New HTPC Build : The Software

I've tried a number of software packages to run my media center kicking off with MediaPortal in the days of Windows XP when no suitable software was bundled but a huge amount of time and effort later Windows 7 with bundled Media Center came along and saved me.

Windows Media Center is not a perfect solution, too many forced adverts, too few rows of content with lots of empty space but it works out of the box. Luckily Media Center Studio helps and is tweaked nicely with Mikinho's Media Center Strips.

What I have found that since Windows 7 there are built in codecs for MP4 files from a Sanyo Xacti camera, quicktime for the Lumix TZ5 and laterlly support for AVHCD files from a Lumiz FZ100, all with no changes by me.

I have also been using MediaBrowser for Movie support and YAMM to pick up move details. Unfortunately, the music plugin crashes my machine which is a shame as WMC's Music library sometimes corrupts of its own accord so having a backup capability would be handy so Music Browser is on hand just in case. In fact I've just had another crack at the Music support on MediaBrowser but it just doesn't display my files reliably, I've checked all of the files to ensure I have tags in place on everything (and weeded out a few corrupt MP3s as a result too) but no luck still.

I also have in place MKV capability which makes life a lot easier for an movies, divx provides the basic codec capability and configuring MKV file extensions via MediaBrowser's External Players works nicely and combined with the integration of Cyberlink PowerDVD that game with the Samsung blu-ray drive for blu-ray disks everything works neatly now.

I did make a short foray into XBMC which looks great, miles better than WMC but configuration changes don't always seem to result in a working solution so blu-rays would play - WMC works so it lives on and the Neo theme in MediaBrowser looks fabulous so why tinker any further?

New HTPC Build : Power Use

Having got the HTPC working as an after thought I have tested the watts drawn at the wall.

The AMD 4850e solution, with the same WD Green power drive would draw around 80 watts idle and a little more in normal use, peaking up to 120w.

This solution, with the addition of an SSD drive and faster RAM peaked at 42 watts during boot and 28 watts idle - much better, I've since added the Hitachi 1TB drive so that will raise that a little.

I can't feel any heat build up either even after being actively in use for several hours - and that is after my latest mod - I know old tights could be used for something (they weren't mine I hasten to add!).

I have covered all of the vents with old tights with the exception of the top vent (on the thought that heat is rising so lifting dust away, that will get reviewed in a couple of months), affixed inside on the sides and outside on the bottom, the finished product is trimmed neatly and not visible in the cabinet at all. I used this trick on the Silverstone case just to reduce the amount of dust that is able to enter the case while not stopping sensible airflow. It is not a perfect solution,  tights do not make a perfect seal (not helped by wife's unwillingness to donate a pair without ladders, something about wanting to wear them) and there are plenty of gaps in the average case that let some air in anyway but any reduction will reduce maintenance required.

New HTPC Build : In Use

Installation complete and everything working?

Minor hurdle to overcome, activating Windows 7, completely new motherboard and processor etc which falls outside of the OEM agreement. I have my argument ready for when I have to ring up and try to convince someone as this is clearly the nearest replacement available for the board / processor I had while keeping to the HTPC purpose.

Awful picture of the finished product!

To my surprise activation goes through the automated route instantly. Phew.

The M.Play software supplied with the remote needed a little tweaking to make it work but turns out that it is both simpler to change and more reliable than the IMon Soundgraph software supplied with the Silverstone Grandia. It still has its quirks - I've found that keyboard shortcuts (including those I've defined myself) work perfectly but direct calls to programs seem to do nothing, however, that is consistent and a much nicer interface that the Soundgraph one.

I've discovered some oddities, so for instance there is an Eject button, that once shortcut has been setup to a small script, does successful Eject the optical disk (has to be defined for Windows and Media Centre) but as it points to a specific script is not able to close the drive. I can live with that as the only time I'm likely to need the button is when physically removing / inserting a disk so I'll have to get off my backside and cross the room anyway.

I have also had to redefine the Media Center button so that it actually starts Media Center when on the desktop (which seems a glaring oversight but wasn't hard to fix).

In fact the controller works so well that we have not discovered what all the buttons do / do not do yet because everything else we care about works out of the box - the lack of a mouse action is not really a problem as I've a USB mouse stuffed behind the CDs in the cabinet along with a mini-keyboard. I am missing the alphabetic option on the remote though for digging through > 20,000 music tracks.

New HTPC Build : Installing Windows 7 from scratch.

It is all looking good and time to build the SSD version. This is where things get a bit lumpy.

Where just turning on the old Windows 7 installed booted to a usable system the installation on an SSD suffered from numerous lock ups following graphics issues :

Took a while to figure out, I made sure the graphics were attempting to use the built in HDMI (and I tried the VGA connection which for a few minutes gave me false hope). I guess the only good news was that the failures were shortly after Windows had copied files onto the hard disk and with the SSD that wasn't taking much time to reach.

I had just about decided to try installing to a different drive thinking that maybe my first experience of SSDs was about to be a bad one when I thought to reset the BIOS. Note to self, always reset the BIOS on new installs. Worked perfectly first time after. I've since tweaked various settings (yes I am using AHCI mode), no overclocking, no underclocking, just default settings to keep stability as best as possible and not had a single extra problem.

I can safely say I like the Asus BIOS too, I've been using Gigabyte boards for sometime now and still to in my other PCs but I might  be convinced to change. Naturally the documentation is still useless and  Google is required to explain some unfamiliar options (EHCI Hand Off for instance).

Once Windows was installed, getting all the latest motherboard drivers and case drivers in place has been an absolute breeze.

Performance?

The WD 1Tb drive had about 10Gb free on it and even defragged as best as was possible performance of that drive seemed sluggish - so spreading data across both the 1TB drives improved freespace to around 30% and  performance looked pretty good for a 3Gb/s devive. However, the SSD performance is amazing [I did take screenshots of a performace testing tool but can't find them or it anywhere now!] - at least 10x the read & write speed of the hard drive and boot times are significantly quicker on this machine (SSD + dual core 1.6Ghz APU & 1066 Mhz RAM) than my i7-2600 machine booting off a 6Gb/s drive with 1800Mhz RAM - it really goes to show just how much of Windows' performance is bound by disk & looking at Resource Monitor, even with an SSD install and unwanted services turned off there is still almost continual activity.

When it comes to raw processing power the E450 doesn't cope well - decidedly down on horsepower so raw processing jobs are slow to respond. However, Windows Media Center is heavily disk bound and the caching used by Media Player means that the Album Artists display is massively faster now that existed on the 4850e install where is was virtually unusable as it took so long to load up the Album graphics.

I think the way Media Center works needs some help as it would appear that none of the system resources get maxed out when rebuilding libraries even on this machine, indeed, there are times when nothing seems to be happening at all. I suspect poor code - it should detect how active the machine is and get on with it.

Graphics performance is excellent. The blu-ray drive came with Cyberlink so testing a blu-ray film gives the processor a thorough work out but playback is flawless at 1920x1080 and processor usage dropped to < 50% when I remembered to tick the "use hardware acceleration" box so am very pleased.

Even more importantly is that the playback of films does not appear (yet!) to display audio / video sync problems with the built in AMD Radeon 6320 graphics over HDMI that were displayed using the AMD 4850e with a Gigabyte GA-MA78GPM-DS2H board with built in HD 3200 graphics which rendered the HDMI connection useless.

New HTPC Build : Switching on for the first time.

First switch on, no SSD yet, just using the WD drive which has Windows 7 Ultimate (a legit copy too!) installed for the AMD 4850e installation that was in the Silverstone box.

I've heard that Windows 7 transfers between hardware much more easily than previous Windows versions but I was surprised that on first attempt (the plug it in and find out what wires I've got wrong trial) the machine booted into Media Centre with only one minor complaint about the graphics card and wanting a reboot for changes in drivers - Microsoft have gotten that one rights it seems.

Now seems like a good time to switch over to an HDMI rather than VGA cable and the connector is exceedingly tight which made that a bit of a battle and took a couple of forced reboots to wake up (turns out I had forgotten to change the BIOS settings so was looking for a PCIe card).

Now the machine is running I can start to get an idea of sound levels and actual vibration through the case.

I can safely say that the case has zero sound dampening capability.

The Samsung BD drive sounds like an aircraft taking off until it spins up (we've only got plasterboard walls and it sounds clear through the walls, luckily it's only while spinning up). The Hitachi drive is a nasty rattly thing. However, the single noisiest thing is now the power supply - it's not the loudest in volume but as its fan is spinning constantly it is a continual noise. I've cleaned all the dust out which helps keep it cool and I've also removed the rear wire grill - there's little chance of small fingers getting pushed in there where the unit will be located finally and the removal of the grill notably smooths the air path reducing volume. Still noisy and for a fairly quiet PSU that was a surprise to discover. Am I going to replace it with a silent model? No, not a chance, the silent standard PSUs are all much higher wattage than I want or need so are likely to be less power efficient and the ones with external power bricks give me limited options for drives (now 4 in the case) and it's just more money.

Testing further with the lid on though does demonstrate quickly that outside of the aircraft drive spinning up the others noises are at an acceptable level even close up - I don't really mind the hard drive ratting when it's doing something and at a couple of feet none of the noises are problematic and by the time some media is playing it's not noticeable at all & I'm really picky about this sort of thing so I am pleased that isn't going to drive me to distraction.