DIY Media Centre
UPDATE: Added some stuff about getting the S/P-DIF audio working.
UPDATE: Found out what the M/B Switch cable did!
UPDATE: Some more slight changes.
I have various videos, DVDs, and other bits and bobs I like to watch on my TV, rather than on the PC. Mainly because it’s so much nicer to do it that way.
For a little while, I was using an old VIA EPIA-based PC running an open source application called Geexbox. It worked well, but the limited power of the hardware meant it couldn’t handle higher-resolution files.
I decided to upgrade, and the more I dug around, my ideas changed. I decided I wanted something that could play HD content, either from disk, Bluray, HD-DVD, or otherwise. It should also be able to play other random filetypes I might encounter, although for the most part, it’s XVID/DivX content. If it was to play HD, it needed to connect to the TV with HDMI.
So I started digging. After much checking and cross-checking specs and information, I ended up with the following spec:
- Asus M2N-VM HDMI motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 4400+ Processor
- 2Gb OCZ DDR2 PC6400 RAM
- 250Gb Seagate 7200.10 SATA hard disk
- Antec Fusion 430 case
- Windows Vista Home Premium edition, 32-bit OEM
A pretty decent spec. The biggest concern was the motherboard. It has an nForce 630a chipset, which includes a Geforce 7050 graphics card. The specs say it uses nVidia’s Purevideo HD, which means it does hardware-based decoding, as long as the application supports it.
So, I bought the hardware (all from Dabs.com, apart from the motherboard, which came from Tekheads). In building it, I encountered a few ‘issues’, but nothing too bad.
Firstly, the case. It has a mass of oddball cables, mostly to power the fans, and the front-panel display/IR receiver. There’s also two slightly obscure power switch cables – one marked ‘PWR’, the other marked ‘M/B Switch’. At first, I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so just used the PWR lead. After some fiddling, I found out the difference. The idea is that PWR (the front panel button) daisy chains onto the back of the IR receiver module on the front. This in turn plugs into the motherboard with the ‘M/B Switch’ button. This means I can then use either the front power button, OR just press power on the Media Center remote.
The fans supplied with the case aren’t bad. They are reasonably quiet, but I replaced them with some Noctua NF-S12 800RPM fans. They’re quieter still, but the bulk of the noise seems to be coming from the CPU fan, which I think I’ll also replace. Stock AMD coolers have never been known for being particularly quiet!
I shoved in an old Sony DVD-RW I had, and installed Vista. I installed all the drivers, but it was a two-step process. As it has an nForce chipset, I first installed the latest drivers, which included a graphics driver, although it’s pretty old, so I then reinstalled with the latest Detonator drivers. After doing that, I could enable Aero, and everything ran fine.
I next installed the driver software for the Infrared and front panel display. It’s a generic receiver, but it can do some other things, with other remotes. I’m using a standard Media Center remote though. By default, the software enables a sound every time it sees a command from a remote control, which is just annoying, so I disabled that. It also tries to show weather information, and some other largely trivial stuff, which I turned off. One nice touch is that the clock on the display syncs to the PC’s clock, and even when the PC is off, it stays on.
Performance-wise, it’s been pretty good. I wasn’t sure if the onboard video would really work; I’d had conflicting information, some saying it wouldn’t work at all, others saying it would. Happily, it seems it does work. I’ve tried quite a few WMV HD videos (in both 1080i and 720p) and both play fine as far as I can tell. I occasionally think there’s a little bit of stuttering, but during high-motion sequences, I can’t see any, so I think I’m seeing things. I think I want to see stuttering, so I do.
I’ve also attached a spare Hauppauge WinTV Nova-T USB stick I had, which gives me Freeview capabilities on the device. It works well, although I needed the latest drivers to pick up all the channels properly.
My TV (a 26-inch Philips LCD) is capable of 720p and 1080i, but won’t allow Windows to use the native resolution (1366×768). The best I can do is 1280 x 720, which is sufficient. Pictures look good, so it’s fine by me. I have to switch it into ‘PC’ mode, so it used an analogue input for the audio, but that’s OK, as it only has two speakers anyway!
I’ve also installed ffdshow, which takes care of any ‘alien’ file types, and VNC so I can prod it from my PC without having to get up and plug a mouse in. A word of advice though – disable UAC, or VNC gets very fussy.
The motherboard has an S/P-DIF header, which I managed to bodge a connection to. The Asus riser card isn’t RoSH-compliant (basically, it uses banned substances) so they’re like hen’s teeth these days. I modified an old S/P-DIF connector from an MSI motherboard. It seems to work perfectly well, but with one caveat – by default, it’s S/P-DIF OR analogue.
Vista treats the audio outputs as separate devices. In order to meet the driver specifications from Microsoft, a dual output via digital and analogue isn’t allowed. Realtek have made a file available to enable it though. To enable the dual output, it’s a case of dropping the .dat file from this archive into c:\windows\system32\drivers, and rebooting.
I played a DVD with DTS audio on it, and the amplifier happily reported (and outputted) all channels. I’ve heard of people having trouble with such things, but it seems to work for me. I am however having trouble getting ffdshow to output 5.1 from AVI files properly though.
I still need to try more HD content to test out the machine. I’ve seen a couple of HD-DVD/Bluray combo drives, so I’m going to buy one of those. I’ll also need a copy of PowerDVD Ultra to play them. I’ll then be able to try some real HD content, and see how it goes. If I do see performance issues with the onboard video, I can just buy a ‘proper’ PCI-e graphics card and slap that in. From what I’ve seen so far, I’m quietly confident I won’t need to though.
So far, it’s working though. It’s been interesting building it, and quite satisfying.