Taking the HTPC Plunge - 1st ever Build!

As Apone mentioned, SPDIF will give you 5.1 - as I sit on my deathbed of manflu, I am watching Usual Suspects on 5.1 connected via Optical to my pretend Amp (My Sammy X30 HTK).

Any idea if Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 7.0 plays back HD/Blu Ray rips from a hard drive? I'm looking for some software that will handle both physical discs and rips from my hard drive but don't want to commit cash before I'm sure that the s/ware does exactly what I'm after.

Cheers

PowerDVD 7 will play ISO's of HiDef rips (of your own material obviously), but I think you need 7.3319a? version of PowerDVD to play folder based rips.

I dont have PowerDVD 8 - they want you to pay again for it, and they removed HD playback as far as I can tell....

Oh, and nice pics :smashin:
 
Right then, here are the phase 2 pics of my build. Have had a hectic couple of weeks with work so the project has been put on the back burner. Have installed all drivers and have been experimenting with KM Player and Media Portal recently.

Thanks to the info on ProjectHTPC I'm almost there but have a few more tweaks to make tonight to try and iron out a few issues I'm having.

Anyway here are the pics:

PSU was late in arriving from Scan so it was almost the last thing to go in:

DSCF0937.jpg


Face plate for the DVD drive fitted on easily, a couple of adjustments to get it straight but looks spot on:

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In with the wireless card:

DSCF0939.jpg


And I'm all done, build finally complete:

DSCF0936.jpg


In-situe with all my other equipment, inc newly purchased Octava HDMI switch. HTPC somewhat dwarfs my Amp!

DSCF0940.jpg
 
...like looking into a mirror....:smashin:

Nice pics, and glad to see it all up and running. How are you coming along with Media Portal mate?
 
Not too bad thanks Theydon, have it all up and running but just a couple of problems I still can't resolve.

- Have ripped about 20 .iso/.mkv files to My Videos, now whenever I click on My Videos from Media Portal it takes about 30secs-1 min to open all titles and display in filmstip view. Any idea why it takes so long?

- Another thing that is really bugging me is that with pretty much all of my .iso and .mkv rips when playing through KM player there is a what can be best described as breaks in the screen. When playing back fast moving content the bottom two inches of the screen are slightly out of synch with the rest and it's highly annoying as it appears as if the screen is playing back in sections. Sometimes it can take place at other random points on the screen but it's mostly at the bottom 2 inches. I haven't experienced this problem with normal DVD playback.

Could this be anything to do with the fact that I'm only currently using the trial version of CoreAVC and haven't yet purchased the $14.95 version? Could it be worthwhile using ffdshow to see if that fixes the problem? I'm baffled to be honest!
 
Not too bad thanks Theydon, have it all up and running but just a couple of problems I still can't resolve.

- Have ripped about 20 .iso/.mkv files to My Videos, now whenever I click on My Videos from Media Portal it takes about 30secs-1 min to open all titles and display in filmstip view. Any idea why it takes so long?

If you change the view to LIST, or small icons, does it take equally long? Once I had more than 10 films on my machine, I changed the view to list (but with Mono 1.9 side view) long ago, as it takes too long to scroll through things, but I dont recall it taking ages to display in the first place. Plus, are the films local, or on shared or mapped drives?

- Another thing that is really bugging me is that with pretty much all of my .iso and .mkv rips when playing through KM player there is a what can be best described as breaks in the screen. When playing back fast moving content the bottom two inches of the screen are slightly out of synch with the rest and it's highly annoying as it appears as if the screen is playing back in sections. Sometimes it can take place at other random points on the screen but it's mostly at the bottom 2 inches. I haven't experienced this problem with normal DVD playback.

Could this be anything to do with the fact that I'm only currently using the trial version of CoreAVC and haven't yet purchased the $14.95 version? Could it be worthwhile using ffdshow to see if that fixes the problem? I'm baffled to be honest!

....I am a bit out of my depth with codecs, and been lucky enough to not have to worry - I installed it all as Phils guide, added a full version of CoreAVC and played everything ok. I am experimenting with a 1080p file that seems to shudder slightly, so will need to read up on codecs and that graphedit thing. Sorry to not be any help - PM mickwall (after reading his thread) and see if he can help you...
 
Got it! Had video renderer set to VMR9, was playing around with them the other night to get the best picture and forgot to change is back to Overlay Mixer, changed it over and all is now looking great. :thumbsup:

Have been playing around with views in My Videos and list seems to load up a bit quicker but there is still a big delay when compared to opening My Music or My TV Series, will try and play around a bit more tonight.

Theydon - I haven't as yet incorporated PowerDVD 7 and am still exclusively using KM player for rips and Blu Ray/HD-HVD playback. Have you seen any noticable improvements with PowerDVD over KMP?

That's the video side of things almost there. Now to sort out my music.
 
Got it! Had video renderer set to VMR9, was playing around with them the other night to get the best picture and forgot to change is back to Overlay Mixer, changed it over and all is now looking great. :thumbsup:

Have been playing around with views in My Videos and list seems to load up a bit quicker but there is still a big delay when compared to opening My Music or My TV Series, will try and play around a bit more tonight.

Theydon - I haven't as yet incorporated PowerDVD 7 and am still exclusively using KM player for rips and Blu Ray/HD-HVD playback. Have you seen any noticable improvements with PowerDVD over KMP?

That's the video side of things almost there. Now to sort out my music.

Looks like it is coming along nicely. Well done:thumbsup: I am not familiar with KM player and only with Cyberlink Power dvd ultra version 7 so can't comment but recently i got a pop up from Cyberlink asking me to upgrade my software to encompass BD profile 2.0. Have not done it yet but from what you are saying, KM player also seems to do the job but can it do BD vesion 2.0?.

BTW not sure if having profile 2.0 means anything really.
 
Theydon - I haven't as yet incorporated PowerDVD 7 and am still exclusively using KM player for rips and Blu Ray/HD-HVD playback. Have you seen any noticable improvements with PowerDVD over KMP?

I use PowerDVD on all my ISO based Red and Blu rips. I think it caters for hardware excellerated playback (ie using the GPU) rather than the CPU as well....
 
Looks like it is coming along nicely. Well done:thumbsup: I am not familiar with KM player and only with Cyberlink Power dvd ultra version 7 so can't comment but recently i got a pop up from Cyberlink asking me to upgrade my software to encompass BD profile 2.0. Have not done it yet but from what you are saying, KM player also seems to do the job but can it do BD vesion 2.0?.

BTW not sure if having profile 2.0 means anything really.


Not 100% sure on KM player and BD profile 2.0 to be honest mate. Had a quick search on the KM Player forum but it didn't bring anything up of note.

Must admit, I think KM Player is a great piece of software, lacks the support of PowerDVD and other playback software but it's highly customisable and provided you're happy experimenting I'd recommend it. It's also free and you can always use their forums for anything you're not 100% sure about.
 

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