HDTV HTPC newb needs help building an HTPC

[Jaxidian]

I've been hinting around the forums about questions here and there and finally decided I'd just compile all of my questions together into one post - figure I'd get more opinions this way. So here goes...

I'm looking to build a HTPC to run beside my DirecTV unit (has no DVR or HD) mostly because I'd like to get HD over the air. Right now I have an ATI HDTV Wonder that I'm going to take back because it sucks. I also have an Antec NSK2400 which I think I want to stick with so I'm limited to uATX stuff but I don't see this as a problem.

So anyways, let's just go through all of the key features...

CPU:
I assume 2GHz AMD64 is sufficient for anything I'd need, even in HD?

Mobo:
Something to accomodate the CPU and video card, blah blah...

RAM:
I wouldn't go with less than 1GB, probably use 1.5-2.

Video Card:
I currently have a 6800 OC that I plan on using - is this overkill? I assume this is plenty powerful enough. I don't plan on doing any gaming at all.

TV Tuner:
I need suggestions for this please! Like I said before, I'd like to only use it for HD OTA and I think I'd like to have 2 tuners (to record one thing while watching another). It wouldn't be horrible if there was another input I could use to hook my DirecTV to just in case I wanted to use it as a DVR for DirecTV content. Also, in case it matters, my HDTV signals here are relatively weak. I really have to fidget with the antenna to get a strong signal so if one tuner is much better than another with picking up good signals, please keep that in mind.

Antenna:
I currently have a Newpoint Argo XP 208230 antenna that I may or may not take back to the store depending on what you all recommend. I'd like a budget antenna here ($50 or less) and something that's not huge. It's going to be in my garage on top of some shelving on the walls. Again, DTV is all I care about - don't give a damn about analog if that matters on this one.

Software:
I run Windows so I'm planning on either SageTV or BeyondTV. It seems like BTV has more numbers but I've heard better arguments for Sage. I'll probalby end up installing them both and trying to figure out which one I like best. But please give me your opinions on this as well!

Anything else I'm forgetting??
Let's see, I'm hooking this up to a 40" Sony Bravia 720p LCD, my case has it's PSU built in, I'd like to have a remote with whatever I get so if the tuner you recommend doesn't come with a remote, please have a solution for that. I'd like to ideally never have to use the kb/mouse unless I'm changing something with the system's setup (updating drivers, etc.). Please let me know if I'm forgetting something important. Oh yeah, am just using onboard sound and got my USB wifi card (good old $10 Airlink from Fry's ).

Thanks in advance!!

-Jax

 

[Jibboom]

Originally posted by: Jaxidian
TV Tuner:
I need suggestions for this please! Like I said before, I'd like to only use it for HD OTA and I think I'd like to have 2 tuners (to record one thing while watching another). It wouldn't be horrible if there was another input I could use to hook my DirecTV to just in case I wanted to use it as a DVR for DirecTV content. Also, in case it matters, my HDTV signals here are relatively weak. I really have to fidget with the antenna to get a strong signal so if one tuner is much better than another with picking up good signals, please keep that in mind.

The Terratec Cinergy 2400i DT is one card with two tuners on it so you can play/record at the same time. It's a PCI-E card by the way, if that makes any difference to you.

 

[Peter]

I've built a handful of HTPC standalones as well as a server/client experiment.

The primary advice for standalone or client machines is: Don't overdo it.

Graphics: The 2D media work is easily handled even by the most miserable of today's graphics offerings, including chipset-integrated. For a Windows client, look for DXVA or at least Overlay video acceleration; in Linux you'll need the Overlay as well.

CPU: Make it as low power as you can, for the sake of noise. When you're doing no analog video, just digital, the CPU will have little to do during recording since the video is already compressed as it comes off the air, and the replay work will mostly be handled by the GPU. You are well advised to use a dualcore CPU (like AMD's X2 3600 EE) if you plan to have twin receivers to record and view different things at the same time.

Harddisk: Samsung have special, media client optimized quiet IDE HDDs (V120CE series, 250GB) if you want those extra 2dB of quietness. If you don't care /that/ much, use at least a SATA drive with NCQ, and connect it to a SATA port that actually does NCQ.

TV card: Twin PCI cards are fine as long as there's nothing else on the same PCI bus - so don't think you can use a RAID controller in the next PCI slot, unless this is a workstation board with multiple PCI busses. You're better off with a twin-tuner PCIE card, since a PCIE link inherently is on a link of its own with no peers to compete for bandwidth.


My own feasibility experiment for a pure client machine ended up finding that a Duron-1200 on an integrated-everything SiS chipset mainboard doesn't ever go above 40 percent CPU load - and that is while receiving 20 Mbit/s high quality compressed analog TV through an encrypted WLAN uplink. Next up I'll be trying a completely fanless VIA C7-1000 for a client box. My recording server currently uses a Sempron64-2600, and will later today be upgraded with a dualcore Opteron on a workstation board - mainly for better I/O throughput to accommodate a total of four tuners, two SCSI controllers and four ethernet channels. This will be probing the upper end of feasibility with regular PC gear

 

[jonny13]

Are you looking at going BD or HD DVD in the future? If so, you need a X2 3600+ and 6600GT at a bare minimum. I recently bought a HDDVD drive and it can't play at faster than a slideshow on my 3200+/6600GT. If you aren't planning on playing HD movies in the near future, then just about anything made in the past few years can handle DVD/Xvid/Divx movies.

 

[Jaxidian]

Originally posted by: jonny13
Are you looking at going BD or HD DVD in the future? If so, you need a X2 3600+ and 6600GT at a bare minimum. I recently bought a HDDVD drive and it can't play at faster than a slideshow on my 3200+/6600GT. If you aren't planning on playing HD movies in the near future, then just about anything made in the past few years can handle DVD/Xvid/Divx movies.

I'm not concerned at all about BluRay or HDDVD atm. As for dvd/xvid/divx, well, that's by no means my main reason for this machine. The main reason for this machine is to be my tuner for OTA HD (my TV has no built-in tuner) and to be a DVR for whatever I want to use it for (mostly the HD OTA but prolly gonna run DirecTV thru it too to DVR it as well).

-Jax

 

[Jaxidian]

Originally posted by: Peter
I've built a handful of HTPC standalones as well as a server/client experiment.

The primary advice for standalone or client machines is: Don't overdo it.

Graphics: The 2D media work is easily handled even by the most miserable of today's graphics offerings, including chipset-integrated. For a Windows client, look for DXVA or at least Overlay video acceleration; in Linux you'll need the Overlay as well.

CPU: Make it as low power as you can, for the sake of noise. When you're doing no analog video, just digital, the CPU will have little to do during recording since the video is already compressed as it comes off the air, and the replay work will mostly be handled by the GPU. You are well advised to use a dualcore CPU (like AMD's X2 3600 EE) if you plan to have twin receivers to record and view different things at the same time.

Harddisk: Samsung have special, media client optimized quiet IDE HDDs (V120CE series, 250GB) if you want those extra 2dB of quietness. If you don't care /that/ much, use at least a SATA drive with NCQ, and connect it to a SATA port that actually does NCQ.

TV card: Twin PCI cards are fine as long as there's nothing else on the same PCI bus - so don't think you can use a RAID controller in the next PCI slot, unless this is a workstation board with multiple PCI busses. You're better off with a twin-tuner PCIE card, since a PCIE link inherently is on a link of its own with no peers to compete for bandwidth.


My own feasibility experiment for a pure client machine ended up finding that a Duron-1200 on an integrated-everything SiS chipset mainboard doesn't ever go above 40 percent CPU load - and that is while receiving 20 Mbit/s high quality compressed analog TV through an encrypted WLAN uplink. Next up I'll be trying a completely fanless VIA C7-1000 for a client box. My recording server currently uses a Sempron64-2600, and will later today be upgraded with a dualcore Opteron on a workstation board - mainly for better I/O throughput to accommodate a total of four tuners, two SCSI controllers and four ethernet channels. This will be probing the upper end of feasibility with regular PC gear

A couple things I wanted to question on your write-up here...

You're saying a Duron-powered machine is sufficient for anything I'd want to throw at it as long as it's all DTV. Would this handle re-encoding the HD content and copmressing it for storage on the hard drive? That would surprise me! Especially with 2 tuners!!

As for the TV tuner, I'm not sure if pci-e will be an option. I'm building this PC mostly with spare parts so I'll likely have to go with PCI. Luckily, I'm not planning on plugging any cards into this box other than the video card and 1 or 2 TV tuners.

Lastly, for the video card, are you sure that just any old (well, new) on-board video would be sufficient? What about an older-gen decent video card such as a TI4200 or something? I'd really like to have a DVI port to hook into my tv so my feed can be digital instead of analog.

-Jax

 

[cubby1223]

This is what you'd be looking at:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr1600.html

Recommends a 2.2ghz p4 for viewing a 1080i picture.

 

[Jaxidian]

Originally posted by: cubby1223
This is what you'd be looking at:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr1600.html

Recommends a 2.2ghz p4 for viewing a 1080i picture.

I saw this before but also read this which caused me to believe it wouldn't work:

Two tuners on board: a 125 channel cable ready TV tuner and an ATSC digital TV tuner. Connect both cable TV and ATSC digital TV to the WinTV-HVR-1600 at the same time.

Will this work for pulling 2 OTA HDTV signals at the same time?

 

[Jassi]

Originally posted by: Jaxidian

Originally posted by: cubby1223
This is what you'd be looking at:
http://www.hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_hvr1600.html

Recommends a 2.2ghz p4 for viewing a 1080i picture.

I saw this before but also read this which caused me to believe it wouldn't work:

Two tuners on board: a 125 channel cable ready TV tuner and an ATSC digital TV tuner. Connect both cable TV and ATSC digital TV to the WinTV-HVR-1600 at the same time.

Will this work for pulling 2 OTA HDTV signals at the same time?

Nope. It has 1 ATSC and 1 NTSC (analog) tuner. You will need 2 for your needs and you will have 2 analog to spare.

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: Jaxidian
It wouldn't be horrible if there was another input I could use to hook my DirecTV to just in case I wanted to use it as a DVR for DirecTV content.

You can hook up your DirecTV to your computer via a HVR-1600 card, but the satellite signal won't be in HD (because there are no HD cards for satellite in the U.S.), and you will have to set up the HVR-1600's IR blaster (basically a remote emulator) to tune the channels in response to the computer's remote. Also, changing channels will be slower.

Reading the product description for the HVR-1600, the analog and OTA HD tuners are independent, so they should both be able to record simultaneously. Here is a SageTV forum thread to back this up. If you intend to use WinTV2000 as your PVR software, you should ask Hauppauge to confirm that both tuners can record simultaneously.

If that's the case, you would need only one HVR-1600, with the S-Video + 1/4" audio jack going to the DirecTV box while the ATSC coax jack goes to your HD antenna.

I run Windows so I'm planning on either SageTV or BeyondTV. It seems like BTV has more numbers but I've heard better arguments for Sage. I'll probalby end up installing them both and trying to figure out which one I like best. But please give me your opinions on this as well!

Both of those apps have their problems. I spent 2+ months troubleshooting BTV 3.x because my recordings would randomly failed. Eventually, I got fed up and replaced BTV with SageTV, which worked flawlessly on that machine without any system configuration changes.

Just before Christmas, Comcast changed the name of their cable lineup in the guide data, which caused SageTV to lock up several times a day even when the sources were re-setup. Reinstalling SageTV did the trick, and now it's working fine again.

They both have free trials and comparable features, so just use whichever works on your computer.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

2GHz may be a little low. 1GB is fine, vid card is kinda overkill, BeyondTV 4.5 is awesome, WinXP or MCE is fine.
For comparison (Ainulindale in sig) :
A64 2.5GHz, 1GB, GeForce 6100, Rage Theatre 550 Pro, WinXP SP2, BeyondTV 4.5 + BeyondMedia Basic (Firefly remote), Olevia 32" 720p/1080i LCD.

 

[Jaxidian]

Any thoughts on an antenna? This one I'm using now seems to get the stations I want but only able to view it 95% of the time with once-a-minute freezes due to the signal (get the same results on ATI's MMC, Sage, BTV, and GBPVR). It appears as though I'm just barely on the threshold of getting a solid signal but still not quite there. Any ideas on how to help would be appreciated! Note that my antenna already has a built-in amplifier so I don't know if buying an amplifier will help here. I'm hoping somebody can say, "Your antenna sucks, go buy this one instead and it'll be tons better..." I dropped $50 on this antenna but can bring it back without any problem.

 

[nullpointerus]

Originally posted by: Jaxidian
Any thoughts on an antenna? This one I'm using now seems to get the stations I want but only able to view it 95% of the time with once-a-minute freezes due to the signal (get the same results on ATI's MMC, Sage, BTV, and GBPVR). It appears as though I'm just barely on the threshold of getting a solid signal but still not quite there. Any ideas on how to help would be appreciated! Note that my antenna already has a built-in amplifier so I don't know if buying an amplifier will help here. I'm hoping somebody can say, "Your antenna sucks, go buy this one instead and it'll be tons better..." I dropped $50 on this antenna but can bring it back without any problem.

I've no experience with antennas, sadly, but there are people here who could probably build an antenna out of paper clips, used tinfoil, and old rubber hoses if they had to.

There's plenty of HDTV information at that link, too.