[TriLUG] htpc case / info

[Don Jerman]

It's not impossible - the 7-inch shows up as another display device,
so you just have to plan to drive 2 displays and pay attention to the
resolution, etc.  That'll mean a card that can handle an aux display
simultaneously, with a different resolution, or else 2 video cards.
Since the 7-inch probably has less resolution you can probably drive
it with a cheap PCI card, if  you can still find one.

I opted to have no case displays on mine, I figure I'm paying for the
TV and I don't want too much other stuff up there distracting me from
it.  I even unhooked the front-panel LEDs.

You want to review the support forums for advice on your video cards -
last I checked the ATI drivers weren't supporting hardware decoding
for MPEG properly.  But that was last summer so ymmv.  Nvidia was the
top dog for xvmc and mine does a good enough job.  That's the major
mind-shift for building HTPC - you don't want peak performance, you
want good-enough stable performance.  If it works well enough now, it
will probably be good enough until we change the standards around
again.

So 4GB is probably waay overkill - 2GB would be a gracious plenty (I
do just fine with 1GB).  You definitely want some processor horsepower
if you're going with that ATI card and displaying HD, because it
appears to lack hardware decode capability.  If you decide to get an
nvidia card (too?) you could get away with something in the 2Ghz
range, by all reports, since the decoder will offload much of the
work.

If you're going with Mythtv and you have a wired network in the house,
you probably want to build a back-end machine in a cheap case, with
loud hot processors, disks and fans, and build a quiet, one-disk or
diskless front end machine.  That would let you put your noise in the
back room, with all the excess cabling and storage, and stream your
video and audio to the viewing area.  It's a good strategy for
overcoming the conflicts in the requirements but it requires a wired
connection - wireless speed isn't up to streaming HD effectively (or
even SD, at my house).


On 12/18/07, OlsonE at aosa.army.mil <OlsonE at aosa.army.mil> wrote:
> currently i'm looking at:
>
> http://www.digitalconnection.com/Products/Cases/sstlc18.asp
>
> and
>
> http://www.geek.com/moneual-moncaso-932b-htpc-case/?option=content&task=
> view&id=936
>
> (not necessarily where i'm going to buy it from, but where i saw it
> first). the idea with the 7" lcd is that when i'm playing a movie it'll
> display the cover on the screen. same applies with audio. am i far off
> in having an expectation like this, or is it something that's fairly
> easy (as in out of the box with mythtv ...etc)?
>
> ideally, i'd like to put 5 hdds in there, most likely 5x 500gb or 5x
> 1tb. i'm trying to come up with a good balance between having what i
> want, and keeping it cool. for a video card, i've decided on the ATI TV
> Wonder 650 HDTV PCI TV Tuner and ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB DDR3 (2x DVD
> HDMI+AUDIO HDCP). for the cpu, i'd probably go with something 45nm, and
> along the core 2 duo line. for memory, i'm leaning toward 4gb kingston
> ddr2-667 (4x 1024mb). i'm currently undecided on the motherboard.
>
> obviously for the os, i'd really like to use mythtv ...but would
> probably go with a distro that has it all bundled over trying to use
> gentoo ...and worry about manually configuring everything.
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