Anand's Home Theater PC - Part I: The First Builds
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 1, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
There is a My Movies browser that can be installed into Vista's Media Center, but it looks like crap. Mike Andrawes (he was around from the early days of AT) recommended Video Browser for Vista MCE. There's a beta version of it available that you can find here.
The beta version enables a new browser mode that you can see below:
This is how you browse for movies
I simply created a file called Gigantor.vf and put the line "folder: G:\" in it and placed the file in my Vista-created My Videos folder. The G:\ drive in this case was a mapped network drive that pointed to the movies directory on my file server.
Under Pictures and Videos in Media Center, select video browser, hit the view button once to change to the new browser mode and when configured you'll get a screen that looks like what I showed above.
You can navigate through titles using a Media Center remote or keyboard, the UI is pretty slick although the beta version does have some bugs in it presently. I had to reboot the system to get the new browser mode to work properly and list view is the default which can't be changed, but this thing has potential. I'm betting that by the time I'm actually ready to deploy the HTPC that there will be some reasonably polished options for browsing content.
That's the quick and dirty setup, I had to install DirectVobSub for subtitle support. I also played around with ngRC which lets you control Media Center from any web enabled device, but it's not exactly the polished iPhone interface I'm looking for.
A crude method of iPhone Media Center control, but it's a step in the right direction...
Final Words
The HTPC is an ongoing project, while the Athlon X2 4850e is more than fast enough for watching 1080p content, actually interacting with the system and multitasking can be a little sluggish for my taste. Of course I generally only run into these problems when I'm actually setting it up so it's possible that it is bothering me more now than it will when the HTPC is just being used to watch movies.
At this point all I can conclude is that the AMD 780G seems to work very well and the Gigabyte board is quite polished, whereas the ASUS M3N78-EMH HDMI looks like it needs a little more work to be equally solid. If you've got an AMD CPU that you're looking to put in a HTPC, at this point I'd have to recommend the 780G chipset.
I've completely ignored Intel here, but I'll save that for a future installment. It turns out that the G35 chipset paired up with a Core 2 Duo E7200 could be an interesting combination, and whenever the G45 makes its debut there's a strong chance that it could become the platform to beat.
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JarredWalton - Friday, May 2, 2008 - link
Or rather than ripping at full bitrate, you could reencode to something smaller, so you can get 5-10GB per movie and still have a good quality 1080P output. AutoMKV is the new tool for stuff like that.legoman666 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I rip all of my movies to h264 + ac3 in a mkv container. Just because you illegally download movies in mkv format does not mean that everyone else does also.kevon27 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
I only do bluray... DVD's are for the peasants. I not going to subject myself to that low quality bit torrent stuff you commoners are use to.Pip-pip!
Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
You know, you can rip bluray, bluray rips are also available online.... In fact I think anand specificall discussed ripping "high deffinition content" in mkv format... what do you think he means?Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Ok, so how does that iPhone web interface work? I was thinking of developing somethign for PPC that would allow roughly the same kind of access, but I guess if there's stuff in the works I'll just check that out.crimson117 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
It's just a web interface that happens to work in the iPhone browser. You could also access it from a laptop or desktop on your network.I'd love to see a developer come up with a native iPhone app for controlling media setups, though I expect there'd need to be some special software running on your media pc.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Exactly, the options are two-fold:1) Develop an iPhone optimized website (ala digg.com/iphone or iphone.facebook.com), or
2) Create an iPhone application that triggers web services running on the HTPC itself.
With the SDK due out this summer, I'm hoping the latter will be a possibility.
Locutus465 - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Perhaps I'll see what can be done on PPC and put it out there then so non-GSM/apple folks can enjoy that kind of fun ;)cghebert - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Anand,sweet setup! Will you guys be doing any of your HTPC stuff with windows xp for those of us who haven't yet "upgraded" to Vista?
allengambrell - Thursday, May 1, 2008 - link
Check out myTV plugin for media center for managing your tv shows. It works much better the video brower or mymovies because it uses a full database and downloads all the episode and show information from the web. I use it to manage all my recorded and downloaded shows.Also are you going to install a ATSC tuner? This is one of the best things about media center. I have dish too but the offair recoreded shows look much better on media center than on dish.
If I were you I would move the storage for the dvds and media to a fileserver dedicated for this purpose. You can then not have to worry so much about noise because you can hide it away from the rest of the rack. I run a gigabit network and have no problem playing recored HD shows or ripped dvds on 3 differant computers at a time. The only storage I have in my media center pcs is for recording show off the offair antenna. This is only because some nights I am recording up to 3 hd shows at a time and I am afraid that that and the playback may be a little to much for the network to handle.
Also myMovies and myTV both work great in a client/server setup you can put the database servers on the media server and then any changes you make on one computer will be reflected on all.
I have also tested a htpc with the same chipset that you are using and to me it seems to be really slow compared to my other intel/nvidia based htpc. It even has some trouble decoding recoreded hd shows fast enough to not to get skips and audio sync issues. I would stay away from it.