Need software details for my HTPC w/Windows Vistax64

[brotj7]

Basically I'm looking to use this system as a Blue-ray player, so we can watch net TV on the big screen at as close to 1080P as possible, and to get rid of the 300ish dvd's my wife wants me to get out of the living room. Also if possible, light gaming on the big screen wouldn't be bad either(Battlefield series, TF2, & Diablo III when it releases). From most forums the recommendation has been WinDVD9 and PowerDVD8 Ultra. Are there any glaring holes with one or the other??? Is there a free equivalent???? Are those all inclusive with Media Center???? What will get me the absolute best resolution if I'm not worried about adding more drives as my collection grows???? I'm not exactly worried about raid as the discs will be in my basement and while it would be a pain in the backside to have to build a single volume again, it isn't ginna kill me to do it. Ease of use for the wife is paramount though otherwise she'll just see the whole venture as a waste of $. So where do I go from here???

I'm pretty firm on hardware at this point as I already own it all, but I'll list it just in case there's any incompatibilities:
Q6600 stock
Tuniq 120
Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
8GB G.Skill DDR2 800
EVGA 8800GT 512mb
LG Blue-ray/HD DVD Rom
2x 74gb raptors in raid 0 for boot
WD 1TB green hd data-just to start
Samsung LN-T4665F 1080P lcd tv
Antec Smart Power 500w
Antec P180b case
Vista Ultimate x64

-The PSU will be swapped out once I start adding more drives, it's from a S939 Athlon x64 4800 it ran the raptors and a 4 drive raid 5 for 3 years. So it seems a good starting point.

-The raptors will be swapped out in a few years once SSD's work out their problems, capacity rises, and price falls.

Thanks in advance,
Robb

 

[BornStar]

In my opinion you're not going to need Raptors in RAID for a boot device. They're going to be much louder than you will most likely want and the performance benefit will not be worth it. As far as storage goes, you're going to need more. I usually figure about 7GB/DVD for ripping (assuming you aren't going to convert to another format) which means that you're looking at 2.1TB of storage necessary just for your DVDs. Also, you'll want to make sure that your graphics card is HDCP ready. If it isn't you're going to have a much harder time getting blu-ray and HD DVD playback. I won't say it isn't possible because I'm pretty sure it is, I think I've just heard it's annoying.

Regarding software, PowerDVD 7.3 came with my blu-ray drive and it works just fine. As long as you're using S/PDIF for audio it will convert the audio to DD or DTS and then pass all 5.1 channels digitally. I believe I read in another thread that you're just using TV speakers for now which would mean the limitation of stereo analog audio wouldn't bother you for the time being. Vista Ultimate comes with everything you need to playback DVDs so you don't need to get any special software for that. You can integrate PowerDVD with Media Center by installing My Movies so you don't have to minimize VMC and then open a new program with a mouse.

 

[brotj7]

Yup, about 5 min after I posted this, I realized I didn't get my surround sound yet.... I gave my old sherwood from ~1998 to my little brother a few yrs ago and always thought I'd get a propper setup once I got a house. Looks like that might my my birthday present this year.
So after some googling last night I found that DVD's are just a mpeg-2. Now the whole container thing has confused me. Am I supposed to move these to a specific mpeg2 type or mpeg4 so the computer can understand??? Do I just leave the vob files in a folder and just find a reader that will play that, or do I make a file like a AVI that's just one contiuous movie file only without compressing it???? What supports the better resolution??? I do plan on adding mose space after I figure out the software end of things, so the 7gb file size sounds good to me, although I don't do the whole extra's thing, just a waste of space to me most of the time so that should leave me some cushion space right??? I was thinking that my TV can already display a higher res than DVD, so do I compress 3-10% or will that display errors???? I have seen several posts that say to use damon tools to mount an ISO image, but I don't want each movie to come up as a drive letter. There's gotta be a limit on those anyways right??? Am I thinking right or am I missing something???

Thanks
Robb

 

[jacc1234]

Your best options would be to either extract them as VOB's which can be played with things like VLC or just extract them as ISO's. You would not have a drive for each movie but instead some software will auto-mount the ISO in Daemon Tools when you select it. I believe Mediaportal has this feature. It is a great HTPC front end that I use, I just don't use the ISO feature. Another option is to convert your DVD's to a more compressed format. This is the route I took and you can save a ton of space with very little to no loss of quality. I have re-encoded all of my DVD's to x264 MKV files. This takes a ton of time and you will need to learn a good bit about encoding to get the best results but for me its worth it. I have around 500 movies both HD and SD currently taking up around 1.5 TB.

 

[ZetaEpyon]

Personally I would bypass the Raptor RAID-0 as well, and spend the money on other components, or not at all.
I would get a WD Blue 320GB or 640GB drive as the OS and small storage drive, and then one of the new 2TB drives for mass storage. If you're serious about ripping stuff, I think that you'll find 1TB smaller than you think. Doubly so if you intend to rip blurays.

 

[Crucial]

Look into the My Movies app for media center. It works quite well and lets you just rip the movies into vobs in video ts folders and gives you a nice app in media center to see the dvd covers and select them from there.

I third the opinion on ditching the raptors. They are much too loud for use in a htpc and are complete overkill. Your money would be better spent on a couple of WD black drives. There really is no need for RAID0 on a htpc.

I also don't think you will need to upgrade your power supply. I bet you're not even using 175W of power most of the time. Get a kill a watt and see what your actually drawing from the wall before wasting money on that.

I have a hard time topping 80W with 4 750gb HD's in my windows home server.

 

[brotj7]

Thanks for the help everybody. I've been tied up because the mobo is DOA, and I'm past my newegg return period, so I have to RMA through Gigabyte. I'll post back my results when I get a replacment.
I had the whole system up and running with a intel mobo, but I swapped it out for the gigabyte for the raptor raid and to OC a little, and now I have to wait.:brokenheart: I figured I could push my Q6600 to 3.2ghz for the initial month of encoding and if I wanted to game, as long as I didn't raid my data drives. To me it didn't really matter if the chip didn't last extremely long or the raid failed as i could just take the the data drives to another machine or rebuild when I upgraded the setup in a few yrs. Nothing to spoil my fun like a dead part....
So when I do finally get it up and running, I can either rip to ISO, and use mediaportal for the auto mounts, or check out powerDVD 7 if I can find the version that rips, and MyMovies2 for the indexing. However either way I should get different drives for boot and space(640black for boot, a few more 1tb's for space). Am I on the right track???
Also jacc1234, got any entry level links for re-encoding bitrates/info??? It all seems a little overwhelming and no single place to start. Thanks again to all for the help.

Robb