It's not so much a project but it might turn into one. I realized I had virtually A whole PC of bit and bobs laying un-used. So it started here.
This is what I has lying around.
An old black ATX case.
Corsair HX520 PSU ( I know this is an excellent piece of kit but I have a HX620 in my main pc)
ASrock 4core Dual Vsta motherboard ( When I upgraded to an I7 I upgraded my mums PC and pulled this from her PC)
Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 cpu + Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7
2x 1gb corsair DDR2 667 memory ( memory was so cheep I got my mum a 4 gig kit and I was Left with this)
1 x belkin Gigabit ethernet card ( the onboard NIC is only 10/100 mbit)
SkyStar2 DVB-S card
Ge force 6200 AGP graphic card
Samsung Spinpiont 500gb HDD.
Now I am Forever watching HD movies TV blu-rays/HDTV and stuff on my PC. I even Have 2 DVB-s2 cards in my PC that I use to watch TV on my PC and that is setup to allow me to watch record capture 2 sky HD channels at once.
So I also have 2x DVB-S2 tuners available. to try and make this work.
So I'd Like to to turn this in to an all singing and dancing HTPC the old bits into an all singing and dancing HTPC with 2 HD tuners and a SD tuner that can replace my Sky + HD under the TV have soo much more functionality. So my Viewing card isn't doing a merry dance between my Sky+Hd box and Card reader for my PC.
Maybe Later when I have that Much working try to add the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD to it and get that up and running too.
I do realize this machine is most likely going to struggle with playing back interlaced HDTV in H.264 but when this was in my mums computer I did manage to get this very CPU memory and graphic card playing back a sky sports HD recording perfectly.
The Story So far is I have Put it together. Partitioned the HDD 50gb for the OS and the rest for another Partition. Installed Windows XP, and copied a HD transport stream over to it along with a copy of good old media player classic ( because if it's ability to let you choose the Codecs it will use) and a bunch of Codecs to see what might work on this machine.
I've Managed to have replicated geting a HD transport stream to play back very nicely with CoreAVC (with Hardware De-interlacing set), AC3 filter, Haali Media splitter under the VMR7 renderer. EVR worked well when i had downloaded the .net3.5 framework too with a touch heavier CPU useage, but VMR9 failed miserably.
The downsides. I had to overclock the CPU from it's stock 2ghz to 2.66ghz to make the playback smooth, as Decoding this stream used the CPU heavily (60-90% CPU usage with a Sky HD TS from the Sky Sports HD channels). Also this motherboard has really bad overclocking options And I'm not entirely sure it's stable enough to be a PVR at that speed.
I copied over DVB Dream and got the DVB-S card up and running to check and see If BBCHD and ITVHD where ok being watched Live. That was ok too, both played ok and used 40-80% cpu time.
Now The Question is where do I go Next, I guess this is to be continued.
This is what I has lying around.
An old black ATX case.
Corsair HX520 PSU ( I know this is an excellent piece of kit but I have a HX620 in my main pc)
ASrock 4core Dual Vsta motherboard ( When I upgraded to an I7 I upgraded my mums PC and pulled this from her PC)
Intel Core 2 Duo E4400 cpu + Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7
2x 1gb corsair DDR2 667 memory ( memory was so cheep I got my mum a 4 gig kit and I was Left with this)
1 x belkin Gigabit ethernet card ( the onboard NIC is only 10/100 mbit)
SkyStar2 DVB-S card
Ge force 6200 AGP graphic card
Samsung Spinpiont 500gb HDD.
Now I am Forever watching HD movies TV blu-rays/HDTV and stuff on my PC. I even Have 2 DVB-s2 cards in my PC that I use to watch TV on my PC and that is setup to allow me to watch record capture 2 sky HD channels at once.
So I also have 2x DVB-S2 tuners available. to try and make this work.
So I'd Like to to turn this in to an all singing and dancing HTPC the old bits into an all singing and dancing HTPC with 2 HD tuners and a SD tuner that can replace my Sky + HD under the TV have soo much more functionality. So my Viewing card isn't doing a merry dance between my Sky+Hd box and Card reader for my PC.
Maybe Later when I have that Much working try to add the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD to it and get that up and running too.
I do realize this machine is most likely going to struggle with playing back interlaced HDTV in H.264 but when this was in my mums computer I did manage to get this very CPU memory and graphic card playing back a sky sports HD recording perfectly.
The Story So far is I have Put it together. Partitioned the HDD 50gb for the OS and the rest for another Partition. Installed Windows XP, and copied a HD transport stream over to it along with a copy of good old media player classic ( because if it's ability to let you choose the Codecs it will use) and a bunch of Codecs to see what might work on this machine.
I've Managed to have replicated geting a HD transport stream to play back very nicely with CoreAVC (with Hardware De-interlacing set), AC3 filter, Haali Media splitter under the VMR7 renderer. EVR worked well when i had downloaded the .net3.5 framework too with a touch heavier CPU useage, but VMR9 failed miserably.
The downsides. I had to overclock the CPU from it's stock 2ghz to 2.66ghz to make the playback smooth, as Decoding this stream used the CPU heavily (60-90% CPU usage with a Sky HD TS from the Sky Sports HD channels). Also this motherboard has really bad overclocking options And I'm not entirely sure it's stable enough to be a PVR at that speed.
I copied over DVB Dream and got the DVB-S card up and running to check and see If BBCHD and ITVHD where ok being watched Live. That was ok too, both played ok and used 40-80% cpu time.
Now The Question is where do I go Next, I guess this is to be continued.
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