HTPC, a solution

[sfbp]

I have been getting tired of all the silly ways that Sony tied our hands. I still have lots of MD equipment but it irks me that "no way, Jose" could I play HiMD properly, digitally, into my stereo. I toyed briefly with the idea of a second-hand NAS-HD1(E) but again, it is so tightly locked up that it's not a viable solution to archiving the library properly with the chance one can get it out again. Really, Sony.

I had this idea of wanting to be able to play AVI files directly over my LAN, instead of (as I have) making DVD's every time so as to watch them on the big screen. So the idea of a Home Theatre PC has been at the back of my mind for a while. Of course there are a zillion problems, which I won't bore you with. The worst is the unsuitability of "standard" windows desktop for display on a TV. But with Windows XP running on my new box based on the NVidia ION chipset and GeForce graphics processor, I get:

a. ability to stream movies via HDMI into my receiver and thence to the TV

b. ability to run SonicStage (and Simple Burner) and play back all .oma (and MP3 and WAV) files from my library on another machine, into HDMI and thereby digitally to my receiver with as-good-as-possible reproduction SQ.

Here are the specs

ASUS AT3N7A-I Motherboard with one 1/2 height PCI slot available

- 8 USB ports

- 1 ESATA port

- SPDIF (Toslink and Coax) out

- HDMI

- Ethernet (which I have hooked to wireless bridge, but could be a WiFi dongle)

- jack sockets for its own direct drive of surround sound speakers, but I really am not interested

- connectors for PS/2 keybd and VGA display (I really don't need either except for setup).

2GB RAM

Windows XP

Duocore 1.6Ghz Intel CPU

DVD burner (SATA)

500 GB hard disk

So the Sonic Stage ATRAC capabilities arrive "by accident" as it were on the back of the hardware needed to play videos.

The only thing missing is SPDIF in, but I bet it could be hacked. I don't care, I can do that on another machine anyway.

The whole thing is smaller than a MD deck, and weighs under 10lbs. Cost around $350 before tax and assembly.

[sfbp]

Noone has responded though a few have viewed this thread. I thought I would just post a couple of comments. After 2 weeks, the teething troubles are mostly gone.

One problem was the digital sound from the HTPC. Initially I thought I could use the optical (toslink) or coaxial SP/DIF out. However the sound was really weird. On further checking I discovered that the two options for sample rate are 48kHz and 96 Khz, which is fine and dandy for DVD's (and DATs). However I started to worry about resampling (of CD audio).

Along the way I had to clean up the problem that the sound when watching movies, which was being transmitted by HDMI (sometimes) along with the picture, would disappear. So - it turns out there are two mostly separate sound systems on this board, one driver being labelled "NVidia Audio HD" and the other "VIA Audio HD". Compounded by not being able to see the small words on the TV (see final paragraph below), I couldn't really do much, as whenever I moved the screen to LCD through VGA the sound via HDMI abruptly turned off!!!! After days of struggle, I finally realised the easiest (not necessarily the ONLY) way to deal with this was to (after fixing the font problems below) disable the sound driver that outputs via Toslink or Coax, and enabling the HDMI driver which turned out to be the "NVidia Audio HD". All of a sudden everything sounds terrific.

After all this stabilised I had occasion to check what is actually reaching the Onkyo receiver from the HTPC. Guess what! My ears had not lied, I found that the Toslink output is upsampled from 44.1 to 48 kHz, with really horrible results on LP2 and (Heaven forbid!) LP4. But the HDMI output is coming through unmodified at the frequency Sonic Stage is putting out, common to all Sony MD and CD products, 44.1 kHz. Makes me wonder if some of the criticisms of Atrac arise from upsampling like what happened to me, described above.

So now I have "perfect" reproduction (over the wireless link to a server PC) of ATRAC streams on my "real" stereo system. Wow! It sounds amazing. If I never needed to record anything I guess I could do without MD now. So finally future-proofed with all my sound library.

The rest of the problems had to do with Windows Fonts. If I wasn't trying to run XP on this machine, they most likely wouldn't be a problem (even Windows Media Center 2005 probably fixes this). Since I don't actually need MD hooked to this computer, I could have installed W7 or Vista, and had all the same functionality without this problem, most likely. So I won't subject you to that one, as it is probably unique to versions of Windows that predate the idea of using a TV screen as a monitor and vice-versa. Finally, using a "TV" which has its own VGA connector may avoid this problem completely.

The only real negative is that the screen saver on the PC kills the sound stream. So does switching inputs on the Onkyo, but that's really part of the definition of HDMI, I fancy.

Any questions?

[paperclip]

I love HTPC's! I've been waiting 20 years for the tech to make it possible. Funny how the DRM on this stuff is the most problematic.

I started my build on an HP Media Center and if the video card wasn't so loud (ATI 1950 Pro) it would be perfect. I don't have HDMI but I can watch Blu-Ray's. That's about the only thing that "just worked", even though everything I've read said it can't be done and I didn't spend 1 min. of trouble-shooting time to do it. I wish everything about computers was that easy.

For the audio I feed it via coax to a very modest Sony 5.1 receiver driving some JBL880's and I'm pretty happy with everything for the price. I can do some pretty amazing stuff with my network now and for visiting friends the "wow factor" is huge. I'm more concerned right now with streamlining, administration and BACKUPS to notice. The other night I was aware of the "wow" while I was watching a blu-ray, recording wav files to my MD deck and printing MD labels all from the network.

My next build is going to focus on silence of components and performance. I really like the ASUS Crossfire III motherboard but wonder if I could get by with a small form factor board?

P.S. I don't use a screen-saver, I just turn off the power to the monitor (through the control panel/power options) after 10 min. I've never like screen savers. Or going into sleep/standby. Goofy, huh?

[sfbp]

I love HTPC's! I've been waiting 20 years for the tech to make it possible. Funny how the DRM on this stuff is the most problematic.

From what I have encountered so far, it's not the actual DRM itself but the restrictions on operations that ought to be 100% no-brainers (eg uploading MD to a computer) that are the problem. I don't even care about most things that are protected in terms of Video (which is what most efforts are directed towards) because as long as I don't have a monster display, digitally stored and replayed Standard Definition is enough. Kind of like the megapixel camera argument - who wants all those megapixels when all it does is fill up my hard disk and take longer to transmit?

I don't have HDMI but I can watch Blu-Ray's.

From what I can see, HDMI is no great shakes technically. It "just" makes things easier for those non-techies who want to spend less time connecting things up. Even then, HDMI has all sorts of artificial problems (such as not being able to tweak the aspect ratio if it's wrong). The one big benefit (if it actually works) is that HDMI cable runs can be long enough to hide all the equipment in another room.

I wonder if I could get by with a small form factor board?

That was what finally tipped the scales for me. There's still a noise factor (I had to disconnect the loudest of the 3 fans on the HTPC but in warmer climes - this is temperate British Columbia - the noise of the fan(s) might be a pain). Also I have another problem which is quite unrelated (for a while I thought it was related) with some sort of interference being picked up from the TV. Eventually I shall have to get an LCD, Plasma or LED TV and it will go away, for the moment I get this nasty hum-like pickup from the TV even on the inputs that are optical. Can't figure that one out at all. It's probably a ground loop but there's no rhyme or reason to it.