989 : CFI Cube Cabinet at Rs.1,390/- | eBay

This is a beautiful cabinet that is really small and absolutely cute. It comes with a 150w PSU and is perfect as a HTPC if you intend to use a large (3.5") hard drive.

If you want some specific details of the cabinet, look at this site:
CFI Cube Casing for Intel Atom | Surfnux's Weblog

Choice 2: PANACHE T3311 : Panache

This is the one I choose. It is a really small cabinet and is very cramped, but works very well if you have a external hard drive to store your movies and only need a 2.5" small drive to boot Windows 7 and XBMC. More importantly, it comes with a DC power convertor in the small chassis that provides power via a laptop like adaptor. So no fans and zero noise from the PSU.

Hard drive : Determined by the cabinet choice above !

I went for a Kingston 30gb SSD for Rs 3300 from Primeabgb. Loads Windows and XBMC in less then 10 seconds and browsing movies is instant. This ia a perfect choice with the Panache. If you went for the CFI cabinet, you can get a 2tb internal hard drive for cheap and add a 30gb partition for Windows 7 and XBMC.

Getting it all together

Assemble the above, install Windows 7, the ATI drivers and XBMC 10.1. Start XBMC and enable DVXA2 in the system settings and you will find that every movie plays flawlessly over HDMI and CPU consumption never exceeds 15%.

Add a media remote from dealextreme.com for less than Rs 500 and it all works flawlessly.

It is a almost perfect HTPC solution :)
 
Nice deal! I got the same board last month for 8k. So looks like prices have fallen. 4GB of memory is essential for Win 7.

Do remember however that XBMC has its own share of issues - It doesn't bitstream HD Audio and it doesn't decode WMVs correctly if you have any. Especially WMVs with 5.1 audio will not work at all. Thankfully there are very few such files.

An SSD is something I'm gonna get either this month or next. Since the transfer rates of this machine are not very high, any entry level SSD will suffice.
 
The spec given is cute little machine.

Pliz think if the number of expansion slots available are sufficient

1) Wi-fi Adapter is something I feel essential in HTPC,to frequently update drivers/even sometimes download media content through internet. Even if you have another PC/Laptop doing this job, it will come handy in transferring the same to HTPC. You need a slot to add this.

2) If you do not like the sound quality(especially if you are hifi enthusiast) you may like to add a separate sound card in future.

3) Also may need to add some TV-Tuner to watch and record TV programs, you need a slot once again.

4) If you are gamer and need to play games demanding heavy graphics support, you may need to add a graphic card too.
 
Right. The kingston 30gb for 3.2k is a perfect choice for thos machine. As for WMV's, I do not ave a single one, so never seen this. As for HD audio, I thought xmbc can bitstream it as-is without decoding, maybe I missed it.


reignofchaos said:
Nice deal! I got the same board last month for 8k. So looks like prices have fallen. 4GB of memory is essential for Win 7.

Do remember however that XBMC has its own share of issues - It doesn't bitstream HD Audio and it doesn't decode WMVs correctly if you have any. Especially WMVs with 5.1 audio will not work at all. Thankfully there are very few such files.

An SSD is something I'm gonna get either this month or next. Since the transfer rates of this machine are not very high, any entry level SSD will suffice.
Click to expand...
 
We often tend to mix too many things and start thinking in terms of building a machine that does everything. So we end up with a average machine that does nothing optimally. Why would you consider a HTPC to be a gaming machine ? A wifi adaptor is a necessary (and works off USB) unless you have a wired network connection (which I do). As for a sound card, the CFI cabinet does allow you to add one card and the board carries a PCI-X slot.

A TV tuner is a different ball game thought and is best acheived with MythTV. Do not really know if MythTV and XBMC work well together. but a interesting thought with a external TV tuner.

ukjeyaraj said:
The spec given is cute little machine.

Pliz think if the number of expansion slots available are sufficient

1) Wi-fi Adapter is something I feel essential in HTPC,to frequently update drivers/even sometimes download media content through internet. Even if you have another PC/Laptop doing this job, it will come handy in transferring the same to HTPC. You need a slot to add this.

2) If you do not like the sound quality(especially if you are hifi enthusiast) you may like to add a separate sound card in future.

3) Also may need to add some TV-Tuner to watch and record TV programs, you need a slot once again.

4) If you are gamer and need to play games demanding heavy graphics support, you may need to add a graphic card too.
Click to expand...
 
vinayaga said:
Right. The kingston 30gb for 3.2k is a perfect choice for thos machine. As for WMV's, I do not ave a single one, so never seen this. As for HD audio, I thought xmbc can bitstream it as-is without decoding, maybe I missed it.
Click to expand...

If your file has DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD, you'll only get DTS in the former and no sound in the latter unless it has an alternate Dolby Digital track.

XBMC is built using ffmpeg for audio decoding and ffmpeg as of now doesn't support DTS HD or Dolby TrueHD.

The only way to bitstream that is to use something that allows the ffdshow. As of now, that is the only free software that supports DTS-HD/Dolby TrueHD streaming.
 
Last edited:
ukjeyaraj said:
The spec given is cute little machine.

Pliz think if the number of expansion slots available are sufficient

1) Wi-fi Adapter is something I feel essential in HTPC,to frequently update drivers/even sometimes download media content through internet. Even if you have another PC/Laptop doing this job, it will come handy in transferring the same to HTPC. You need a slot to add this.

2) If you do not like the sound quality(especially if you are hifi enthusiast) you may like to add a separate sound card in future.

3) Also may need to add some TV-Tuner to watch and record TV programs, you need a slot once again.

4) If you are gamer and need to play games demanding heavy graphics support, you may need to add a graphic card too.
Click to expand...

None of the above are useful in the current context of using/comsuming media.

A wifi adapter doesn't have enough bandwidth to stream high bitrate 1080p/Bluray dumps. Infact for the latter at times, even 100mbps ethernet chokes.

For audio, there's no use to add a soundcard since all audio will be passed out via a digital bitstream through HDMI. In a movie context, a soundcard is absolutely useless. If one needs good stereo audio quality, the best option is to add an external USB DAC.

With HD programming using the current gen set top boxes, no TV tuner is actually gonna work. So its best to keep TV viewing out of this system altogether.

Finally if you are a gamer, this machine isn't for you - the CPU is too slow even for 4-5 year old games.
 
reignofchaos said:
Do remember however that XBMC has its own share of issues - It doesn't bitstream HD Audio and it doesn't decode WMVs correctly if you have any. Especially WMVs with 5.1 audio will not work at all. Thankfully there are very few such files..
Click to expand...

The current version 10.1 does not support HD Audio bitstreaming, but developers are working on it and pretty soon we should have HD audio in XBMC as well. This how ever does not mean that we do not have a flawless solution, we do. All we need to do is to configure XBMC to load any external media player (via a small script) that can bitstream HD audio, for example Total Media Theater5 or PowerDVD or MPC-HC with ffdshow.
Checkout my HTPC and this is what I have done and it works flawlessly ....

I will like to add............XBMC or any other media center based HTPC can do everything a dedicated Media Player can do, the ONLY difference is that..... A Media Player is kind of out of the box solution and with Media Center based HTPCs, you have to configure few things to get that seemless experience. But once done you have a far better Multimedia machine than any Media Player out there ....:)
 
sam9s said:
The current version 10.1 does not support HD Audio bitstreaming, but developers are working on it and pretty soon we should have HD audio in XBMC as well. This how ever does not mean that we do not have a flawless solution, we do. All we need to do is to configure XBMC to load any external media player (via a small script) that can bitstream HD audio, for example Total Media Theater5 or PowerDVD or MPC-HC with ffdshow.
Checkout my HTPC and this is what I have done and it works flawlessly ....

I will like to add............XBMC or any other media center based HTPC can do everything a dedicated Media Player can do, the ONLY difference is that..... A Media Player is kind of out of the box solution and with Media Center based HTPCs, you have to configure few things to get that seemless experience. But once done you have a far better Multimedia machine than any Media Player out there ....:)
Click to expand...

Yep but loading an external player means you lose out on the lovely XBMC interface during playback which again is kind of a deal breaker. I hope the DSfilter project fixes this issue soon. Also I did notice I get far better image quality via MPC-HC in SD videos than XBMC inspite of enabling bicubic scaling in XBMC options.

As you mentioned, media players are not even close to a good HTPC in convenience or output quality. Only deal with an HTPC is that it needs a bit of time to get it running as you like.
 
reignofchaos said:
Yep but loading an external player means you lose out on the lovely XBMC interface during playback which again is kind of a deal breaker.
Click to expand...

No man its definitely not a deal breaker...... trust me..... TMT5 interface is pretty good as well. Plus XBMC over all is so damm polished media center that I'd say I can easily compromise on XBMC native HD audio support (and the dev are working on it as well),
The transformation is seamless, The moment you click an ISO in XBMC, TMT5 opens and starts to play the file automatically, full screen, and when the movie ends, we are brought back to XBMC smoothly ..... if possible do watch my video in my "Checkout my HTPC thread" for a live demo, infact youtube is loaded with these kinda demos ....:)
 
As this is going to be a single-purpose machine (no quick games, or firing up MS Office; not even checking the e-mail) then why Win7?

In fact, as it looks to be a one-application/UI system, based on an open-source suite, why not Linux?
 
For the simple reason that XBMC live based off linux works easily with only Geforce based cards. And this motherboard comes with a onboard ATI card.

ATI cards have their fair share of driver issues on linux and XBMC live. Windows 7 allows you to use DVXA2 to use the onboard video card for video processing, thus leaving the CPU free and cool.

Thad E Ginathom said:
As this is going to be a single-purpose machine (no quick games, or firing up MS Office; not even checking the e-mail) then why Win7?

In fact, as it looks to be a one-application/UI system, based on an open-source suite, why not Linux?
Click to expand...
 
Thad E Ginathom said:
As this is going to be a single-purpose machine (no quick games, or firing up MS Office; not even checking the e-mail) then why Win7?

In fact, as it looks to be a one-application/UI system, based on an open-source suite, why not Linux?
Click to expand...

Thats a valid question, but there are few things I do load under windows that gives me even more user friendly experience, for example my TMT5 remote works on a tiny server that loads on windows, the script that loads the external player is for windows, plus I also use WOL with an application to switch on my PC from hibernate mode remotely. Yes I know all this must be applicable in Linux as well, but I do not have linux experience at all. So getting things done would have reqired another learning curve and time consumption. For that reason chose wins 7. I will try win 7 lite version and try to get things done and if it works as intended I might switch to win 7 lite ....
 
vinayaga said:
We often tend to mix too many things and start thinking in terms of building a machine that does everything. So we end up with a average machine that does nothing optimally. Why would you consider a HTPC to be a gaming machine ? A wifi adaptor is a necessary (and works off USB) unless you have a wired network connection (which I do). As for a sound card, the CFI cabinet does allow you to add one card and the board carries a PCI-X slot.

A TV tuner is a different ball game thought and is best acheived with MythTV. Do not really know if MythTV and XBMC work well together. but a interesting thought with a external TV tuner.
Click to expand...

You are right. Personally I never game on my HTPC.

I use wifi for internet connection.

What I meant was, only one extension slot is really less for any probable expansion.

Since you are focussed, it looks more or less you will not end up in adding a separate VGA card or sound card later and in such case this board will suffice you.
 
OK, all good points on the Linux front. Now I come to think of it, although I am now firmly in the Linux camp, I did have some difficulties getting 3-D-related stuff (Compiz cube etc) working on my onboard ATI. This is not the experience that someone who is not used to Linux wants when setting up a media machine.
 
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