Looking for Home Theater PC Build

[Jeff Isaac]

I'm not a fan of the Apple TV or Fire Stick or Chrome thing.. I usually plug my Laptop into my TV when I want to watch Shows but it's getting old having my laptop tied up on the TV... SO I wish to build a dedicated PC just for my TV. I need WiFi, a BluRay player, lots of hard-drive space for "digital copies" of movies.. any help / tips / input / advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Guys <3
-Jeff

 

[RealBeast]

I have done a number of HTPC builds with Silverstone cases and been happy with the results. Take a look at THIS ONE, which I used recently. I used a small SSD for the OS to make it boot fast and a large HDD for storage, a blueray drive, small Silverstone modular PSU, ITX board and onboard video. Works well and is pretty quiet.

 

[beetooex]

Have you decided what software you're going to use to play blurays? When I looked in to it there was very little on the market and they were stupidly expensive. Add the cost of a drive and it was cheaper buying a stand-alone player. Free software didn't seem to be an option either.

 

[Jeff Isaac]

Have you decided what software you're going to use to play blurays? When I looked in to it there was very little on the market and they were stupidly expensive. Add the cost of a drive and it was cheaper buying a stand-alone player. Free software didn't seem to be an option either.

No, I was not aware additional software was required for a bluray drive. Thanks for the heads up I will have to look into it. ^5

-Jeff

 

[RealBeast]

I would highly recommend CyberLink Power DVD 13 or 14. I've tried them all for years and like it the best. You can trial it for 30 days. You can also use a freeware program VLC (just Google VLC and blueray) if you set it up correctly, but I thought Power DVD was worth the cost.

 

[beetooex]

You're welcome Jeff. I've read VLC can sort of play blu rays but you have to hack it first and the disk menus still don't work anyway.

I recently reccomended this as an htpc for a friend, he says it works great for xbmc.

http://www.ebuyer.com/643323-zoostorm-desktop-pc-bing-7260-8004

I figure you'd be hard pressed to build anything equivalent for the same price. Especially if you wanted windows. It's even got an empty mSata slot for an ssd boot drive if you wanted to upgrade.

Either that or a £200 celeron laptop with hdmi. With the screen shut it'd look no worse than a slim dvd player on the av shelf.

Of course you can build/buy something much nicer if you need more than just a 1080p 'player' or want something pretty or super small.

Personally I like to play with old kit and put systems together for pocket money. I've got an old dell box under the hdtv- core 2 e8200 undervolted with rmclock, 4gb ram and an add2 card in the pciex16 slot for a dvi out (still integrated graphics- just provides a digital out). Sound is this amazing yet cheap usb device http://nwavguy.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/behringer-uca202-review.html plugged in to a 15 year old seperates hifi. It's all a bit ugly but price versus performance is bang on imho and fan noise is suprisingly low.