Hopefully I can do my HTPC setup justice in this post. First, if you’ve never heard of an HTPC, the idea is to hook up a computer to a television at the most basic level. From there you can do a variety of things, including watching tv, movies, pictures, listen to music, play games, and anything else you can do on a computer. My goal was to have an interface that was easy to use while seated on the couch using only a remote. In addition it needed to be easy enough to use that the wife could do it. No keyboard and mouse while browsing explorer windows here.
Hardware
For the most part I built the machine from the ground up. Here are the different pieces I put into the machine:
Intel Dual-Core E2160 Allendale 1.8GHz LGA 775 Processor
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard
MSI RX2600XT-T2D512EZ Radeon HD 2600XT 512MB
Scythe SCMNJ-1000 80mm Sleeve “NINJA MINI” CPU Cooler
Patriot Extreme Performance 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Snapstream Firefly PC Remote
Vbox Cat’s Eye 150 ATSC Tuner
A quick word on the components and why I chose them. The dual core intels are amazing overclockers. My 1.8 is running at 3.0 right now with zero effort (guide at Tom’s). It can probably go higher, but I don’t have any reason to try. The motherboard is a quality build (solid state transistors!) and it has digital audio out. The video card is a Radeon 2600XT, which will decode just about any video (a word on this later). It runs HDMI and will output audio, but unfortunately it has to convert everything to AC3 first, and then output it. In other words, there is no pass-through. I went with a fanless version which runs hot, but I also bought some very quiet Scythe fans for the case. A big 120mm for the front intake, and two 90mm for the back exhaust.
Software
I know the Microsoft haters will harp on this choice, but I’ve decided to use Media Center 2007 which is only found on Vista. For people that automatically think Vista sucks, it might as a desktop (or at the least be an uneeded upgrade from XP) but there is no other way to access the awesome frontend that is MCE 2007.
Media Center 2007 is a cool program that does everything that I mentioned above. It records and playsback TV just like a tivo, it will play videos, mp3s, and images. Not to mention the entire interface is super slick. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and it’s very nice. The nice thing about MCE is that it’s very wife friendly. I leave the application open at all times, and you never even see the windows desktop. Eventually you start to forget it’s a computer at all.
If you’ve never tried MCE 2007, don’t knock it until you have.
Setup
I don’t think the following is specific to MCE 2007, but setting up a HTPC to playback everything you want is a big challenge. There are tons of codecs out there and getting your computer to play them back is a huge challenge. The following are several tweaks and codecs I’ve used to create a versatile HTPC setup.
Codecs
This box is replacing a Snazio Net Cinema 1350 media streaming unit, so the first thing I tackled was getting the HTPC to playback every codec I had.
First I installed an app called Haali Media Splitter. This will let us play .mkv files. I installed this application, and told it to play everything except .ts files (more on this later). This will allow Media Player (and MCE) to playback .mkv files, but that is merely a container. To playback specific codecs contained inside .mkv files (usually x264 material) we need more than just Haali.
For AVC/264 content I’ve used both FFDShow Tryouts, and CoreAVC with very similar results. With a 3ghz dual core processor, it doesn’t matter much. FFDShow is free though. Upon installing FFDShow I told it to handle every codec except for mpeg2, and turn off it’s audio capabilities completely (we’ll come back to audio). Now when MCE opens an xvid/divx file FFDShow will play it, or when Haali has MCE open an .mkv containing 264 content, FFDShow (or CoreAVC) will play it.
Surprisingly mpeg2 was the most difficult to setup because of bloody interlaced television. A strong selling point of the Radeon HD 2600XT is that it can decode mpeg2 and 264 content and take a load off the CPU. The problem is that decoders like FFDShow and CoreAVC are software decoders that don’t know how to harness the GPU in the video card. But because of my CPU, this has been a mute point, until now.
Watching 1080i television using the default Microsoft mpeg decoder or FFDShow, the handling of the deinterlacing was terrible. On horizontal pans the screen would jump and flicker and give me a headache. The built-in deinterlacing capabilities of the Radeon however are great, but we have to get MCE to use that. We need two different programs to get MCE to use the videocard. This is also why we told Haali not to handle .ts files. While .ts is also a container, often times .ts files contain mpeg2 content. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think using Haali to handle .ts files will make it impossible to use the onboard AVIVO decoder on mpeg2 content. I’m not sure on this, but I don’t use Haali on .ts files, and the mpeg2 content inside my .ts files is GPU decoded, so I don’t care.
First we need to download the avivo codec pack from ATI. Scroll to the botton and download the AVIVO pack. Then we need to tell Vista to make it the default mpeg2 decoder. After installing the codec pack, now we download DECCHECK.EXE from Microsoft. If you register you can download a copy of it here. When we run that program, AVIVO should show up. It might say it’s not MCE compatible, but we don’t care. Set it as the default. Then we run a program called VMCD.EXE, and from there we tell it to use the ATI Mpeg Decoder as our default decoder. Now when we watch recorded 1080i content we will have beautifully smooth deinterlacing. To double check that your gpu is being used, open the catalyst control center and scroll down to ati overdrive. Run an mpeg2 video from media center in windowed mode, and if your gpu is being utilized, it should read somewhere close to 40% for me. If it says 0%, you’re decoding solely via cpu.
For audio I would install AC3 Filter. When you set it up go to the fourth tab for SPDIF. Here you can tell it to passthrough AC3 and DTS straight to your receiver (assuming you have one). It’s a great program and should be able to decode almost any audio format you run across. The only audio I’ve seen that it won’t play is AAC which is found in .mp4 files. Download CoreAAC if you play any of these.
So now MCE will playback almost every type of video file we throw at it. The only problem is MCE doesn’t recognize .mkv and .mp4 files by default. Visit this site and go all the way to the bottom. Download and run mkv.reg and mp4.reg and now MCE will see those file types.
The final piece of software I installed is called Nero Drivespeed (a tool included with the Nero Suite). A problem I had was watching an .mkv burned to a DVD. It’s important that the HTPC is quiet, but the bloody thing would spin that dvd-drive up as fast as it could, and it sounded like a plane was taking off during the entire movie. The solution is to force the dvd-drive to only operate at 1x using Nero Drivespeed. Now I can watch a video archived onto a dvd and I never hear the drive. Only the versions distributed with the newer Nero 7 and 8 packages will work in Vista.
TV Playback
I also own a Sony DHG-250 to record and playback high definition OTA television, but this computer will soon be replacing it. The sony box has only one tuner, so if it’s recording, you HAVE to watch what is being recorded. Right now I have two tuners in the htpc, and this opens so many doors. I can watch a different program while I record another. I can record two shows at once. If a tuner is free, MCE will record a buffer before and after a show in case they start early or run late. I plan on upgrading to at least 3 tuners (there is a max of 4) for certain situations. For example, if I’m recording two shows from 8-9pm that both want to record an extra minute to 9:01, but I have something scheduled at 9, one of them will have to stop precisely at 9pm to record the third program. If I had a third tuner, that tuner would be free to start recording the third program early, and the two 8-9pm programs would be free to record past 9. I run two Vbox Cat’s Eye 150. They’re pci cards and they work awesome. Installed the drivers in Vista, and MCE found and configured them perfectly.
Remote
An important factor in the wife-friendly setup was a remote. I want the HTPC to be accessible solely by a remote, and my remote of choice was the Snapstream Firefly. It’s an RF remote designed to work with their tv recording app (beyond tv), but it works perfect with Vista MCE. Install the software which runs in the background, tell it you’re using Media Center, and BAM, all the buttons work for exactly what you want it to. You can skip ahead and back during live tv, change channels, and even the menu/info/exit buttons work precisely like they should.
That was much more in-depth than I planned, but hopefully it will help anyone out there struggling to get their HTPC setup exactly how they want.
Update 4.23.08 – In case you’ve found this post via a google search, here’s some updates I’ve made since I started this 5 months ago. I’m now using Haali to do all my splitting for ts/mkv/mp4. I’m now only using CoreAVC for 264 content, and I installed Xvid. That covers about 99% of the videos out there, and I no longer use FFDshow for anything.
Since then I’ve upgraded to three vbox dta 150s and it works great.
Update 7.29.08 – Made a serious effort today to finally get subtitles working properly, and it was much easier than I anticipated. I installed DirectVOBSub. It worked almost out of the box. Only problem I had was Media Center wouldn’t load it. All you do is open an .mkv or something with subtitles in regular old Media Player, and then when the DirectVOBSub icon loads in the tray, double click it. On the general tab you want to select “Always Load.” I had to restart Media Center for it to take effect. You can make sure it’s loading by running Media Center in a window, load a video, and the DirectVOBSub icon should appear. I’ve only tried this on one movie so far, so we’ll see how it works!
