[nige106]

My proposed build is below. I'll be running XBMC/Windows Media Centre & Media Browser. Mainly playing 1080p MKV's and MP4's. Odd useage of iPlayer. It must have the ability to bit stream DTS-HD and Dolby-HD. At some point in the future I may want to add a TV card so presume I need a spare PCI. All files shall be on my NAS. No Gaming but I may use it to rip the odd DVD if I can't be bothered to fire my main rig up.



Any recommendations or see any mistakes or maybe even just save me money? (Purchasing in the UK).

[eskro]

looks good to me!
u may want to start with the stock INTEL cooler and see if its quiet enough for you,

then your htpc case choice,
its about taste so, yeah theres lower priced cases
but if u like that one, its all good.

[nige106]

I've ended up going for:

Item: Intel Core i3 2120 3.3GHz Socket 1155 3MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
Item: XFX HD 6450 1GB DDR3 DVI HDMI Low Profile Graphics Card
Item: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium w/SP1 - Licence and media - 1 PC - OEM - DVD - 64-bit - English
Item: Antec NSK 2480 MATX Desktop Case With 380W EarthWatts PSU
Item: KeySonic 2.4Ghz Wireless Keyboard with Integrated TouchPad - USB
Item: Kingston 64GB SSDNOW V100 - SATA-II 2.5" - Read 250MB/s Write 145MB/s
Item: Asus P8H61-M LE/USB3 Intel H61 Socket 1155 8 Channel HD Audio mATX Motherboard
Item: Kingston 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333MHz i5 Memory Kit Non-ECC CL9 1.5V

Also bought a Harmony One to drive XBMC and also fed up of currently having 4 remotes.

[Mallet21]

Good choice on the processor upgrade...for some reason Intel charges a higher premium for their (t) processors even though power consumption under load (1080p decode) is damn near identical.

[nige106]

Yeah I'd been reading about the power consumption underload and idling and the performance hit was too much to justify the marginally lower running costs.

[pyrodex]

If you are using a dedicated GFX card wouldn't the processor be utilized less since the GFX is doing the work for decoding the content?

[nige106]

Well I'm over the moon with my build. I'll get some pics up over the weekend.

My only issue is to do with dts-hd. When playing a 25gb ripped bluray I've got WMC sending the correct signal to my amp and the amp displays that it's outputting dts-hd mstr. So I know my setup is in principle working correctly.

However when I look to compress the film using Ripbot264 it doesn't matter if I select core or flac for the audio and pass thru when I play the resultant .mkv in MPC it doesn't output the dts-hd and I get no pretty lights on my receiver. How can I fix this? Do I need to remux the original audio stream into my new mkv? Any guides on this as it's all new territory to me.

Secondly I can't get WM7 to play any mkv's. It see's them but crashes when I click play. I've installed a registry addition but still no joy.

Any help?

My plan for tonight is to try and get XBMC sending dts-hd to the receiver.

[Mallet21]

Here is a pretty good guide for using Ripbot:
http://www.mediasmartserver.net/wiki/ind.../RipBot264
You want to make sure you select the "Copy Stream" audio profile.

I use DVDFab for my bluray ripping and encoding. You have to pay for it but it has saved me a lot of headaches.

If you want to use WMC, I'd suggest installing Shark007's codec pack:
http://shark007.net/

This will pretty much set WMC up for you automatically.

[nige106]

Thats what has me stumped. I have selected the xx copy stream option under audio and used both FLAC and CORE when importing. Neither get outputed to my amp.

I've got the 64bit version of the shark007 codecs installed and it still doesn't work.

[bluray]

Any help?

My plan for tonight is to try and get XBMC sending dts-hd to the receiver.

I thought that you might be interest in XBMC codes for MPC-HC as an external player. You should be able to bitstream DTS-HD and TrueHD with HD6450 with ease. If you have Thor with DTS-HD (7.1 version) to try it with MPC-HC tonight, you'll !

Here is the external player codes: Another External Player Code, but Very Simple to Setup.

[bluray]

Thats what has me stumped. I have selected the xx copy stream option under audio and used both FLAC and CORE when importing. Neither get outputed to my amp.

I've got the 64bit version of the shark007 codecs installed and it still doesn't work.

Shark007 works great with my 7MCE, but it was very tough to configure it though. If you have ArcSoft TMT5, you can easily integrate it to playback blu-ray ISO and BD using 7MCE without Shark007. You can easily integrate MPC-HC to handle blu-ray M2TS/MKV/AVI on 7MCE as an external player too.

If you don't want to mess around with 7MCE, you can use my XBMC guide above. It might be much easier with XBMC external player route!