2008-05-09, 04:05
I'm in the final stages of putting the finishing touches on a very intricate and overly complicated home theater / media network. I'm going to give a rundown of the displays first. To each of these displays I'll be adding an XBMC box of some sort, as well as various other HD sources.
I apologize in advance for how ridiculous this may appear. I've been adding peices to this collection for years, and it's gotten out of control. I'm not nearly the TV geek I appear to be, it's more of an obsession/hobby.
- Living Room : 42" Hitachi Plasma - 1080i (3x HDMI, 2x Component)
- Bedroom : 32 " Samsung LCD - 1080i (1x VGA, 2x HDMI, 2x Component)
- Basement/Theater Room : Optoma HD803 1080p Projector. Screen size undecided, but between 110"-150" depending on projector mount and screen type.
I've also got three potential platform on which to run XBMC. I'm incredibly jealous of OSXBMC and how awesome is seems to be progressing. Admittedly I've considered the idea of a hackintosh, but for the price I could get a Mac Mini anyways. The three machines currently available, or mostly so - are;
- Acer Centrino 2.0ghz 2gig/DDR2, 120gig 5400rpm HD, ATI x700 128mb PCI-E.
- NF4 3200+ A64 M-ATX machine, 2gig P3200 DDR, random 100-250gig SATA HD, NV 7800GT 256mb (Component or DVI->HDMI output from GPU)
- A third partially built machine that I may or may not need, considering the various other HD and multimedia sources I have for all of these displays (see further for list of other components). Consisting of; Intel E6600 C2D, 500gig SATA, NV 7600GT 128mb. I'd just need a matx motherboard/case/powersupply of some sort to make it a quick build. A couple hundred to bump up the ram, but if I were to do that - I'm upgrade the ram on the A64 machine as well.
A quick list of the other HD and multimedia sources that are connected to the various displays.
- XBOX 360 via HDMI.
- PS3 via HDMI.
- Motorola DCT-6412 (Component/DVI - 120gig HD) and DCT-6416 (HDMI - 160gig) PVR's from my cable provider.
- Wii and various other lower resolution sources.
The reason I've listed it all is not to brag, but simply that I've acquired so much HD and source hardware over the years as I've built up to our new home-theater, that it's getting hard to manage. Adding 3 new XBMC boxes and network sharing/storage/download capabilities is making me lose focus on where to start and how to best allocate the resources I have, or minimize the amount of additional hardware (ie; ram) I need to buy. My ideal goal is to have all three displays capable of the best output their respective monitor is capable of.
My current solution is to pair them up as such;
- Laptop in Bedroom/Office ; It's small, quiet, and designed to work exceptionally well with powersave/hibernate/sleep functions. With this particular model Samsung, I should be able to get a very respectable 720p via VGA from the laptop. I can't see it being too hard to find a way to use any old remote (or wiimote+bluetooth) to power up and down the laptop, set the machine to go to sleep or hibernate X mins/hours after playback stops - stuff like that. Make it act like my trusty old XBOX does (which is slowly but surely showing it's age) so my I can continue to fall asleep to episodes of the simpsons or futurama. I've been conditioning myself to them since I first tried XBMC in 2004 - I'd go through withdrawal if my XBOX were to suddenly die for good.
- MATX A64 : Likely choice for the projector in the basement. Bumping it up to 2-4gigs of ram depending on whether or not XBMC will work on in Ubuntu 64bit. 7800GT 256mb should be perfect for the GPU, all in a relatively quiet Antec case with a low noise cooler on both CPU and GPU. Remote control isn't as essential on this one, but needed for playback. It'll likely also wireless keyboard/mouse attached, and switch out of fullscreen display more often then the laptop would.
- The third possible frankenmachine would cosist of an Intel E6600, on as small of a board/case as I could manage. I have a spare 7600GT 128mb PCI-E card to use as well. I'd just need some ram, the case/power/motherboard and I could make an adequate 1080i DVI->HDMI capable media box for the Plasma in the living room. For the time being, I'm sure the coax or optical output on any old matx or equivilant board for the E6600 would work for my speaker system. This XBMC box would be more like the laptop, switching out of fullscreen display less often, and rarely having anything more than remote control.
So after laying all of that out, does that seem like the best use of my resources - all things considered? There'll be another part to all of this the media server/storage component. For the time being I'll likely use TVserity for transcoding to the the PS3/360. For the much preferred SMB shares for the XBMC machines, I for the time being, will be using one core of the Q6600 in my workstation for a virtual machine running something or other. Be it Ubuntu with samba, or a more complex or better suited setup for acting as media share, storage, and downloads. I'm sure there'll be better solutions later, but it'll tap me out building the above boxes for now.
I apologize in advance for how ridiculous this may appear. I've been adding peices to this collection for years, and it's gotten out of control. I'm not nearly the TV geek I appear to be, it's more of an obsession/hobby.
- Living Room : 42" Hitachi Plasma - 1080i (3x HDMI, 2x Component)
- Bedroom : 32 " Samsung LCD - 1080i (1x VGA, 2x HDMI, 2x Component)
- Basement/Theater Room : Optoma HD803 1080p Projector. Screen size undecided, but between 110"-150" depending on projector mount and screen type.
I've also got three potential platform on which to run XBMC. I'm incredibly jealous of OSXBMC and how awesome is seems to be progressing. Admittedly I've considered the idea of a hackintosh, but for the price I could get a Mac Mini anyways. The three machines currently available, or mostly so - are;
- Acer Centrino 2.0ghz 2gig/DDR2, 120gig 5400rpm HD, ATI x700 128mb PCI-E.
- NF4 3200+ A64 M-ATX machine, 2gig P3200 DDR, random 100-250gig SATA HD, NV 7800GT 256mb (Component or DVI->HDMI output from GPU)
- A third partially built machine that I may or may not need, considering the various other HD and multimedia sources I have for all of these displays (see further for list of other components). Consisting of; Intel E6600 C2D, 500gig SATA, NV 7600GT 128mb. I'd just need a matx motherboard/case/powersupply of some sort to make it a quick build. A couple hundred to bump up the ram, but if I were to do that - I'm upgrade the ram on the A64 machine as well.
A quick list of the other HD and multimedia sources that are connected to the various displays.
- XBOX 360 via HDMI.
- PS3 via HDMI.
- Motorola DCT-6412 (Component/DVI - 120gig HD) and DCT-6416 (HDMI - 160gig) PVR's from my cable provider.
- Wii and various other lower resolution sources.
The reason I've listed it all is not to brag, but simply that I've acquired so much HD and source hardware over the years as I've built up to our new home-theater, that it's getting hard to manage. Adding 3 new XBMC boxes and network sharing/storage/download capabilities is making me lose focus on where to start and how to best allocate the resources I have, or minimize the amount of additional hardware (ie; ram) I need to buy. My ideal goal is to have all three displays capable of the best output their respective monitor is capable of.
My current solution is to pair them up as such;
- Laptop in Bedroom/Office ; It's small, quiet, and designed to work exceptionally well with powersave/hibernate/sleep functions. With this particular model Samsung, I should be able to get a very respectable 720p via VGA from the laptop. I can't see it being too hard to find a way to use any old remote (or wiimote+bluetooth) to power up and down the laptop, set the machine to go to sleep or hibernate X mins/hours after playback stops - stuff like that. Make it act like my trusty old XBOX does (which is slowly but surely showing it's age) so my I can continue to fall asleep to episodes of the simpsons or futurama. I've been conditioning myself to them since I first tried XBMC in 2004 - I'd go through withdrawal if my XBOX were to suddenly die for good.
- MATX A64 : Likely choice for the projector in the basement. Bumping it up to 2-4gigs of ram depending on whether or not XBMC will work on in Ubuntu 64bit. 7800GT 256mb should be perfect for the GPU, all in a relatively quiet Antec case with a low noise cooler on both CPU and GPU. Remote control isn't as essential on this one, but needed for playback. It'll likely also wireless keyboard/mouse attached, and switch out of fullscreen display more often then the laptop would.
- The third possible frankenmachine would cosist of an Intel E6600, on as small of a board/case as I could manage. I have a spare 7600GT 128mb PCI-E card to use as well. I'd just need some ram, the case/power/motherboard and I could make an adequate 1080i DVI->HDMI capable media box for the Plasma in the living room. For the time being, I'm sure the coax or optical output on any old matx or equivilant board for the E6600 would work for my speaker system. This XBMC box would be more like the laptop, switching out of fullscreen display less often, and rarely having anything more than remote control.
So after laying all of that out, does that seem like the best use of my resources - all things considered? There'll be another part to all of this the media server/storage component. For the time being I'll likely use TVserity for transcoding to the the PS3/360. For the much preferred SMB shares for the XBMC machines, I for the time being, will be using one core of the Q6600 in my workstation for a virtual machine running something or other. Be it Ubuntu with samba, or a more complex or better suited setup for acting as media share, storage, and downloads. I'm sure there'll be better solutions later, but it'll tap me out building the above boxes for now.
