sam9s HTPC Project! powered by XBMC!!

Wharfedale EVO 4.2 Speakers
Thanks for the suggestions.

I am leaning towards the Mini itx from cooler master for 5400.
The intel lga 1155 2020 processor for 3600
Motherboard not sure, ideally need usb3 ones as all my ext. disks have them but they seem to start from 5.5k

Can you suggest the other components?
 
****** MAJOR UPDATE **********​

Have done a major upgrade on my HTPC, by adding an SSD and also dumping windows based XBMC and opting for OpenELEC. So far so good the boot times have improved like leaps and bound. the SSD I have opted is SanDisk its an SSD that sandisk has come to be use as a cache drive on a windows machine, hence small capacity, just 32 GB, but that is more than enough for OpenELEC to run and that also keeps the cost of the drive down. I got it for 2500 You can use ready cache as a normal SSD as well, just need to formate the drive in windows.

Then on SSD I installed the latest version of [OpenELEC I have used the generic version.

I am just blown out by the performance. With a default skin which is Confluence, the boot up time has come down to 30 secs ..:-), from around 2 mins. But thats not all. If you keep your HTPC, in suspended mode via openELEC, which is what I am doing now (and would suggest the same), the boot up time is just 5 Secs Flat!!!!!. Blazing fast.

So now I was actually able to replicate the boot up time of my WD TV Live media player. Infact it has surpassed that. My WD TV Live takes 13 Sec to boot from switched off to menu screen. OpenELEC on suspended state takes mere 5 Sec ... amazing!!!

I also have made a small your tube video to show the boot up time. In the video the skin I have used is the heaviest one Aeon Nox, so with Aeon NOX the boot up time from zero ie completely switched off to the desktop menu has increased from 30 to 35 and in suspended mode it increases from 5 to 8, which is still pretty fast and is still less than the 13 sec WD TV takes.

Here take a look at the video.

XBMC via openELEC on SSD c - YouTube
 
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lol I am not gonna upgrade the mobo gobble,...:) thats like changing the entire hardware, no plans for that, this is running rock solid ....

BTW what advantage would that provide ..... does it eliminates the POST stage, coz that is the only things which takes time, the actual booting of the openelec is not much.
 
@Sam

Not sure how come your boot time is 2 min, as after looking at your build I have built mine couple of years back and with a SSD and Win 7 + XBMC tweaked with the "MMC" to load the XBMC without the Explorer my boot up time is around 30 sec max. My Asus Oplay mini is the media player which beats up my HTPC in loading at less than 10 sec. This is the only media player that I have for comparison.
 
^^ OK so where is the confusion, with me as well on SDD with OpenELEC its 30 secs. 2 Minutes (which again is just a guess could be 1:30 as well, never actually bothered to note down the time) was with windows 7 ultimate, running XBMC with all sorts of customization where in it used to load, AnyDVD HD in the background plus few other things as well, hence the boot time was a minute and a half plus.

With SSD and OpenELEC it has come down to 30 sec, but major difference is from suspended state, which is like 5 sec, with WOL enabled I just tap the WOL button and XBMC is loaded ... :)
 
Sam, now that you have moved to Openelec, how do you manage BD ISO's and HD Bitstreaming or is that OOTB. I was going through this thread and I believe you were using a como of MPC and TMT, both probably dont work on Openelec, so curious to know.

Gobble, how do you set this up, the mobo I am buying seems to be UEFI compliant.
 
OpenELEC supports ISO playback, albeit without menus (for BD) for DVD ISO, full menus are supported. However for 3D (only FS(MVC), not SBS or TB) there is no solution as of now for Linux based XBMC. Windows based XBMC we can follow the same procedure, what I did with my XBMC on windows. (i.e configuring external player to handle the 3D FS playback).

Bitstreaming is already there. Latest version of OpenELEC is based on Frodo, so even DTS-MA and DD-THD bitstreaming is there. Drivers are already included. I had to do nothing, just install openELEC and everything works OOTB ... :D
 
Hi Sam, one question, last week I assembled a pc for one of my relatives which was supposedly a low cost one, I had used AMD Sempron Dual-Core APU Sempron 2650 and GIGABYTE GA-AM1M-S2H motherboard which has USB 3. To check its HTPC capabilities I installed XBMC and played back a couple of HD videos and found the playback to be quite good with 7.1 channel audio bitstreaming including HD Audio over HDMI. However the only observation I had was that in one or two dark scenes the brightness appeared to be lower (may be due to some default settings of XBMC 13 which I never used before. I played BD rips (mkv) over network with large files ranging upto 40+ GB and all played very well.

One of the fellow members from my city is interested around this and have decided to base his htpc on this platform. So my question is do you think if BD playback (if the FM installs a BD writer) and 3D will work well with this configuration?

Note that Sempron 2650 APU has slightly lower operating frequency than E350N but has 128 shaders instead of 80 in E350N.
 
Thats a tough question, 3D is a different ball game all together (3D ISO is what I mean here). I always have forced and made the same call to everyone ... that we do not need a beefy CPU/system for an HTPC. A low level GPU is all you might need, if at all you want to be safe , which includes 3D as well.

Coming to your question it would be a tough call and even tougher to answer. All I can say is tell your friend, not to completely bank on this config for 3D ISOs. They are seriously very taxing. Be ready to invest on a low end GPU like 630, if at all 3D does not work. It might you never know, but odds are against it. GT630 will make this a piece of cake. Make sure you only invest in an nvidia card if 3D is imp. nvidia is much ahead of ATI in terms both hardware, software and drivers when it comes to 3D
 
Mohanavel said:
Last week I installed Raspbmc, But dnt know how to find which version i installed, SAM can you help me to find out..
Click to expand...

Mohan I somehow missed your query, I apologise ... did you get to find an answer.
 
sam9s said:
Thats a tough question, 3D is a different ball game all together (3D ISO is what I mean here). I always have forced and made the same call to everyone ... that we do not need a beefy CPU/system for an HTPC. A low level GPU is all you might need, if at all you want to be safe , which includes 3D as well.

Coming to your question it would be a tough call and even tougher to answer. All I can say is tell your friend, not to completely bank on this config for 3D ISOs. They are seriously very taxing. Be ready to invest on a low end GPU like 630, if at all 3D does not work. It might you never know, but odds are against it. GT630 will make this a piece of cake. Make sure you only invest in an nvidia card if 3D is imp. nvidia is much ahead of ATI in terms both hardware, software and drivers when it comes to 3D
Click to expand...

Thanks for the response sam,. If I leave out 3D for now can we think of 2D BDs with this platform or do you think that might also require to add a separate GPU? I think in any case we can add a separate GPU later on and another think to note is that the PCIe slot on this board is running at 4X speed only but I checked that it is much above the speed of dedicated budget GPUs, any thoughts on that front? I remember either baiju / spiro mentioning that on E350N board it was tested fine with dedicated GPU although I do not recall if 3D was ever tested.
 
I had previously played a few 3d isos with GT520 without any problem. GT630 will surely play 3d iso files.
 
haisaikat said:
Thanks for the response sam,. If I leave out 3D for now can we think of 2D BDs with this platform or do you think that might also require to add a separate GPU? I think in any case we can add a separate GPU later on and another think to note is that the PCIe slot on this board is running at 4X speed only but I checked that it is much above the speed of dedicated budget GPUs, any thoughts on that front? I remember either baiju / spiro mentioning that on E350N board it was tested fine with dedicated GPU although I do not recall if 3D was ever tested.
Click to expand...

2D ISOs should not be a problem, since you already have tries a 40+GB mkv. 4X PCIe should also not be a problem, but I am sure you can find a mobo for the same price or maybe 500 bucks more that will have PCIe x16. None the less I would say it would not hurt to get a low end gpu, it does not cost much but will make sure all videos including all 3D play absolutely smoothly ....
 
Very inspiring....planning to built (obviously with the assistance of a techie friend though) a HTPC soon.
 
:) agree.

Sam, have been following your threads for quiet some time now though silently. HTPC, Synology and The recent HT project at your home. Inspiring stuff !! Thanks for sharing in so much detail.

I am learning from you, sash and others and hoping to build an htpc for myself soon. Main constraint is time and apprehension about being able to DIY as I'm a non techie.. Anyway, this post is just to say thanks.

Btw, have u checked out Alienware alpha. It's on pre-order right now in the US for $600. Looks great but seems like a big overkill for HTPC. What do you think?

Tx, Caco
 
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