Be Excellent To Each Other

Simple set of requirements:

1) Quiet as possible.

2) HDMI.

3) 5:1 sound with optical audio out, I suspect this might be the hard bit. It'll be connecting to my 360 5:1 speakers, which accept optical, or optical - that's it, optical. It has two optical inputs, one of which is used by my 360 (when I've got it set up on the big telly), so it has one spare. These buggers - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pioneer-HTS-GS1 ... B000JK1TMO - they sound pretty good but the inputs are..... limited to say the least.

4) Standard network adapter, I prefer wired to wireless, because I'm old-fashioned, and you only need to run the cable once (and there's already one run to that corner of the room for the 360). (Don't mind if it's got wireless as well though.)

5) Capable of running Windows 7 properly, not some crappy Atom processor thingy, 2GB or more of RAM.

6) Some kind of digital TV tuner affair, we have a Sky digibox feed in that corner of the room, can you get tuner cards that take a digital input like that?

It's going to be internet connected and used for watching iPlayer/other VOD, as a DVD player, and streaming from the NAS. It'll be connected via HDMI to a 40 inch Samsung screen, bit elderly now, only does 720p/1080i (1080p started at £2K when I bought it, which was more than I was prepared to pay at the time, and TBH it works fine). The Samsung's built in speakers are of course utterly shite, and I only have the 5:1s linked above connected, which is why the optical audio out on the PC is critical.

If Blu-Ray is a relatively cheap addition it can have a BD-ROM instead of a DVD-ROM, although with no 1080P screen it'll be hobbled.

I really don't want to build the thing myself, and I don't mind paying a bit of premium to get one ready built, the days of me finding fucking around putting PCs together are well behind me.

All advice appreciated

EDIT - I just had a look round the back of the subwoofer and it does have a standard set of analogue inputs, which I've actually connected from the back of the telly (I'd completely forgotten about that, shows how often we watch telly.......), and a digital coaxial input too by the looks of it. I'd still prefer optical though.

Using the 360 itself as a header unit streaming from whatever else you've got sitting on the network meets pretty much all those requirements.

PS3 with PlayTV. Quieter than a 360 and has BluRay.

Yeah, I was going on the basis that he already has a 360.

Ah, good point.

You can pick up a Bluray Drive for a PC for around £50 now - but I'm not sure if you'd be able to play it if you use a 360 as a media extender.
Some quick looking around on the Internet would suggest that you can't.

But, unless you are desperate for Bluray, I'd suggest (like Craster) using the 360 and a cheap-o PC.

I have two 360s, the old one (original chipset) is connected to the big telly and makes an awful racket when it's turned on, to the extent that it's actually off-putting when trying to watch something. (On top of which, you can only have one 360 with your 'live' profile as it were, so the dashboard is about 18 months out of date, at least.)

The newer Jasper chipset 360 is connected to my PC setup, and I don't want to moving it around every time me and the missus want to watch something on the big telly.

Honestly, I do want a media centre PC, I have given it some thought

Not even slightly true. You can do "recover gamer tag" on any net-connected 360, or you can move the profile between consoles via HDD, memory card, or any USB mass storage device formatted for 360 use.

If you want cheap, you want something like one of those tiny Ion powered nettops but with an optical drive. The GPU takes care of decoding content for playback, so you don't need much CPU grunt; they're adequate for running Win7. Low CPU power lowers the thermal budget, which means you can run quieter fans. I daresay someone makes these as pre-built units, and I also daresay you're not going to get much change from £4-500 for a well-engineered unit.

Note that you won't get Bluray's better quality audio codecs over anything other than an HDMI connection. Most disks carry an alternate surround sound mix at DVD-quality for this scenario; some don't (notably my Highlander Bluray offers only a stereo mix).

You may have problems getting 1080i to work well. I'm not sure if your typical graphics card is going to handle generating an interlaced signal without unpleasant motion artefacts. You might be better off with 720p output; downscaling is more reliable.

Edit - SD capture from Sky is easy with any capture card, but the quality will suck by the time it's been through another round of lossy codecs. HD capture will cost you quite a bit and need serious CPU.

PlayTV is pretty great for freeview, although you're not going to get any HD freeview through it. Aside from that is has mostly lovely menus, is pretty clever (can record whilst doing other stuff, will turn itself on and off from standby to record stuff you've scheduled it too). I've not really used the PS3s other media stuff though.

OK you can't easily and repeatedly move profiles around then, I do appreciate it is possible

My 'main' 360 sits almost permanently on my PC setup, unless we're having a games night, in which case it goes onto the big telly with the 5:1 sound. The old 360 is really nothing more a DVD player these days, and even then it makes such an unpleasant racket that it's only pressed into service if me and Mrs AE are watching a film together, otherwise I just use my PC and stick a pair of headphones on.

Point being, I really don't want to be dicking about moving my 360 profile around and/or using the old 360 for anything other than annoying the neighbours by simple virtue of the fact that it can deafen people a mile away just by being turned on.

As for the rest of your post, thanks for the advice I'd already settled on 720p on this screen as I realise interlaced is basically crap, but it does make Blu-Ray less worthwhile overall. When I got this screen I had to choose between a few hundred quid for 720p, or £2000+ for 1080p (as the cheapest 40 inch 1080p screen was at the time), so I went with 720p since I was only buying it to go with my 360 anyway.

I think you might be right that a cheap netbook or laptop is the smartest choice here overall, EXCEPT, I can't imagine I'll get optical audio out in a month of Sundays on such a thing?

What uses optical audio out these days? I've never really had any experience with it TBH, I'm sure it harks back to the days of CD and DAT more than anything else (i.e. it's a bit elderly), the only device I've ever owned that I've used the optical out on is my 360, I've had CD, MiniDisc and DAT players with it on in the past, but never used it.

1) put 360 profile on USB stick (surely you have a spare USB stick?)
2) plug stick into whichever 360 you are using
3) there is no step 3

Easy! For bonus points, get a 16Gb one and put all your DLC and savegames on it too. This is how I spread my gaming between my two 360s.

As for optical out, all the Ion nettops I've seen have one. The Asus or Acer summat or other TheEgg bought a few weeks back certainly did. In any event, it'll be easy to figure out if any particular model you are buying has SP/DIF or not from the spec sheet.

Also, you have that coaxial digital input. It's functionally identical to optical if you find a computer with that instead.

Build one.

Don't build one. You'll never get the thermal engineering as good.

Well, my Media Center runs near silent and 24/7 stable on just air cooling, so it's very possible to get it right.

OK so I'm officially a

Well sort of, my 'Jasper' 360 migrated back under the telly when I got my Kinect in December (the old original chipset 360 has now been placed into storage where it can do no more damage to innocent eardrums), but I didn't really give the whole 'media centre PC' thing much thought as I dropped the idea not long after starting this thread as being too much money for too little.

It popped back into my head today so I went through the very painless process of setting up the 360 as a media centre extender from my PC, gave it the required paths and credentials for the NAS, and there you go, exactly what I was after for all this time, just like Craster said.

The 360 needed to install some sort of codec pack, but thereafter I haven't come across a file in my sprawling movie collection that it won't play, and the interface is pretty swizzy too, plus it will stream directly from the NAS (although I believe my PC needs to be on as some sort of intermediary).

Impressed!

The 360 does an OK job of it, and for a good couple of years I used it as a media centre (well, not quite a media centre, more just a way to watch divx that were stored on the big PC on my living room telly).

It got a bit of a hassle for the good Lady, and I was bored so I bought a little Revo 3700 for under the telly, and a NAS to dump all the files on. Works like a charm for what I was after. It's much quieter, uses less power than having both the 360 and a desktop switched on, and we can use it for browsing the internet on the big telly too, as well as photo slideshows etc. I was worried it might be a little slow, but so far I've been pretty impressed with what the little box can do. Runs Win 7 really quite well.

No optical drive though, which may be an issue for some but our surround sound is one of those all in one things that plays blu rays (total played in around 8 months to date: none).

Hmmm the sound is a little bit out on some XVIDs (lip-syncing not quite right), the same files are OK on my PC.

Still watchable but slightly annoying.

You running it over wireless or wired?

Wired, albeit two hops away, if the data is going via my PC. (100meg Netgear router with good CAT-5 cabling, I hate wireless and avoid it wherever possible, so before we moved into this house I paid the electrician extra to wire it up for CAT-5. Since it's an old Victorian house it needed a full check-up anyway.)

I'm not entirely sure that it's streaming 'from' my PC or 'through' my PC, I had to configure the path to my NAS on the 360 itself, it didn't pick it up from my PC's XBMC.

Does it work if your PC is turned off?

It does not. It just sits there looking for a media center PC.

Booted up my PC and it launched fine.

Which media player on the xbox are you using? Media Center or the more standard player.

This one.

Media centre when running through the 360 transcodes on the fly at the PC end to a wmv compatible stream iirc

If you run it through the media blade rather than Media Centre, it'll be a lot more reliable and won't need your PC on, but you won't get the transcoding so your MKVs won't play. Annoyingly.

In the end I lost patience with the Media Centre Extender, and it doesn't do YouTube and stuff like that anyway. The final straw was last night when me and Mrs AE really wanted to watch some stuff off YouTube together but we just had no way of piping it to the big telly so we couldn't sit on the couch together.

So today I bought this sucker:



http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/pcs/1279 ... pire-x3900

I paid the 'local shop premium' so it was £599, but it's a pretty tidy piece of kit and of course no delivery time (or charges).

Base specs are dual core i3-530 at 2.93GHz (hyper-threaded), 4GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB hard drive, built in LAN, hi-def sound, DVD-RW etc. Shite integrated graphics but plenty powerful enough for a media PC.

It also has HDMI and that all important optical audio out.

Have got it all set up, Windows 7 Home Premium is pre-installed and as ever it just works perfectly out of the box (albeit with a load of fucking shit on it that I had to uninstall), the base unit is small and absolutely whisper quiet, (not much bigger than an original XBox), and is tucked neatly down the side of the telly, on top of the subwoofer. The digital sound feed through the proper 5:1 setup is superb.

Since it came with a (half-decent) 22 inch 1080p TFT, I've hooked that up to an old laptop and set it up with a set of speakers and keyboard+mouse in the kitchen, to give us a fully featured PC in there.

£600 isn't peanuts, but it's a nice enough piece of kit and I expect it will last us for years. Overall, pleasantly impressed, and would recommend to a friend.

<points towards the boxee thread>

I am not even remotely convinced by the Boxee, I wanted a proper computer, which is also why the 360's Media Centre Extender pissed me off.

And besides which, does the Boxee 'do' YouTube? There's a metric fuckton of stuff on there that me and Mrs AE want to watch together that basically appears not to exist anywhere else (the VH1 'Behind The Music' series, for starters).

EDIT - Actually I wonder if it would play Frozen Synapse? How cool would that game be on a 40-inch screen with full surround sound. Steam install incoming!

That's a shitload of computer for a media centre

I have a media pc connected up to the tv too, I haven't even switched it on since I got the boxee.

Does boxee to YouTube? Of course it does that's kinda the point of it, it pulls content from everywhere and anywhere and displays it all in a nice central searchable index.

If you don't want that, then there is a specific app for the majority of sources.

If you don't want that, there is a fully fledged browser you can use to go to content directly.

It'll be a Frozen Synapse player too in a few minutes

But according to the Boxee thread it's a bit buggy, to say the least.

Also, I 'know' Windows, I can stick VLC and Winamp on there, I've installed Firefox which is the web browser I trust and like, I can use it for light gaming etc. Also, I can remote control the media centre PC from my main PC, which is a super bonus. And so on.

I'm not saying the Boxee is rubbish, but it doesn't look like it's for me.

It is buggy, but much much better than it used to be with the latest firmware, and seems to go in the right direction.

If all you want to do is play media, either online or local, then there is no better solution. Obviously if you want to do more than that, then boxee can't help you

Frozen Synapse runs a bit crap

I mean, it's playable and that, but distinctly jumpy when zooming in and out and the controls are a bit 'treacle-esque'. It reminds me of GTAIV on the 360.

I may have to get a low profile graphics card to put in this PC, although I have to say I have no idea which one would be any good, and I suspect the power supply isn't exactly meaty and/or laden with connectors, so it's most likely gonna have to be something that gets all its power from the PCI-E slot (it does actually have a PCIE-16x expansion slot, but only half-height cards will fit in there).

RESEARCH COMMENCES.

What? I can play it on my work PC fine. Try turning the animated backgrounds off.

This is Atrocity, if it isn't running at 100fps it's worthless shit

Damn straight!

Something like this should give it the required poke - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... ubcat=1984

I don't turn options off when I'm playing games, I keep chucking hardware at it until everything runs just how I want it to. I'm not expecting to be playing GTAIV on this thing, but I'm not turning down graphics options on a fucking turn-based strategy game.

(Although actually Grim..., you're 100% right, with the (pointless) backgrounds turned off it's completely silky smooth. Just tried it now.)

My stubborn twathead nature is going to prevail regardless however, so I'm still going to put a proper graphics card into it.

Also, MAME has just found a new home in our house. 40 inch Chase HQ, virtual surround sound, with a 360 pad played from the comfy sofa, game on.

Chinny did a thread about this sort of thing somewhere.
I forget what PC he got, but it was tiny.

Chinnys was an Acer Revo. I suspect that would not suit AE's somewhat 'singular' requirements for a media centre

My media centre PC is distinctly lower spec, but at least it has a proper graphics card

AE's small scale media center (sic). (yesterday).

I feel positively abused!

A few moments watching PC benchmarks will get my dander back up.

I bought a Revo for under the telly too (running XBMC, VLC and browsing on the big screen). It's excellent, and it was quite cheap too. I bought the linux version but wiped that and put win7 on there.

Ahhh, but can the Boxee play .iso files, eh?

(Genuine question and one thing that's important to me for a media player (another reason why the XBox 'solution' was no good), on the media PC I've simply installed VLC and it'll happily play .iso files directly from the NAS, which is super considering I have the complete 'King Turd' Beavis & Butthead collection on the NAS in .iso format and I don't really want to burn out 16 DVDs.)

Yes it can! DVD and BluRay (although not with full BluRay menu support yet)

The search is over! Radeon 5570, step right up.

Low-profile, needs no extra power (can take it all from the PCI-E slot), passively cooled, the PSU in the Acer will handle it OK (albeit with very little headroom), and costs £50.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... ubcat=1699

Whilst this is of course no monster of a card, it does outgun the old Radeon 3870 (which was an expensive, hot-running, high-end card in its day) by a comfortable margin.



http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5570-review/22

It'll run the likes of Mass Effect and Fallout 3 on high/ultra settings for example. (So kicking an XBox 360's ass, and making less noise whilst it's at it.) - http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5570-review/16

For £50 I think I'll go for it, as it'll give me a viable 'sitting on the couch' games machine, especially since my big telly is only 720p which limits the amount of pixels I'll be asking it to chuck around.

I got a Radeon 6450 in the end.

It's fucking rubbish.

Yeah I know.....

I actually read up on it as well, and it was clearly an inferior card to the 5570, but I was thinking, y'know, a generation ahead, maybe the specs don't do it justice, maybe it'll be better in the real world than it looks on paper, and it was only £35.

First of all I had to dig out my hex keys to get the standard bracket off and fit the low-profile bracket, and even then getting the thing in the case was a seriously tight squeeze, with the passive heatsink practically touching the side of the case.

Then I knobbed up and disabled the onboard video in the PC's BIOS having made the assumption that Windows 7 would see the new card at least in some regard and output from its HDMI, which it didn't. So then I had no fucking HDMI output at all and couldn't even get back into the BIOS to turn the onboard video back on, so I had to take the PC downstairs and hook it up via DVI to the kitchen PC's screen as DVI is 'always on' (the big 40 inch telly doesn't have DVI, just SCART, HDMI and component).

So then I got the Catalyst drivers on, brought it back upstairs and got it all working properly and frankly it's just a bit 'meh'.

Certainly it's more powerful than the integrated Intel graphics, and it can drive WoW at the screen's native res (1360x768) at around 30FPS (hiss spit) on mostly high settings which the integrated graphics couldn't, but it's not the kind of 'big leap' that you'd expect even a pretty low-end discrete graphics card to provide.

And whilst it's silent, it runs frighteningly hot, according to the Catalyst Control Center the GPU is hitting 101/102C just when playing WoW, needless to say I'm not going to overclock it or chuck any serious benchmarks at it. (The 6450 has a range of default clock speeds, mine is pegged at the lowest speed and it's gonna have to stay there, the faster ones (faster being a relative term) have horrible little whiny fucking fans on them.)

So yes it's an improvement, and yes it makes a decent job of running the older 3DMark tests, but the DX11 support is negligible since it's so under-powered, and I should have just spent an extra tenner and got the 5570.

Overall rating - a bit shit.