Thread: My home media set-up

I am happy to say that about 2 months ago my family cut the cord on our cable tv service. We have switched to downloading all of our TV shows and Movies. We couldn't be happier. Here is the setup we are using so if anyone else is interested in saving $$ they can see how I did it.

First I already had the home wired with cat5 for a network, so I don't have to use wifi to get tv to the kids bedrooms. I have extensive tcp/ip experience so I knew what I was doing regarding networking, even so it wasn't hard and a person that understands how to set up a computer with a static ip would have little problems.

We already had a home server so I only had to add some storage space to it. All the TV shows are stored in one share, and the Movies in another. I am using windows home server as the os on the server, I was already using it to share music in the house and to do automated backups of our machines.



I decided to get 3 Acer Aspire Revo netdesk computers based on a post on Lifehacker, one for the family room(65" DLP) and once fro each of our 2 children's rooms(22" LCD). I set up Ubuntu and XBMC on them by following a great tutorial linked off of the XBMC forums.

Once I had XBMC running on them I needed content. I started with Torrents on a dedicated machine, but it was hard to keep a good ratio when I was starting out needing lots of back content that we had stored on our tivo, so I looked into Usenet, Newsgroups have come a long way since I was downloading gigs of music years ago. NZB's have made it easy. So I set up SABnzbd+ on the torrent machine to do the downloading, and got accounts at the major NZB sites. I then set Sick Beard to search for and send the NZB's for my the TV shows we watch to SABnzbd+. I am using CouchPotato to do the same thing for movies. Once i had them set to look for my wants it's even easier than dealing with rss. Shows get downloaded unrar-ed, renamed to something more XBMC friendly, and moved to the correct share on the server. I am using torrents as a back up for the shows that don't come across usenet.

I could have set all that software up on my server instead of a dedicated box, but I had the hardware and I didn't want to mess with the machine that is responsible for my backups.

Any questions on my set-up please ask.

JB

Thanks for the useful post. While I'm fine in my little one bedroom apartment just hooking my PC to both my monitor and TV as a mirrored display for my media needs, I've been thinking of fixing my parents up with a setup similar to yours.

With Christmas coming up was trying to decide what to get them. So far the only media center components I've had first hand experience with was the Popcorn Hour, which while it did it's job, was definitely lacking in several areas.

The only part that has me concerned about doing the kind of setup you've mentioned is that i would like to make sure I spent just enough to get spec's to handle my desired content and nothing more. Does the desktop you mentioned in your post handle 1080p content just fine?

Was thinking about just assembling my own media center PC, since for me picking components and assembling them is no sweat. But even building your own, would be hard to beat the price and size of that unit.

1080p is no problem. The nvidia chip hasn't stumbled on any content I have thrown at it.

The small size is great and it even came with a bracket to mount in on the back of the LCD's in the kids rooms so they can't knock it off the dresser.

I can remotely manage their systems in their rooms since it is running Ubuntu. So I do library and software updates from my computer. So with the right router config you could probably even manage your parents machine from your place. Both Couchpotato and Sick Beard have friendly web interfaces so it wouldn't be to hard for your parents to add content. Couchpotato even has a greasemonkey script to add movies right from their IMDB page.

When I first set the system up I spent about an hour a day messing with it just because I couldn't believe it was going to work with how simple it was to set up. Now I just take a quick look at SABnzbd+ to see if any files failed and why and then tell the search software to get different versions.

JB

I love these kinds of threads! :)

Here's a photo of my HTPC setup in our main room.


Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Running a Core 2 Q6600 with 4GB of DDR2 ram. I'm using the onboard HDMI to output to my receiver (Sony STR-DN1000) and using the onboard HDMI switch to my 65" Toshiba DLP. Other HDMI ports are used by my cable box and bluray player.

I'm using MeediOS as my front-end and have TV shows, movies, pictures and music streaming for a 6TB NAS all on gigabit. I use Girder to control my HTPC using a Harmony 1000.

I have HTPCs setup in each of my daughter's rooms for their LCDs as well but I used some SFF desktops that I had replaced at work. We normally donate our old computers so I just donated a few of them to myself. :)

Those Acers are nice, though. We're in the process of selling our house so once we move I may end up doing some more upgrades.

I like that TV stand, we're still using our stand from the 35" CRT we had before we went Hi-Def. The skin I use on XBMC looks very similar to the one in your photo.

I was lucky I had a Media Center remote and receiver laying around. I used the receiver and programed our Harmony. XBMC has the drivers build in to use the media center remote. I had used the Harmony in the past with the receiver to control the laptop it came with so I knew it would work.

If I couldn't have used the Harmony I doubt if I would have gotten any wife acceptance at all. Before the Harmony the kids wouldn't watch DVD's because when mom would change to the DVD player she would blast them out of the living room, so they learned to wait for dad.

We are loving saving the money every month with no cable bill, the only thing we haven't replaced fully is the local news, but we had gotten so feed up with the news we were ready to quit watching it anyways. XMBC has weather built in and I grabbed an RSS feed from one of the local tv websites which displays as a scroll on screen, so we get headlines and look the stories up on either our computers or the ipad in the familyroom if it is something we want to read right away.

Hello, I am looking to do the same, can you point me to the Ubuntu and XMBC tutorial you mention in you post? I also notice that you used NZB's and not torrents? can you expand on why you chose that route? hoping to hear from you soon

I use NZBs instead of torrents for my HTPC movies. Mainly cause I look for 1080p stuff that can add up to large DL's and as we all know some ratio based sites you have a hard time picking your ratio back up after DLng GB/TB of HD movies.... Also NZBs have full stream so the HD movies come down much faster versus you being at the mercy of seeders and the swarm... I still use my torrent sites daily though especially places like SCA where they have free leech on PACKS...

I suggest if you want to do HTPC I suggest heading over to this site
Assassin HTPC Blog - Custom Entertainment from www.assassinhtpcblog.com

He is a VERY knowledgeable and respected person in the HTPC community and frequents forums like Toms Hardware, AVS etc etc...

For me and my HTPC set up
I have an ASUS p8z77-m MOBO
16GB Corsair ram (vengeance series 1600 mhz)
i5 3570K cpu
Antec EA-380D Plus bronze PSU
Samsun 840 120gb SSD
4 2TB green WD hard drives (1 is used for backup in a flex raid config in case one drive goes bad i don't lose data)
All housed in a beautiful Silverstone Grandia GD-06B HTPC Case...

I have tried Mediaportal, mediabrowser, XBMC, Jriver and plex
I use XMBC with the AEON skin on all 4 of my HTPC
It's so flexible I have separate categories for Kung fu movies, movies and anime series.

Once my drives fill up I am going to implement a NAS into the mix. for now my above rig is the main HTPC hub so to speak...

I have done to date around 15 HTPC rigs (setup and assemble) for family and friends so if you got any questions let me know and i can try and help or at least steer you in the right direction...

Note that the CPU doesn't really matter as far as playing back HD content, at least if you're using some kind of acceleration (VDPAU for NVidia, I believe, though it may have changed). I have an old Athlon 64 X2 @2Ghz and my HTPC plays 1080p content beautifully, with barely any CPU load (5% or so). The thing that matters for playback is the video card. I use NVidia because Linux support is better for it, although XBMC runs fine on Windows too.

If all you're going to be doing with the HTPC is downloading and playing videos, Clorox's build is a complete overkill. I run everything fine with essentially no latency with a 2Ghz Athlon X2 64 and a NVidia 9500 GS, both of which are about 5 years old now. 1GB RAM only. Pretty much all playback is HD, either 720p or 1080p, and with HD sound passthrough to my AV unit.

Now, if you want to run a newznab indexer on it, you would have a use for all that extra CPU and memory, sure. Otherwise, you're spending more money than you should. Also, another important consideration is noise. I have a completely silent solid-state PSU and a quiet CPU fan. Video cards with no fan and only a heatsink are a plus. You don't need to buy the most expensive parts to have great HTPC.