Media PC

[Whoey]

Several years ago I picked up a classic style desktop media center PC on liquidation as it was something I really thought we needed. It ran happily for several years with our old CRT TV, and despite my best efforts the fans eventually drove me crazy. The Spectra Pentium4 windows XP machine with passive heatsink in a low profile case and an irregular power supply that sucked air through the heatsink and powersupply was just too noisy.

I had been running Mediaportal on windows for some time, and at some point migrated to Boxee for windows. I tried upgrading the machine to Windows 7 with the newer (final) release of Boxee only to discover it was more buggy and that Boxee had decided to stop supporting any releases apart from their Boxee Box platform. Something I had wanted to get for years, but saw the price too high for a very limited device.

When my old PC that my wife had inherited gave up the ghost and we got a replacement for her I rebuilt a new machine in the tower. Similar spec to the original, but in a larger tower with a normal power supply unit and proper heatsink on the CPU, thus, much quieter. I decided with this new machine it was time to try out XBMC (xbox media center) since I really liked the Boxee software and it was based on XBMC so I ended up putting XBMCbuntu which is a version of Ubuntu with the XBMC software. We ran this for at least a year, and I tried to find smaller quieter solutions to the massive tower as tall as our 42inch TV... plus even though it was quieter and more stable than before, it still had fans and made plenty of noise, and occasionally crashed and froze, probably a result of it being a franken-computer with parts of a flaky setup to begin with.

I picked up a cheap loaded android TV box when I found out XBMC was porting to android... I tried the beta and it was just not fluid enough, plus the video decoding was still not done, and probably won't be for ages... so that idea was also scrapped.

Saw a bargain price on a Shuttle XS35GT slim PC, (which is a discontinued model) a machine that seems fairly commonly used in the XBMC forums, plus it's much lower power consumption, and entirely passively cooled, no fans at all. My Cybertool was very helpful with all the little (tiny) screws to mount the laptop harddisk in the enclosure.

That plus a stick of memory, the 2.5inch harddisk from a USB enclosure I had on hand and my Microsoft usb media center remote (which has been my controller for each and every one of my media PCs) and I was set.


This time I have moved to Openelec, a lightweight linux purpose built XBMC setup, which only requires about 100mb of space to setup and run. I may move to a usb stick or something else later... but for now the idea was to get it all running and get rid of the huge tower beside the TV... it seems like something is missing now! I should note all my media sits on network storage, so the media player has no need for loads of space. Since we live in Spain, we tend to download most of our TV from the US/Can/UK in English (downloading is not illegal here). I would love to have something like netflix, but it's still not available here.

I also re purposed some leftover bits from IKEA shelving as a bracket, and used the wall mount sockets of the TV to make a shelf for the new Shuttle PC to hide on.

Openelec is fantastic, after I exported my library from the old XBMC setup and imported to the new one plus some other minor configuration adjustments the new setup is great! Smooth, silent and fast. It's been a few days and I'm really pleased with the results. It supports quite a few devices, so if you're on the market for a media center device, look into it! A friend is sending me his CEC adapter which goes between the tv and PC and should allow me to use the TV remote to control the Openelec/XBMC setup... so I'd effectively only need one remote!

Any ways, that's pretty much my journey... Anyone else setting up one of these type of machines?

[nuphoria]

That's quite a job you did there! Awesome

I've not done the linking PC and media thing yet, but after a few other ideas I recently found a decent cheap work around. I got a £17 basic 1080 media player, hooked up to the HDTV via HDMI and attached a 2TB drive to it. All obvious film/audio file types play without problems and it's working pretty well.

For anyone's who interested, it was these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Elements-External-Drive/dp/B003IPC21Y/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355480823&sr=8-2 (was down at £69)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/JUSTOP-Media-Player-1080P-Surround/dp/B006S6F44W/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1355480964&sr=8-3


My only bugbear is that it came with a crappy low powered remote - why do they do that?! I carved the plastic out around the LED and made a little foil reflector which improved it's range a little

[Whoey]

Considering our TV is supposed to have media player features, as does our blu ray player... there are some videos that they just don't handle well, and I'd rather not mess about re-encoding files all day. Plus the menus are rather clunky and sluggish.

XBMC on the other hand automatically updates with our media library, and organizes by movie/show/season/etc and has episode, cast, box art and general show info... plus it has things like watched status, and resume points. You can search, organize by title, newly added, year, genre, etc. and it all just seems much smoother, unlike my bluray player where you have to point the remote at it directly, the media player remote has amazing range and even back lighting. Considering my general dislike for Microsoft products I bloody love that remote.

Considering that I have had PCs connected to TVs for many (probably something like 15) years in some form or another, in fact when we lived in London for a couple years we only had a PC with a TV card... no TV.

If you're interested I would say throw a copy of XBMC (for windows) on a laptop and hook that up to the TV... you may be surprised!

[nuphoria]

I don't doubt it would be superior - been a learning curve for me recently! I'll put it on my list of stuff I should do soonish

The little cheap box is pretty good at things like resume points etc. Certainly for the money is was worth it

[Whoey]

And now I have a Pulse-Eight USB CEC adapter and my TV remote now also runs my OpenELEC based XBMC pc... it's now uber awesome!

[Grant Lamontagne]

No idea what any of that means but it sure sounds awesome!

Def

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

[Whoey]

it's a tiny little box that plugs into my media PC via usb and inbetween the HDMI (out of pc, into TV) allowing my TV remote to work with my media PC in the same way most modern DVD/Bluray players can also be controlled by CEC (Consumer Electronics Control)

it also means I control my TV and PC with a single remote...

[Grant Lamontagne]

Why didn't you just say that in the first place? 

Def

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

[Whoey]

it's not in my nature to do things the easy way...

[Grant Lamontagne]

Yours either huh?

Def

Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk 2

[derekmac]

XBMC is great!  We run it on our Apple TV 2, and I have Icefilms and 1Channel installed, and there's nothing that you can't find, TV show or movie wise.

We had actually gotten rid of cable for quite some time, but when we switched to Fibre OP, the deal was too good to not pass up to also get TV for the year.  I imagine that once the year is up, we'll probably go back to only having the Apple TV.

I do have to say that I HATE HATE HATE the Apple TV remote, but our Harmony controls it flawlessly! 

I had thought about building a Media Center PC, but the ATV does what we need it to.

[Whoey]

I did think about getting an AppleTV for this purpose, as they're cheap, and small... but seems the new ones (v3) can't be jailbroken yet, so no XBMC...

I'm loving OpenELEC more every day... beats my old XBMCbuntu setup by far!

[Whoey]

So yesterday I was going to watch the Defiance pilot and for some reason my mediapc wouldn't boot, it kept rebooting in a loop, and occasionally made its way all the way into XMBC, but my tv remote wasn't working for it. eventually discovered that the CEC adapter needed a firmware update as I'm now running Openelec 3.0 final, which has XBMC 12.1. my poor v1 CEC adapter was running really old firmware and had some issue with new XBMC or some malarky... once I got past that and got the firmware updated everything went back to normal... but of course ate up all the time I had allotted to watch Defiance... maybe today...