Your media PCs?

[northgeorgia]

My curiosity grows in this area, and I know some of you have shared your media PC setups. Now I'm curious if anyone has any video clips or photos to share, even if it's simply of watching what's on the screen. I know there are some programs out there to analyze the signals in detail (which I'm also interested in), but what about simple software that allows you to use a remote to blind scan and flip through channels? What are all of the interesting combinations out there of software, PC Cards, OS platforms, remotes, additional OTA/radio tuners, and so forth? Any recommendations for video cards and motherboards? I'm trying to visualize myself, one day in the near future, with my all-in-one media PC that can do FTA, record OTA, maybe do a little radio, and of course use the Internet to stream Netflix, YouTube and other stuff through to a nice HD television

 

[kittyhas1000legs]

My PC was first put together as more of a general PC than HTPC, but this should give you a pretty good idea. (Note: Speccy has its quirks, that's actually a 1TB drive, not a 17,179,869,184 GB SSD)



I use Windows Media Center for FTA, and apparently it can work with some DVB-S2 tuners. Everything records to my 2TB drive, which is just about full (70GB left!). Windows Media Center is good so long as you aren't worried about other devices reading the recorded shows. The other drives are full of things I've ripped/torrented over the years, mostly Doctor Who and anime.

For OTA, I have a Hauppauge WinTV HVR 950Q USB tuner, which can do NTSC/ATSC/ClearQAM. Its tuner is just as sensitive as the one in my TV.

Once I have LOS, I'll be using a WinTV Nova S2 for FTA. I'll let others recommend software for FTA.

Whenever I have some extra money, I'll be buying 2-4 more hard drives and put them in a RAID. This lets your computer use them as one giant drive (and would require some research).

 

[Tron]

Let me take this opportunity, as I've done before, to highly recommend the Silicon Dust HD Homerun networked tuners for OTA and digital cable. Most trouble free PC tuners I've ever used.

 

[updatelee]

My setup isnt an HTPC, its more for development and analyzing the satellite signals. This is my updateDVB app for linux, you can find it on my bitbucket site. It supports blindscan and spectrum scan for stv0900/stv0903 based cards. You can use it on any tuner, just wont have those features, but can still tune and analyze. As you can see in one of the pictures Im using my genpix skywalker-1 to tune and analyze a DGII signal on 107w

UDL

 

[Blindowl1234]

Mine is pretty simple...Vizio 47" Smart Tv with my Gateway PC piped to it. It has a 1Tb HD but I hooked up a 2 TB external. I use XMBC which works fine with over 400 movies etc in it so far. I ripped all of our SD dvd's and dumped them on it. I also installed Play On Play Later so I can watch the movies that way or see the pictures on my hard drive. My FTA set up is also running thru the Tv via the MHD. I'd start with a pc hooked to the Tv and XBMC.

 

[northgeorgia]

In general, is it better to have a separate video card, or use the ones that are built into the motherboard? I would assume the separate video card would provide for better performance, but what are your experiences?

 

[updatelee]

I use builtin video because I need every slot free, Ive got 4 pcie and 1 pci dvb cards. Ive got the intel i7 HD4000 video card builtin. Its good but not stellar. My old motherboard had a builtin ATI that was brutal, was a huge hassle.

The problem is many good addon cards take either two or sometimes three slot spaces ! the performance is night and day, not even comparable how much better it is. A $200 video card will put a built in card to shame. But I just cant afford to have three slot spaces used up. I dont actually sit infront of my computer that often anyways, I remotely access it 99% of the time anyways so my priorities are

- take no additional slot space
- be hassle free in terms of drivers and support
- have enough performance to decode H.264 1080p 65mbit/sec feeds once in awhile

the builtin HD4000 meets those without issue, its plenty fast enough to decode video. I dont game ever, like at all, so alot of features that new video cards offer is lost on me anyways. I would have loved to been able to get a nice nvidia card for the CUDA performance, CUDA is a software API that allows the GPU to be used for things other then graphics, like FFT performance gains in SDR applications.

UDL

 

[TheTechGuru]

http://txnj.net/specs/desktop/

 

[madmadworld]

first i know little about subject.
but now use a $35 video card it's picture seems the same as the $200 all in wonder that crapped out minus the atsc tuner sad. it's 1 gb type. no gaming too.
shes 5-6 years old now use it more for online streams than sat stuff but handy when needed.
think about buliding a new one but always get up to around $1000 and forget about it lol