2012-04-21, 18:24
Long time listener, first time caller...
I've spent a couple of weeks reviewing posts and especially checking out eskro's guides and finally pulled the trigger on all the components to build a system. I thought I'd post and share my experiences, hoping that someone might be able to learn from it, like I did from others.
First of all, I've had past experiences with building computers - I used to regularly build my main PC before moving to Macs about 10 years ago. Since then I played around with with a couple of Hackintosh builds (that never really worked out - too much of a hassle) and with starting a family four years ago, spare time seems to be a thing of the past! Being mainly an Apple family we had three of the original AppleTV's, replaced them with a couple of AppleTV 2's but found that without jailbreaking they weren't really matched for our media collection. The majority of our movies are DVD's and BluRay's, not purchased from iTunes. A couple of years ago I bought a Thecus NAS and started loading up all the optical media - MakeMKV is a great piece of software, running on both PC's and Macs. So now I had 4TB of mkv files, ranging from 6-8GB for DVD's and up to 46GB for BluRay. All play great on my iMac through VLC and with XBMC. A jailbroken ATV2, running XBMC, has problems with the complexity of streaming BluRays. I assume it's to do with the lack of local drive to buffer up a significant amount of signal, but I'm sure there could be other reasons. To try and solve this I picked up a couple of WD Live TV's. These devices are pretty cool, they deal with mkv's much better than a jailbroken ATV2. For some reason though, occasionally, when playing a movie, the picture would freeze. Typically, this is during one of those situations when my wife is trying to gain some control over the house, with a 2 and 4 year old running around, and I would hear about it in detail when I got home! Being an iPad/iPhone family, wanting to Air Play to the ATV2 meant that I was running both the ATV2 and WD together.
So I decided to build. Here are the components I went with. I really wanted the ASUS motherboard mentioned in eskro's guide but I spent too much time doing the research. On Wednesday when I put the order in with Amazon, the Prime shipping would get everything here on Friday, apart from the motherboard. Instead I went with the Foxconn H67S.
Foxconn Intel H67S Mini ITX DDR3 1066 LGA 1155 Motherboards H67S-B3 H67S V2.0-GBOX $59.99
Kingston Technology HyperX Blu 2 GB 1333 (PC3 10666) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM KHX1333C9D3B1/2G $13.99
MI-008 Tower Black P4 Chassis with 250W Itx Psu+sata Power Supply $38.99
GT 430 (Fermi) 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card, ENGT430/DI/1GD3/MG(LP) $55.99
Intel G530 CPU 2.40 GHZ 2M CACHE 2.4 2 LGA 1155 Processor (BX80623G530) $47.57
The total for the system was $234.51.
After getting all the components together (which embarrassingly enough took way longer than it should do because I wasn't familiar with the 24 vs. 20 pin ATX connectors - it's been a while), I connected everything up to a Pioneer VSX-1021-K - 7.1 Channel A/V Receiver. After making some edits to the BIOS (e.g., disable on-board audio - there doesn't appear to be a way to disable on-board video) and ran it for a little while to get a feel for how noisy the CPU fan is. It's really not too bad - but you can definitely hear it. Our media room down in the basement is probably 20ft square and with nothing else turned on, you can hear the hum. I also have a Scythe 120mm fan from a friend and was hoping to use this as a case fan but at 38mm thickness it was just too large. I need to do a little more research on what size fits and get that ordered. The fan noises aren't going to be an issue for my set up, as discussed below.
I grabbed a couple of USB flash drives, and wandered over to the sole PC in the household, a Dell Inspiron 530. I downloaded the XBMCbuntu Eden iso, and using Physdiskwrite wrote it to a 8GB flash drive. I had another Flash Drive, a 32GB one, set aside to host the OS. Installing didn't take too long - remember your username and password because you might need that to ssh in to fix your install. I spent about 6 hours trying to work out how to get audio over HDMI. The picture was great, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't get any audio. I read a bunch of articles in the forums and came up with the following procedure (note there are a lot of really complex posts, edit lots of files - none of them worked for me. The one that really helped was this one: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1063134).
First, you need to ssh into your XBMCbuntu install. With it running, use the following:
For me, this was:
You can get your IP from the Network page in Settings. First time you do this you have to say yes to adding the remote computer’s fingerprint to your known hosts file.
Once logged in, get your playback devices by typing:
This is what I got with my setup. I was a little confused about what each of these was. I wondered if some of the four devices were the onboard ones - which can't be disabled in the BIOS. I even tried it without the GT430 installed, using the onboard HDMI but that gave me no devices.
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
The key was recording the card number and device number of each of the four devices. So, for my setup:
The solution for me was to go into Audio Settings (under the System menu) and select the following:
I tried 3, then 7 and 8, all without success. Just for completeness, I did 9. And it all worked! You have to reboot every time you make these changes. I now have passthro audio and everything is working great.
I didn't buy a remote for this - behind a wall in the media room is a network closet where CAT6 runs feeds around the house back to set of switches and a cable modem. That is where it lives now. To drive the UI, I use XBMC Commander (http://xbmc-commander.com/). It's a universal app and runs great on the new iPad and iPhones. I was worried about being able to suspend the computer and awake it but Commander does this really well. I've only hibernated the machine once but it worked great.
There are a couple of improvements I want to make. Having the USB flash drive hanging out the back is a little ugly, so I'm ordering a "StarTech USB A to USB Motherboard 4-Pin Header F/F 2.0 Cable, 6" (USBMBADAPT)" for $3.49 from Amazon. I also want to get a case fan that will fit - eskro has mentioned the "SilenX EFX-12-15 120mm Case Fan" which looks like it will work.
All in all, for an evenings work (a long evening ...) everything is working great. The little dude and I have already watched a couple of his favorite movies this morning and the quality of the streamed HD video and audio is excellent. Thanks to eskro and all the others that have shared their experiences on the forum.
I've spent a couple of weeks reviewing posts and especially checking out eskro's guides and finally pulled the trigger on all the components to build a system. I thought I'd post and share my experiences, hoping that someone might be able to learn from it, like I did from others.
First of all, I've had past experiences with building computers - I used to regularly build my main PC before moving to Macs about 10 years ago. Since then I played around with with a couple of Hackintosh builds (that never really worked out - too much of a hassle) and with starting a family four years ago, spare time seems to be a thing of the past! Being mainly an Apple family we had three of the original AppleTV's, replaced them with a couple of AppleTV 2's but found that without jailbreaking they weren't really matched for our media collection. The majority of our movies are DVD's and BluRay's, not purchased from iTunes. A couple of years ago I bought a Thecus NAS and started loading up all the optical media - MakeMKV is a great piece of software, running on both PC's and Macs. So now I had 4TB of mkv files, ranging from 6-8GB for DVD's and up to 46GB for BluRay. All play great on my iMac through VLC and with XBMC. A jailbroken ATV2, running XBMC, has problems with the complexity of streaming BluRays. I assume it's to do with the lack of local drive to buffer up a significant amount of signal, but I'm sure there could be other reasons. To try and solve this I picked up a couple of WD Live TV's. These devices are pretty cool, they deal with mkv's much better than a jailbroken ATV2. For some reason though, occasionally, when playing a movie, the picture would freeze. Typically, this is during one of those situations when my wife is trying to gain some control over the house, with a 2 and 4 year old running around, and I would hear about it in detail when I got home! Being an iPad/iPhone family, wanting to Air Play to the ATV2 meant that I was running both the ATV2 and WD together.
So I decided to build. Here are the components I went with. I really wanted the ASUS motherboard mentioned in eskro's guide but I spent too much time doing the research. On Wednesday when I put the order in with Amazon, the Prime shipping would get everything here on Friday, apart from the motherboard. Instead I went with the Foxconn H67S.
Foxconn Intel H67S Mini ITX DDR3 1066 LGA 1155 Motherboards H67S-B3 H67S V2.0-GBOX $59.99
Kingston Technology HyperX Blu 2 GB 1333 (PC3 10666) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM KHX1333C9D3B1/2G $13.99
MI-008 Tower Black P4 Chassis with 250W Itx Psu+sata Power Supply $38.99
GT 430 (Fermi) 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card, ENGT430/DI/1GD3/MG(LP) $55.99
Intel G530 CPU 2.40 GHZ 2M CACHE 2.4 2 LGA 1155 Processor (BX80623G530) $47.57
The total for the system was $234.51.
After getting all the components together (which embarrassingly enough took way longer than it should do because I wasn't familiar with the 24 vs. 20 pin ATX connectors - it's been a while), I connected everything up to a Pioneer VSX-1021-K - 7.1 Channel A/V Receiver. After making some edits to the BIOS (e.g., disable on-board audio - there doesn't appear to be a way to disable on-board video) and ran it for a little while to get a feel for how noisy the CPU fan is. It's really not too bad - but you can definitely hear it. Our media room down in the basement is probably 20ft square and with nothing else turned on, you can hear the hum. I also have a Scythe 120mm fan from a friend and was hoping to use this as a case fan but at 38mm thickness it was just too large. I need to do a little more research on what size fits and get that ordered. The fan noises aren't going to be an issue for my set up, as discussed below.
I grabbed a couple of USB flash drives, and wandered over to the sole PC in the household, a Dell Inspiron 530. I downloaded the XBMCbuntu Eden iso, and using Physdiskwrite wrote it to a 8GB flash drive. I had another Flash Drive, a 32GB one, set aside to host the OS. Installing didn't take too long - remember your username and password because you might need that to ssh in to fix your install. I spent about 6 hours trying to work out how to get audio over HDMI. The picture was great, but as hard as I tried, I couldn't get any audio. I read a bunch of articles in the forums and came up with the following procedure (note there are a lot of really complex posts, edit lots of files - none of them worked for me. The one that really helped was this one: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid...pid1063134).
First, you need to ssh into your XBMCbuntu install. With it running, use the following:
Quote:ssh username-you-created@your-ip-address
For me, this was:
Quote:ssh [email protected]
You can get your IP from the Network page in Settings. First time you do this you have to say yes to adding the remote computer’s fingerprint to your known hosts file.
Once logged in, get your playback devices by typing:
Quote:aplay -l
This is what I got with my setup. I was a little confused about what each of these was. I wondered if some of the four devices were the onboard ones - which can't be disabled in the BIOS. I even tried it without the GT430 installed, using the onboard HDMI but that gave me no devices.
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 7: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 8: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 9: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
The key was recording the card number and device number of each of the four devices. So, for my setup:
- Card 0, Device 3.
- Card 0, Device 7.
- Card 0, Device 8.
- Card 0, Device 9.
The solution for me was to go into Audio Settings (under the System menu) and select the following:
- *Audio Output = HDMI
*Speaker Configuration = 5.1 (or 7.1 if that is your speaker configuration)
*Boost Level on Downmix = Yes
*AC3 Capable = Yes
*DTS Capable = Yes
*Audio Ouput Device = Custom
*Custom Audio Device = plughw:0,9 (where 0 and 9 come from the list above)
*Passthrough output device = custom
*Custom passthrough device = plughw:0,9 (again 0 & 9 came from the list above)
I tried 3, then 7 and 8, all without success. Just for completeness, I did 9. And it all worked! You have to reboot every time you make these changes. I now have passthro audio and everything is working great.
I didn't buy a remote for this - behind a wall in the media room is a network closet where CAT6 runs feeds around the house back to set of switches and a cable modem. That is where it lives now. To drive the UI, I use XBMC Commander (http://xbmc-commander.com/). It's a universal app and runs great on the new iPad and iPhones. I was worried about being able to suspend the computer and awake it but Commander does this really well. I've only hibernated the machine once but it worked great.
There are a couple of improvements I want to make. Having the USB flash drive hanging out the back is a little ugly, so I'm ordering a "StarTech USB A to USB Motherboard 4-Pin Header F/F 2.0 Cable, 6" (USBMBADAPT)" for $3.49 from Amazon. I also want to get a case fan that will fit - eskro has mentioned the "SilenX EFX-12-15 120mm Case Fan" which looks like it will work.
All in all, for an evenings work (a long evening ...) everything is working great. The little dude and I have already watched a couple of his favorite movies this morning and the quality of the streamed HD video and audio is excellent. Thanks to eskro and all the others that have shared their experiences on the forum.
