Hi guys. A few pics of my mini HTPC. The idea behind this was to have all the polish and customisability of an HTPC but with the simplicity of a domestic media streamer. I have my gaming rig upstairs (Core i7, Radeon 6950) since I'm old school and prefer my FPSs with keyboard and mouse - that and I have a nice monitor that goes beyond 1080p! We also have a Toshiba laptop in the living room too so no requirement for web browsing either. I'm using InstantSheller to boot directly into XBMC so that the Windows 7 shell and associated resource hungry services aren't loaded up. I originally planned to just use Ubuntu or Linux Mint (as they're free and XBMC integrates particularly well) but there are issues with these OSes not being able to use the hardware acceleration of the components I'd chosen so unfortunately it was a case of old Gatesy boy getting more of my hard earned!
Setup
Samsung PS59D6900 59" 3D Plasma
Onkyo TX-SR608 AV Receiver
Monitor Audio Radius HD 5.1 Speakers
Sky+HD 1Tb Box
Sony BDP S580 3D Blu Ray Player
Xbox 360 250gb
HTPC with SpeedLink IR receiver
Harmony One to control it all
Did you spot the PC?
Here's an idea of the size
Components Used
Lian Li PC-Q09FB Mini ITX Case with 150w flex PSU
MSI E350AI-E45 Mini ITX AMD Zacate motherboard/CPU/GPU solution
4Gb OCZ DDR3 RAM
2.5" Samsung Spinpoint 250Gb HDD
Sharkoon Silent Eagle 80mm Case Fan
Zalman variable speed fan controller
The MSI board is a VERY capable piece of kit. Handles 1080p MKVs, 3D SBS movies and audio bitstreaming without batting an eyelid. I believe XBMC 11 is going to allow native bitstreaming of DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby True HD too. It also does a pretty nice job of upscaling SD material too. Quite necessary on a 59" screen!
The internal disk is for OS only. All media is streamed to the HTPC via a WDTV Live Hub which we use on the TV in the bedroom. Rather handily it can act as a NAS as well as a VERY capable media player. Even in it's switched off state it's internal 1Gb hard disk and any attached USB drives are accessible to anything on my network. I currently have my music and TV series on the internal drive and all my movies on an external Samsung 1.5Tb USB drive.
Rather handily the Speedlink IR receiver/remote was in the database for the Harmony One so after a wee bit of reprogramming all of XBMCs functions are available including "mouse" mode
Simon