jurrie.net

Enter HTPC

Posted on Sat 04/25/09 in Personal

Yes, while there is still plenty to think of regarding my upcoming pile of bricks (I’ll receive the key May 14th, waaay earlier than expected) I’ve been very preoccupied with my “media situation”.

Up to now I have used my Snazio and PS3 to playback my media files. However, codec support is quite limited. The Snazio gives me the finger if I feed it anything but MPEG-2 or XviD, while the PS3 accepts a few more file types (including specific h.264 files).

However, I did not want my not-so-power-efficient server to be on 24/7, and powering on my server each time I wanted to watch an episode of something or play some of my music was a bit annoying. Then there’s the region code problem.. I have a lot of R1 dvd’s (anime series) which my PS3 doesn’t accept. All in all, convenience is lacking!

Enter HTPC. Even though I won’t buy anything soon (first I have to complete most of the work on my house) I’ve been fiddling around with configurations and reading a lot of forum pages. My conclusions were

1. The HTPC I must build myself, should be as low power as possible, but still support recent technologies like OpenGL 2.0
2. The storage server should be very low power since it must be running 24/7, but also handle download daemons (torrent/usenet). So.. a NAS with more options.

After checking some Do It Yourself (DIY) threads and configurations, I concluded for about €100 more I’d have a ready made, nice looking, feature rich and perfectly working NAS system. So I dropped the DIY part altogether.

For now, I’ve made a spreadsheet with possible configurations plus some NAS options: HTPC+NAS.ods. No cooler picked yet in the second config, so I added a 35 euro dummy line.

Update April 27th: Updated the config. Looks like the near-final setups are there! When I make the purchase it’ll be July/August so things may change, but I’m pretty satisfied with the listed configurations.

Oh, the interface will be XBMC with AEON STARK. Check the movie below ;-)