Shall i buy BD Player or Build HTPC

[lake1988]

You may want to check mede8er media players. It's very good in handling 3d and has many additional features too..

Mede8er - The greatest show on earth

 

[nicenicenicee]

You may want to check mede8er media players. It's very good in handling 3d and has many additional features too..

Mede8er - The greatest show on earth

How much does it cost?

Regards

 

[lake1988]

You can ship to India..$190 + shipping cost...that is for med600x3d without any internal drive space in it.

 

[nicenicenicee]

You can ship to India..$190 + shipping cost...that is for med600x3d without any internal drive space in it.

thanks for the option lake, But i think shipping will be almost 50% of the price which takes it to 280 USD i.e. around 17K.

with that budget i think i can buy high end Motherboard (8K) + 1 TB HDD (4K) + CPU (6K)....

which should be capable of doing every thing that this box could do....... AND
will be able to do many other thing which a PC could do?

GAMING
Desktop
Downloading using torrents.
etc etc.

My opinion is that it is very versatile to have HTPC.......what you say?

 

[lake1988]

If you want to play HD movies in excellent quality you need to have a very good graphics card without which rendering won't be that good..obviously if you inclined towards HTPC do some research on optimum components to put together which will be useful for gaming as well as movies...to be more specific bd player and media players SoC are solely designed to perform the decoding/rendering media while incase of a htpc there are a lot of cpu cycles wasted on running background processes not related to media playback.

but now-a-days this media players can do more than just playing movies..they can download torrent, search for subtitles, play streaming media..etc..there are a lot of media players based o android os as well..some of them wven supports 4k...

Please search more regarding the specifics you want and based on that go for htpc or media players.

 

[haisaikat]

Well, I own a 3D TV, so would like to invest in something which is capable enough to handle upscaling algos, as well as 3D stuff.

what would you recommend?

I do not know any motherboard that supports HDMI 1.4a with onboard graphics powerful enough to drive stereoscopic 3D. You would need to get a motherboard supporting at least current dual core processors along with pcie x16 slot where you can plug in a gpu LIKE nvidia gt 440 OR Raedon HD 6540.

But this path will not allow you to reuse your current PC as RAM and PSU both might require to be upgraded along with the rest of the components anyway.

I also agree with lake1988 that media players are evolving day by day yet for flexibility of upgrade HTPC will be the way to go.

 

[nicenicenicee]

I do not know any motherboard that supports HDMI 1.4a with onboard graphics powerful enough to drive stereoscopic 3D. You would need to get a motherboard supporting at least current dual core processors along with pcie x16 slot where you can plug in a gpu LIKE nvidia gt 440 OR Raedon HD 6540.

But this path will not allow you to reuse your current PC as RAM and PSU both might require to be upgraded along with the rest of the components anyway.

I also agree with lake1988 that media players are evolving day by day yet for flexibility of upgrade HTPC will be the way to go.

Well if i plan to make it from scratch, what will you recommend?
which are top mobos do we have
which are top display cards?
which processor is good enough and how much that would cost me?

 

[sam9s]

Well, I own a 3D TV, so would like to invest in something which is capable enough to handle upscaling algos, as well as 3D stuff.

what would you recommend?

Which 3D are you talking about, 3D ISO frame Sequential, is a different ball game all together. SBS, TB are just plain files any media player/HTPC including 350N will play easily.

For 3D ISO get any decent Dual Core like C2D or any AMD varient with compatible mobo .... or if you want to have something better (for may be used as casual processing as well) ....get a first/second gen i3, with compatible mobo, add a GT440/GT630 (both same 440 is discontinued I guess) and you are all set for full 3D ISO.

Remember you will also have to invest in a decent S/W player Total Media theatre 5+ as far as I am concerned is the best when it comes to 3D playback on windows, even better than Power DVD

 

[nicenicenicee]

Which 3D are you talking about, 3D ISO frame Sequential, is a different ball game all together. SBS, TB are just plain files any media player/HTPC including 350N will play easily.

For 3D ISO get any decent Dual Core like C2D or any AMD varient with compatible mobo .... or if you want to have something better (for may be used as casual processing as well) ....get a first/second gen i3, with compatible mobo, add a GT440/GT630 (both same 440 is discontinued I guess) and you are all set for full 3D ISO.

Remember you will also have to invest in a decent S/W player Total Media theatre 5+ as far as I am concerned is the best when it comes to 3D playback on windows, even better than Power DVD

I really don't know what is a 3d ISO fram sequential, and what are SBS, TB.

As far as total media theatre is concerned, on website they have mentioned that it is discontinued and will not be updated or maintained.
what is the next choice of media player. and how much that costs?

 

[sam9s]

Damm thats news to me!!!, TMT and POwerDVD are the only two windows based 3D players popular for full 3D BD ISO. Frankly I did not like Power DVD at all, gave headaches to me. TMT (5 is what I have) works flawlessly. See if you can "arrange"an old version. Apart from these two, WinDVD I guess plays 3D. MPC-HC doesnt do 3D as far as I know. NERO also has a 3D player. but as I said TMT and powerDVD are the only two popular 3D ISO players.. I cannot believe TMT officially is discontinued .... thats too surprising.

YOu can try POwerDVD maybe it will be ok for you ..

 

[vea]

When it comes to playing blu rays the PC and BDP should give out identical output technically since no upscaling is coming into picture. The only thing on PC that you would need to bother is getting the softwares in right tandem.

However when it comes to upscaling from non-HD to HD content there you may find a difference. All entry level BDPs and TVs do some sort of upscaling on the other and the quality of upscaling varies depending on the video chip on board. Even for PCs there are custom software upscaling methods like DXVA, madVR which eats CPU power and delivers good upscaling. Hence the cost of some of the highly expensive BDPs out there in the market which apart from the video chip also has good quality DAC chip built for improving Audio CD playback but that is a different topic altogether.

I would say if given the option of budget sub 20K, I would always go with PC with the right softwares. For 20K+ budget go for separate BDP and for less than 10K budget there is limited option but still BDP should be the way to go unless you have a existing PC to do a BD Drive upgrade.

But if you have variety of ripped contents formats then BDP (even costly ones) might not support all of them gracefully including future formats (unless there is a manufacturer made firmware upgrade to intentionally allow compatibility) in which case a PC or a media player will again b your saviour.

Sorry for moving off topic. I am thinking in these lines too. I have an HTPC with antec fusion remote case, i3 2nd Gen processor, intel DH67BL board, 8 GB ram, 1TB HDD, GT210 graphics card with a LG Blu-ray drive running xbmc. I have connected it to a Marantz SR 5007 AVR and use a samsung 65F8000 LED to view movies. Im happy with the quality of rips and files played through xbmc. It plays most blu-ray discs too. However, I cannot play some blu-ray discs in xbmc and is planning to purchase PowerDVD 14 and upgrade the processor and graphics for smooth 3D playback from BR discs.

Alternatively, I can buy a blu-ray player instead of the PC upgrade, which can play all BR discs and 3D movies without a fuss. I have a budget of Rs.25k. What is advisable in terms of picture and sound quality, upgrade my PC or buy a standalone blu-ray player? Or is it better to sell of my HTPC and get an oppo BD 103 adding some more money?

 

[Hassan Khani]

Oppo 103 would be ideal choice. Stunning picture quality and can play most of the file formats. Also it can be used to play songs from DLNA, NAS. It also comes with IOS / Android app for browsing media. I have BD 95 and it is an amazing player. If you can get BD 103 or 105.

 

[haisaikat]

Here is an Intel based configuration , will provide an AMD based one later

You need to add RAM (4GB DDR3), PSU, cabinet, HDD on top of this with the exception of RAM rest you have to evaluate for reuse vs buy

Motherboard - Rs 4600 (supports upto Core i7, has USB 3, pcie 3.0 support, can drive 2D 1080p video with onboard HDMI supported by the CPU in case you want to add GPU later on for 3D)
Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H Motherboard - Gigabyte : Flipkart.com

CPU Option 1 - Rs 3600 (low - med settings of madVR)
Intel 2.9 GHz LGA 1155 G2020 Processor - Intel : Flipkart.com

CPU Option 2 - Rs 6600 (high madVR settings)
Intel i3 3220 - Intel : Flipkart.com

Grapahics Card - Rs 4600
ZOTAC NVIDIA GT 630 Zone Edition 2 GB DDR3 Graphics Card - ZOTAC : Flipkart.com

 

[haisaikat]

duplicate post

 

[sash]

My BD player can play from 2 TB hdd, can play from network file shares wirelessly (automatically detects any device connected to the wifi and shows shared folders) and can play youtube etc.
What i miss terribly is there is no cool interface like xbmc where movies are nicely organized with metadata downloaded from the internet. If there was a BD player that does that, i'd buy it today.

 

[nicenicenicee]

My BD player can play from 2 TB hdd, can play from network file shares wirelessly (automatically detects any device connected to the wifi and shows shared folders) and can play youtube etc.
What i miss terribly is there is no cool interface like xbmc where movies are nicely organized with metadata downloaded from the internet. If there was a BD player that does that, i'd buy it today.

Which BD player you own sash?

 

[nicenicenicee]

Here is an Intel based configuration , will provide an AMD based one later

You need to add RAM (4GB DDR3), PSU, cabinet, HDD on top of this with the exception of RAM rest you have to evaluate for reuse vs buy

Motherboard - Rs 4600 (supports upto Core i7, has USB 3, pcie 3.0 support, can drive 2D 1080p video with onboard HDMI supported by the CPU in case you want to add GPU later on for 3D)
Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H Motherboard - Gigabyte : Flipkart.com

CPU Option 1 - Rs 3600 (low - med settings of madVR)
Intel 2.9 GHz LGA 1155 G2020 Processor - Intel : Flipkart.com

CPU Option 2 - Rs 6600 (high madVR settings)
Intel i3 3220 - Intel : Flipkart.com

Grapahics Card - Rs 4600
ZOTAC NVIDIA GT 630 Zone Edition 2 GB DDR3 Graphics Card - ZOTAC : Flipkart.com

2 TB disk ==> @ 6K?
4 GB RAM ==> @ 2K?

so if i choose higher configuration it is around.
4600+6600+4600+6000+2000 (mb/cpu/GPU/HDD/RAM)==>@18K

And if we talk about upscaling
POWERDVD Ultra costs around $90 = 5500

so total anticipated damage would be 24K.

But i hope it would be future proof for atlest next five or more years to come.

 

[haisaikat]

so total anticipated damage would be 24K.

Add PSU and Cabinet and Remote (MC Remote), but again if you want to compare with BDP then you need to discount the cost of HDD and add cost of BD Drive which would be more or less equal. But I would say wait for the AMD config

But i hope it would be future proof for atleast next five or more years to come.

Unless you enter into an upgrade race with resolution (4K, 8K, 16K . . .) exactly as Flat Panel manufacturers would like you to think

 

[nicenicenicee]

Add PSU and Cabinet and Remote (MC Remote)

Do you think i will be able to use my present PSU and cabinet?

And by the way what is MC Remote? how much does that cost, any links would be good.

Unless you enter into an upgrade race with resolution (4K, 8K, 16K . . .) exactly as Flat Panel manufacturers would like you to think

Well i think today even FULL HD content is not available properly 4K etc etc...i think it will atleast take 3 to 4 years .

 

[sash]

Which BD player you own sash?

I have the LG BD 670