Building an HTPC

Almost exactly one year ago, I seriously started considering the problem of having the digital content I care about, mostly made up of music and pictures, scattered around different computers.
At home I often found myself thinking “I wish I could watch this movie on the TV instead of sitting in front of a tiny monitor”. At a friend’s house I would sometimes say “I can’t show you the pictures of our last trip right now because they are on my other laptop”.
On top of that I started to have the creepy feeling that that not everything was backed up properly and on a regular basis, since it resided on different machines. This had become both annoying and worrying.

That’s how I got interested in Home Theater PC or HTPC for short.

My goal was to be able collect and organize all of my digital content in the form of music, pictures and movies in one central place, more precisely the living room, and to make it available to other PCs in the house as well as enjoying it on the TV’s big screen.

After looking at a couple of commercial products in that category (particularly Apple Mac mini and Apple TV) I realized the most common thing to do for a geek like me was to go off and build my own HTPC. This way I could pick and choose the hardware parts to build a machine that matches my specific needs.

The requirements

A computer that wishes to rightfully be called an HTPC must have the following basic characteristics:

• Silent
• Low power consumption
• TV connectivity
• Large storage capacity

On top of that, my personal requirements were:

• Be able to play High Definition (HD) movies at high resolution (1080p)
• Be able to play some occasional 3D game
• Do not look like a computer but rather like some Audio-Video piece of equipment

The hardware

Based on these requirements and my budget, I came up with the following hardware configuration:

Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H
CPU	AMD Athlon X2 Dual-Core 4850e 2.5GH
Cooling	Scythe Ninja Mini CPU Cooler
Memory	Kingston DDR2 PC6400 2048MB
Storage	Western Digital 500 GB SATA
Graphics Card	MSI GeForce 8600GT 256MB DDR3
Sound Card	Integrated
Case	Antec Fusion 430 Silver

There are some key points here that lead my decisions I should probably explain.

First of all I decided to go with the cheaper AMD Athlon X2 CPU over an Intel Core 2 Duo, since the performance gain I would get from the Intel processor wasn’t really that important to me to justify the higher price.
Moreover the 4850e uses just 45W of electricity, which contributes in keeping the CPU cool and the power consumption low.

My choice of motherboard was based on a couple of factors:

• The Antec Fusion V2 case (really slick by the way), has only room for a Mini-ATX size motherboard
• It has integrated High Definition Audio sound chip with support for 7.1 channels and DTS (Digital Theater Systems), which basically means great audio for music and movies
• It also has a decent ATI Radeon X1250 graphics chip with HDMI and TV-out ports integrated, which is nice to have in case my graphics card fails

I wanted this computer to be silent, and since I’m not a huge fan of water cooling, I figured the best way to keep the volume down would be to keep as few fans as possible.
For this reason I substituted the stock CPU cooler that comes with the AMD processor with a Scythe Ninja Mini heat sink (shown in the picture below). This would allow me to cool the CPU without needing a fan. Moreover its low profile fits well in the Antec Fusion case.

As a matter of personal preference, the graphics card had to be an NVIDIA GeForce. This particular model not only provides a nice price/performance balance, but is also extremely silent thanks to its fan-less passive cooling through a heat pipe.
The downside is that once installed in the case it takes up the equivalent space of two cards, due to the large heat sink on the backside.

The case was the most important (and expensive) piece of the whole configuration. I have to say the Antect Fusion 430 is a great case for an HTPC.  
As far as aesthetics go, it makes a computer look like a fancy hi-fi amplifier with a shiny aluminum front panel. Moreover it has some nice features like an LCD screen with support for IR remotes and even a volume nod, contributing to the overall experience.

On the inside, it is designed to keep the hardware cool without being loud. It has two big fans positioned on one side of the case blowing cool air from the outside on the CPU and the graphics card, which are the hottest components in the system.

In this picture you can see the two fans on the left side directing the air flow towards the two giants heat sinks mounted on the CPU and GPU.

The software

After the build was done, I immediately installed Windows Vista Home Premium and the required device drivers on it to see how it performed.

Here is how Vista rates the system:

Playing HD movies encoded with the H.264 codec at 1080p on to a 40’’ flat HDTV is no problem at all. I use Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 which supports the NVIDIA PureVideo® feature to offload part of the rendering off to the GPU.

I have to admit I was a little worried that the two fans mounted in the Antec case weren’t enough to keep the system from overheating, especially when HTPC is inside of a closet under the TV.

So I decided to run the excellent Prime95 tool to stress test the system and watch the CPU and GPU temperature with CPU-Z and GPU-Z respectively. The screenshots below show the temperature measured at the two CPU cores when the system is idle (on top) and when running under load (below):

It seems that the passive cooling is doing a pretty good job at keeping the CPU and GPU at low temperatures, even when the system is put under heavy load.

Conclusion

So far I’ve been pretty satisfied with the HTPC I’ve built. It fits well into the living room thanks to its specially designed case and it’s silent enough that I can’t even tell when it’s turned on or off (OK, I can always look at the power led on the front panel). Also it does everything I need it to without issues.

Having a PC working as media center instead of a proprietary custom device such as the Apple TV, definitely is the most flexible choice in terms of what software you can run. It also allows you to tweak the system to your preference, which is a requirement in itself for anyone with a passion for technology.

/Enrico

The HD Jungle – Part 1

Since I bought a HD-Ready LCD TV, I have been wondering how HD movies actually  look like in real life. So I decided to connect my old Dell desktop to the TV via an DVI-To-HDMI cable and went to download a couple of those free WMV HD Content Showcase movies from Microsoft.

The next step was to open one of the movies in Windows Media Player 10 and…well, the movie played, but it was more like watching a PowerPoint slideshow. Apparently I overestimated my faithful Dell (a P4 2.6 Ghz with 1 GB of RAM, by the way), since the CPU was already working at 100% of its capacity.

I figured there had to be some way to get some hardware acceleration so that my GeForce 7600 could partially (or maybe even completely) offload the CPU from the movie rendering. And there is where I entered the HD Jungle…

Apparently there are different video encoders/decoders used to compress HD videos, and no real official standard has emerged yet. Also, exploiting your GPU to decode these videos, is not as easy as I thought. To make a long story short, after reading through thousands (?) of forum posts and articles, I think I finally got my head around this HD story. And I thought I would share a summary of my findings.

In this first post, I thought I would try to define some of the basic terms, often carelessly thrown around by manufactures and resellers of TVs and video equipment. In a future posts I will talk about the encoders and file formats used to compress HD videos, followed by a mini-guide about how to enable GPU hardware acceleration on a Windows PC. But first of all, let’s clarify the terminology.

A High Definition (HD) video is a video whose frames have a higher resolution than earlier formats. Typically there is an implicit comparison to DVD-Video that has a resolution of 720×576. HD video, instead, supports one of two resolutions:

• 720p (1280×720) known as HD ready
• 1080p or 1080i (1920×1080 progressive or interlaced) known as Full HD

In simple terms, this means that an LCD TV labeled “HD ready”, for example, will have a native resolution of 1280×720, while “Full HD” indicates a resolution of 1920×1080. Also, since all LCD TVs use progressive scan in order to display moving images for technical reasons, “Full HD” usually implies 1080p. This of course applies to all other video equipment, such as cameras and players.

Now, at such high resolutions, digital HD video content usually ends up taking quite a lot of storage space. A typical HD movie of 2 hours, for example, is approximately 5 times larger than the same movie encoded in DVD-Video. This impose the problem of how to store and distribute this content to the masses, since the ~4.7 GB of space available on a DVD disc is no longer enough. A new standard optical storage format for the media industry was needed.

Two contenders emerged to fight for the title of “successor of the DVD disc”:

• HD-DVD with a capacity of ~15 GB
• Blue-ray with a capacity of ~25 GB

HD-DVD and Blue-ray were backed up by different manufacturing and retail companies. Most remarkable is probably the case of Microsoft offering an external HD-DVD player for the Xbox 360, while Sony’s PlayStation 3 came with its own Blue-ray player.   This meant that during a 2-year period, commercial video content (movies and video games) were delivered in both formats, leaving the choice to consumers on which format to support when buying hardware. In 2008, however, two big supporters of the HD-DVD format (Warner Bros. and Toshiba) suddenly switched side, practically declaring Blue-ray the winner of the “format war”.

This concludes the first of three posts on the “HD Jungle”. I hope this information is as useful to you as it is to me.

/Enrico