XBMC for home media center.... hardware recommendations?
#1
Hey there, I am looking to set up an XBMC hub at my house, and I'm looking for recommendations.

For a bit of background, my home theater system consists of a 60" hdtv, and I've got a fantastic sound system hooked up to it.

Currently, I'm handling most of my sourcing through a playstation 3, though I have an old home media system running SageTV.

For truly high-def movies, I will likely continue to feed blu-ray discs to my PS3.

What I'm looking to accomplish is to set up XBMC so that I can play movies from my DVD collection in reasonable fidelity, and access my music collection at the highest quality possible.

The unfortunate thing about using DLNA with a playstation 3 is that .MP3 is all it supports, and there's basically no way to deal with anything better.

I'm interested in FLAC or other lossless audio codecs, as well as DVD-A and SACD source material, which can come in 96/24 and multichannel variants.

I'm seriously looking at an apple TV 2 as a potential XBMC hub, with the media files stored across the network, but it's unclear to me whether running XBMC on the Apple TV2 will allow me to stream ripped versions of these to my home theater system, and I'm also fuzzy on what the best way to rip full quality versions of these would be.

I may also be interested in getting into some development, as I've already done some hacking on SageTV, but it appears to be a dead end now.

Can some folks with experience on this stuff help clue me in?

Cheers
Ikarius
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#2
Start with poofyhairyguy's sticky thread at the top. He has a link to eskro's thread about hardware and "to what HTPC group you belong". The first few posts in those two threads should answer all of your initial questions.

As regards your more advanced requirements, they are a bit confusing.

If you've got files on a server/DLNA somewhere on the network and you just need a box capable of talking to the server/DLNA and outputting to your home cinema system, that's very easy to achieve. You just need a coax/toslink/HDMI output on the box.
baldmosher™
Trying to save his marriage with a HTPC
Current system: TV unit, 37PFL5405H, Microserver N40L (as HTPC), Xbox360, BDP-S370, FoxsatHD, Azur 540Rv2, Keysonic 540RF, Harmony 300
Planned W7x64 AMD mATX (HT)PC build: Case, PSU, RAM, Mobo, CPU Total £240 + IR + HSF? + SSD?
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#3
Sorry if my questions were confusing. I have a fair # of .mp3 files already. I would like to start re-ripping my CDs as FLAC or another lossless format, and I also have a number of DVD-As, SACDs, etc. Some of those are 96kHZ/24-bit, some are 5.1, but they are all beyond what you can pull into a .mp3. I'm interested in ripping those, and being able to play them as part of my music collection, but I'm not sure what formats allow me to preserve the multichannel and high bitrates. I'm interested in any illumination folks can provide me on how to go about doing that. Also, whatever format I rip things into, I want to make certain I can tag it with proper metadata, and play it at full quality through XBMC.

Also, on the hardware recommendation front, I seem to be an outlier. I am more than willing to limit hardware to 720p, but what I do care about is bitstreaming HD Audio.
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#4
Ikarius Wrote:I'm interested in FLAC or other lossless audio codecs, as well as DVD-A and SACD source material, which can come in 96/24 and multichannel variants.

I'm seriously looking at an apple TV 2 as a potential XBMC hub, with the media files stored across the network, but it's unclear to me whether running XBMC on the Apple TV2 will allow me to stream ripped versions of these to my home theater system, and I'm also fuzzy on what the best way to rip full quality versions of these would be.
FLAC is for sure the best way to RIP you CD's. I should redo my RIPs again with FLAC, but takes a lot of time (over 900 CDs). For now I keep them as MP3 / 320k. Everything stored on NAS.

I don't know much about Apple TV2 - when i started with XBMC the older version was only available and not yet suported on XBMC.
720p and having a 60" TV - not really, or? You should not limit everything whit buying not state of the art technology. (720p/1080i is not s-o-t-a).

I would suggest, that you start with a real HTPC. Don't must be latest fashion, but good hardware will help to run XBMC smoothly with everything.
So if you own a good equipment, do not try to save money with your mediaplayer hardware. I use a ASRock Core 100-HT (i3) - 4 GB RAM - 60 GB SSD and W7 x64. >Instead of W7 you could also go for open ELEC.

For the Bitstreaming Audio - most is already supported today - and i really hope, that with Eden, all Formats will be playable with Standard Player. we look forward...
My Equipment:
HTPC (i7-8700K 3.7 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD) Windows 10 with Kodi 18.6 & Central SQL DB (Maria DB)
AVR Emotiva RMC-1 & AMP Emotiva XPA9-Gen3, TV LG OLED 65 E6, BD oppo UDP-203, Speaker Revel Performa3 F208 / F206 / C208 / Nubert WS-14 for Atmos/DTS.x)
NAS Synology DS1817+ / DX-517/DX513 (4x8 TB RAID5 + 2 x 5x6TB in RAID5)
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#5
Have they cracked the protection in DVDA now? Didn't know they could be ripped.

In my experience it's always 10x quicker to locate and download a rip online that someone else has done - if you have the originals it's not usually illegal to do this. If you can't find the rip then do it yourself and upload it for those who are in the same position as you. And if someone illegally rips a copy, that's their morals in question, not yours. Besides it's probably on YouTube anyway
baldmosher™
Trying to save his marriage with a HTPC
Current system: TV unit, 37PFL5405H, Microserver N40L (as HTPC), Xbox360, BDP-S370, FoxsatHD, Azur 540Rv2, Keysonic 540RF, Harmony 300
Planned W7x64 AMD mATX (HT)PC build: Case, PSU, RAM, Mobo, CPU Total £240 + IR + HSF? + SSD?
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#6
Looks like ripping DVD-As is doable, there's an application called DVD-Audio Explorer.

SACD looks to be a whole different kettle of fish, as it's not readable (at least the hi-def tracks) by a computer CD drive. Someone appears to have figured out how to rip the tracks with a PS3 running Linux, but since Sony's taken that option away from us, that's probably a dead route now.

In theory, you could get an SACD player and route the digital out into a computer (there's presumably a USB device you could manage this with) and then record the bitstream, but that's going to a hell of a lot of trouble. I'm also unsure if you'd still have to deal with decrypting sony's proprietary DSD format if you went this route. You could probably convince the SACD player to simply stream it out as LPCM, but I'd have to dig into it.

Of course, downloading ripped copies from the internet isn't difficult to do, but commonly you'll run into problems finding anything higher quality than a 320k .MP3, which is of course, what I'm trying to exceed.
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XBMC for home media center.... hardware recommendations?0