2017 Budget HTPC Rig : Needs to have SSD & able to play BD- ISO , HD Audio Bitstream

[buxx]

I am in the look out for a Media player/HTPC that can play all types of media including BD ISO, Rips, HEVC with HD Audio Passthrough to my AVR.

Had shortlisted Shield TV & a custom PC with the below config :
7th Gen Intel Pentium G4600 Kaby Lake, Micro-ATX motherboard with 4 GB RAM and an SSD in a generic Case/PSU.

My ultimate requirement is to stream Netflix, Amazon Prime in 5.1 and to play all Local, media , Blu Ray Discs & rips (i am talking 40-50GB ones) with HD Audio bitstreamed to my AVR. ( I know that I will need to get a Fire Stick for the streaming to get 5.1, if I get a a HTPC, but then it gives me the flexibility to attach a Blu Ray drive and use it as BD Player) .

Kindly suggest something !!

Needles to say, I have a tight budget (~15K) and would like to spend as little as possible.

 

[MaSh]

Re: 2017 Budget HTPC Rig : Needs to have SSD & able to play BD- ISO , HD Audio Bitstr

I did something like this a couple of months back. The cheapstake that I am, picked up a corporate surplus sale desktop, a dell optiplex 780 from a local vendor for 5k. It came with 40gb hard drive, 4gb ram, core 2 duo processor. I added a Zotac gt730 graphics card to it that costed 2k odd from Amazon. Connected it to my receiver via hdmi. The os is windows 7 licensed.

I was using two raspberry pis before this, one running kodi for movies and other volumio for music. The htpc trumps raspberry pi is everyway possible. I have not faced any issues with any commonly available video or audio formats. Yes some of the really high bit rate 265 codec might not run as smooth or at all.

MaSh

Sent from my Redmi Note 3 using Tapatalk

 

[buxx]

Re: 2017 Budget HTPC Rig : Needs to have SSD & able to play BD- ISO , HD Audio Bitstr

On a side note: how does it matter if the DTS HD decoding is done on the PC and Multi channel PCM is streamed to the receiver. What is probably more crucial is the Digital to Analog conversion that will still happen on the AVR ?? Am i right or am i right?

 

[MaSh]

Re: 2017 Budget HTPC Rig : Needs to have SSD & able to play BD- ISO , HD Audio Bitstr

On a side note: how does it matter if the DTS HD decoding is done on the PC and Multi channel PCM is streamed to the receiver. What is probably more crucial is the Digital to Analog conversion that will still happen on the AVR ?? Am i right or am i right?

Choice is yours. You can have the decoding done on the PC or bitstream everything to the AVR. Choose which ever sounds better to you. For music, I have foobar with Wasapi addon which lets the receiver's dac do the conversion.

MaSh