Challenge: X58 (LGA 1366) uATX mobo

[thesameguy]

Be cautious of Corsair PSUs - they have at least a couple varieties known for coil whine (you can google which ones). It's really annoying. You might look at Silverstone - they are very quiet and cheap on Amazon. XFX too. Hell, get an XFX and that XFX vid card and have a matching pair!

[drew]

Nice!

Do you, or have you used XBMC? I'm trying to research it while I'm making choices.

From what it looks, it's a rather non-intuitive operation...

Other things I'm contemplating:
Hauppauge WinTV-DCR-2650 Dual Tuner Digital CableCARD Receiver

I know pretty much 3/5ths of sweet fuckall about this stuff.


If I got this (I can apparently get a cable card from Comcast), I'm assuming I'd still need a TV card in the PC?

Then I would be able to use the PC as a gigantic DVR?

Embarrassingly, this is an area of tech I've not looked at prior to yesterday...

[Alan P]

If you're worried about the CPU cooler being noisy get an AIO one? I doubt the HTPC usage will stress a modern CPU that much so the fans could be on quietly?

[thesameguy]

I run a fork of XBMC on my Ouya, and I set my parents up with it on their Win7 HTPC. It's very powerful, but as a result somewhat convoluted. It's semi-OSS-ness leads to some of the issues IMHO. It's not difficult to get up and running with it (actually quite easy), and then you can grow from there.

The Hauppauge card interfaces your computer to the cable system, so you can watch or record content from cable through your HTPC on the TV. Back in the day this was much easier, but since most cable broadcasts these days are encrypted, so that's why you need the CableCARD setup. There are limits on what you can watch depending on your cable provider. I don't know the specifics here because I haven't had cable with which to use such a thing in many, many years. Usually, it's limited to PPV type programming, but sometimes premium channel.

The software you're running on the PC determines what you can do with the allowed content, whether it's live or you get DVR like functionality. That Hauppauge card says it's only compatible with Windows Media Center, so you may not be able to use it with XBMC. But, you can certainly run both on the same computer, no worries. You'd just need to run whichever app gets you the content you want.

What you can definitely do for sure is use that card and lots of storage to use your HTPC like a big fatty DVR to record some content from a Comcast cable connection. No other card is needed - the Hauppauge WinTV-DCR-2650 is it.

[drew]

Awesome. It seemed shitty to have to buy a $150 cablecard tuner, and a $120 card....


Interesting....

The search for knowledge continues.

I was thinking about building/setting it up in the office (the second bedroom) and getting it tweaked before I plonk it in the main room on the main TV. For the sake of my other, as I'm not sure she'd be real thrilled with something completely convoluted....

[thesameguy]

Unless you need the functionality of XBMC (it does some neat things, like live streaming torrents) I'd personally recommend Windows Media Center. It will play DVD (and BD with a codec), stream audio, stream movies (anything Media Player can play), play Netflix content, and do DVR duty. It does not connect to many streaming services (Hulu, Amazon, etc.), but for everything else it's painless to set up and use. If you have a lot of ripped movies, I highly recommend the Media Browser plug in as a replacement for the "Movies" section in WMC - it's a superior use experience, and frankly easier to set up than Movie libraries anyway. For those streaming services (other than Netflix), you can either fall back to a web browser on the system or use the streaming repository services in XBMC. My parents do that, but I just use the xbox.

Some people hate having multiple HTPC environments and shoe horn everything into XBMC. Personally, I'm at ease with multiple environments. I like the path of least resistance - I want to use my HTPC, not tinker with it. Plenty of folks like making XBMC do everything (which it can and I respect it for it!), but I just don't have the interest in that approach. I spend 80% of my media consumption time in WMC - the other 20% of being somewhere else isn't getting me down.

[Yw-slayer]

I use Plex (an XBMC fork, I believe?) for our server/HTPC and everything else. It works alright, not perfectly. At least the interface is easy to use.

[thesameguy]

Plex is a server platform, where as XBMC is a client. They actually aren't related, although they have been integrated fairly successfully recently.

[Yw-slayer]

Ah. Plex has a client as well.

[thesameguy]

Yup.