Laptop as HTPC ?

[Flash]

I will be changing my Laptop soon - Moving to Macbook Pro in the near future

Can I use my present Laptop as a dedicated HTPC ?

The Specs are




Hard Disk Size is 640GB
Graphics Card Nvidia GT540

I have Netgear Push2TV as well ( Never connected it to the laptop to check if it works or rather how it works

this is my first venture into HTPC and instead of building one was wondering if this laptop could manage HTPC duty
Or do I need to upgrade anything ? or scrap the idea completely ?

 

[Deleted member 17547]

Do you have HDMI out in your laptop ?

If yes then you are good to go.. Connect and start enjoying movies..

 

[aakashr]

I will be changing my Laptop soon - Moving to Macbook Pro in the near future

Can I use my present Laptop as a dedicated HTPC ?

The Specs are




Hard Disk Size is 640GB
Graphics Card Nvidia GT540

I have Netgear Push2TV as well ( Never connected it to the laptop to check if it works or rather how it works

this is my first venture into HTPC and instead of building one was wondering if this laptop could manage HTPC duty
Or do I need to upgrade anything ? or scrap the idea completely ?

i7 + 6GB RAM.................definitely good to go!!!
which program do you intend to use to play movies, music, etc...........XBMC is perfect and made for HTPC, if you have not already tried it.

 

[ravikumar615]

spec looks good ... for HTPC GPU matters. Nvidia chipset is good. My personal experience is that Asus Nvidia graphics card has been better than the makes of Forsa, MSI etc. I have not used GT540 and hence cannot comment on its performance.
But overall the spec looks good for HTPC. Hope you got HDMI on your laptop.

As suggested by other FMs, XBMC is the way to go.

Hope cooler fans and HDD do not make annoying noise during pleasant music or thriller movies

 

[s_anuj]

i7 + 6GB RAM.................definitely good to go!!!
which program do you intend to use to play movies, music, etc...........XBMC is perfect and made for HTPC, if you have not already tried it.

+1.... install XBMC & get started.

only problem with using laptops as HTPCs is lack of digital audio. Check if you have a SPDIF output? An HDMI out might solve it thou

 

[Flash]

Do you have HDMI out in your laptop ?

If yes then you are good to go.. Connect and start enjoying movies..

Thanks Vikram for the call and clearing my doubt.

Yes it does have HDMI. will try it tonight

spec looks good ... for HTPC GPU matters. Nvidia chipset is good. My personal experience is that Asus Nvidia graphics card has been better than the makes of Forsa, MSI etc. I have not used GT540 and hence cannot comment on its performance.
But overall the spec looks good for HTPC. Hope you got HDMI on your laptop.

As suggested by other FMs, XBMC is the way to go.

Hope cooler fans and HDD do not make annoying noise during pleasant music or thriller movies

Ravi,

Any other alternatives to XBMC.
Should I knock off my Windows and put something lighter like Ubuntu etc for faster boot up times.
Or should I use Windows and use Hibernate for a quick start and shut down


Here is what info i got about the Graphics card from the net

Pardon the ignorance guys.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M

The NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M is a fast middle class graphics card for laptops. It is based on the same chip as the GeForce GT 435M but with slightly higher clock speeds. Furthermore, it supports GDDR5 and 900MHz DDR3 graphics memory. Unfortunately, no models have utilized GDDR5 due to the increase in power consumption and higher prices compared to DDR3 VRAM.

GF108 Architecture

The GT 540M is based on the same GF108 architecture as the older GT 435M. The GF108 stems from the GF100 (Fermi) DirectX 10 architecture. However, it is optimized for the consumer end (gaming) and stripped down to save power. More information on the architecture can be found on our GeForce GT 435M page.

Performance

In general, the performance of the 540M lies between the Radeon HD 5650 and 5730 in our first benchmark tests. Therefore, the 540M is about 10% faster than the GT 435M using DDR3 graphics memory.

Paired with a fast CPU, demanding games of 2010 should run fluently in medium to high details and SXGA (1280x1024) resolution. In our tests, for example, Call of Duty: Black Ops and StarCraft 2 ran fluently in high details and 1360x768. More gaming benchmarks can be found below. Demanding games released in 2011 like Anno 2070 or Skyrim will only run fluent in low to medium detail settings.

Features

A novelty of the GF104/106/108 chips is the support for Bitstream HD Audio (Blu-Ray) output via HDMI. Alike the Radeon HD 5730, the GT 540M can transfer Dolby True HD and DTS-HD bitstream without quality loss to a HiFi receiver.

The GT 540M offers PureVideo HD technology for video decoding using the GPU. The integrated Video Processor 4 (VP4) supports feature set C and therefore the GPU is able to fully decode MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 (MPEG-4 ASP - e.g., DivX or Xvid), VC-1/WMV9, and H.264 (VLD, IDCT, Motion Compensation, and Deblocking). Furthermore, the GPU is able to decode two 1080p streams simultaneously (e.g. for Blu-Ray Picture-in-Picture).

Through CUDA, OpenCL and DirectCompute 2.1 support, the GeForce GT 540M can be of help in general calculations. For example, the stream processor can encode videos considerably faster than can a modern CPU. Furthermore, physics calculations can be done by the GPU using PhysX (supported by Mafia 2 and Metro 2033). However, the GPU is not fast enough to calculate PhysX high detail game settings.

Following the current 3D trend, the 540M supports 3D Vision. It enables the laptop to send 3D content (3D games, 3D Web Streaming, 3D photos, 3D Blu-Rays) to a built-in 3D-enabled screen or an external 3D TV if supported by the manufacturer. This feature is disabled if the notebook includes Optimus.

Can someone please elaborate about this .--
My laptop has a sticker which says Nvidia Optimus

 

[Flash]

+1.... install XBMC & get started.

only problem with using laptops as HTPCs is lack of digital audio. Check if you have a SPDIF output? An HDMI out might solve it thou

I guess I can use HDMI.
I will be using this purely for Movies and use a Emotiva DAC for Music.

 

[prithivi]

you can play movies but not as a dedicated HTPC
i guess laptop wont bitstream DTS-HD and laptop gets heated quickly
and once it gets the heat the movie hangs

 

[baijuxavior]

If it is purely for htpc purpose, then use windows 7+xbmc. This will support hd audio also using xbmc with hd patch. Linux has problems with hd audio. If you have the original win7 disk then reinstall win7 and install just the necessary drivers like graphics, audio, network, wifi etc.After that install xbmc. If you are interested you can set the laptop to boot directly into xbmc. For faster boot use hibernation or sleep. Sleep mode will drain your battery, so hibernation is recommended. My laptop starts in just 5 seconds from hibernation. With a little code you can start xbmc when resuming from hibernation or sleep and exit it when the laptop is switched off. If you need, I can give you the necessary settings and code. Also add a remote control.

 

[baijuxavior]

You can easily check whether the laptop supports hd audio bitstreaming by looking at the hdmi audio properties and I don't think heating will be a problem.

i guess laptop wont bitstream DTS-HD and laptop gets heated quickly

 

[Flash]

You can easily check whether the laptop supports hd audio bitstreaming by looking at the hdmi audio properties and I don't think heating will be a problem.

I checked, it does support hd audio.

So I guess I will go ahead and use this as a HTPC. :licklips:

 

[ravikumar615]

Any other alternatives to XBMC.
Should I knock off my Windows and put something lighter like Ubuntu etc for faster boot up times.
Or should I use Windows and use Hibernate for a quick start and shut down

Other options are Ubantu/Linux, openelec.tv (linux + xbmc distro) etc. but getting the correct drivers can be a pain especially for GPU. better stick to Win7 + xbmc

If fast bootup is a concern then try Solid State Drives (SSD) for you boot drive. They are faster (and silent) and hence will bring down your boot time.

I boot my zbox using SDHC card with openelec. It takes about 10 secs. :licklips:

You can give other options a try but I feel your setup is beyond what is required for HTPC If you want to use your laptop to fullest then go win7 + xbmc.

 

[zervinb]

A slightly off-topic question.

Why is the Windows Experience Index just 4.8? That index is indicative of the lowest scores in the test. What is getting it down? The specs are quite impressive, Core i7 and 6.00GB RAM with a dedicated graphics card. Then why should the Index be just 4.8?

My Dell with lesser specs (Core i3 with 4.00GB RAM with ATI Radeon HD5470) shows Windows Experience Index 5.0

 

[Deleted member 17547]

How about using the POT Player for movies ?? It plays almost all format.. I have tried it with big size movies like 10-15GB movies and it plays it well..

OT.. does anyone know how to configure it for Audio pass through ?? I tried couple of things but then volume level goes down..

 

[manniraj]

How about using the POT Player for movies ?? It plays almost all format.. I have tried it with big size movies like 10-15GB movies and it plays it well..

OT.. does anyone know how to configure it for Audio pass through ?? I tried couple of things but then volume level goes down..

Hi sagar

Try this link. I have configured my potplayer earlier using this site. It is a very huge html page so you need to be patient. Also the potplayer+madvr uses lots of CPU power mine takes almost close to 70%, hence stopped using either mpc-hc+madvr or potplayer+madvr. So just going with the xbmc+hd audio patched combination superb with cpu usage being less than 8% even with 20gb movie with hd audio.

Thanks

 

[baijuxavior]

To set audio passthrough look under - Preference - Filter Control - Audio Decoder - Built in codec settings.

 

[Flash]

A slightly off-topic question.

Why is the Windows Experience Index just 4.8? That index is indicative of the lowest scores in the test. What is getting it down? The specs are quite impressive, Core i7 and 6.00GB RAM with a dedicated graphics card. Then why should the Index be just 4.8?

My Dell with lesser specs (Core i3 with 4.00GB RAM with ATI Radeon HD5470) shows Windows Experience Index 5.0

Your post got me thinking and I re-ran the assessment.

The new score shows as 5.7. It is determined by the lowest sub score

 

[Flash]

How about using the POT Player for movies ?? It plays almost all format.. I have tried it with big size movies like 10-15GB movies and it plays it well..

Vikram, I will try POT player ... How is it superior to let say WMP with some installed codec pack ?

 

[Flash]

Question :

IF I connect my Laptop to my AVR via HDMI
What signal am I sending to my AVR - Analogue or Digital..

-------------------------------------

Basically assume I play some FLAC files on my laptop and it is connected to my AVR via HDMI, Is the Laptop sending digital signal or analogue to my AVR?

 

[technobhatt]

Question :

IF I connect my Laptop to my AVR via HDMI
What signal am I sending to my AVR - Analogue or Digital..

-------------------------------------

Basically assume I play some FLAC files on my laptop and it is connected to my AVR via HDMI, Is the Laptop sending digital signal or analogue to my AVR?

As per my understanding, through HDMI...laptop is sending Digital Signals only !

About..laptop as HTPC :-
I'm using my Sony Vaio laptop same as a HTPC to watch movies. it has ATI Radeon 1 GB graphics card inbuilt with 4GB RAM and 500 GB HDD.

Movies:- XBMC player and HDMI out .
XBMC works great for HDMI out without any problem. The only disadvantage is...you can't adjust the aspect ratio (there is an option to manage screen size, but that doesn't seem to be sufficient)
And it detects all sort of Audio Codecs including DTS HDMA.
There is NO heating and hanging problem.

Music:-
I'm using Foobar2000 to play music through HDMI out. Laptop's ATI HDMI out works fine to play all kind of music files including FLAC.