The Home Theatre Thread

...continuing from the Mac(+Apple) thread, i thought i'd create a thread about home theatre stuff as it seems there are a few ppl interested in it... oh and also XBMC/HTPC stuff too.

here's some info about my setup:

Home Theatre Room:

• Panasonic PT-AE4000E 1080P projector
• Peerless PRG projector mount
• 120" OZTS Majestic Evo3D 2.37:1 fixed scope screen
• Yamaha RX-V1800B receiver
• B&W 684 fronts
• B&W HTM61 centre
• B&W 602 S3 rears
• Velodyne CHT12Q sub (this thing pumps)
• Auralex Subdude decoupling platform for the sub
• PS3 Slim
• ASRock ION330HT running XBMC Live w/ Alaska Revisited skin
• Logitech Harmony 1100i remote

the screen is a 2.37:1 anamorphic screen so when watching 16:9 content, i will get black bars on either side. however, when watching anamorphic movies, the projector will scale it to fit the screen completely (as you can see in the photo). this is why when you watch blurays/dvd's on a 16:9 tv, you will still get black bars on top and bottom, and is also why when you go to the cinema, the curtain's spread after you watch the commercials (which are in 16:9).

not all new movies are anamorphic ratio though. suprisingly, Avatar is only 16:9 and all Pixar movies too.

and here is my existing family room setup (pictures to follow):

Family Room:

• Samsung 63" 1080P plasma (PS63P71)
• Yamaha RX-V665 receiver
• B&W 600 S3 fronts
• B&W LCR60 S3 centre
• B&W CCM50 in-ceiling rears
• Sonique Thunderbox subwoofer
• Auralex Subdude decoupling platform for the sub
• PS3
• ASRock ION330HT running XBMC Live w/ Alaska Revisited skin
• Logitech Harmony 785 remote

the Yamaha RX-V665 is also powering a 2nd zone outdoor with Yamaha speakers. both areas are running off gigabit network back to an unRAID server with around 10Tb's of content (1080P mkv and BD ISO movies, and 720P MKV's for tv shows (and some avi's)).

let me know what you think and if you have any questions. and please, if you have a dedicated home theatre, please post it up with your specs!

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[video: www.youtube.com]

 

Thats some serious hardware man.

That is an insane set up. Really nice.

I use my PS3 for the media center side of things, got a few plans at the moment.

-Recommission my desktop as a fileserver only, running one of the many Linux distros (highly likely be Ubuntu but may be something more exotic like FreeNAS.
-Recommission my old Notebook (currently used for movies/tv in the bedroom) by adding a battery that works and new keyboard that all the keys work on, to replace my desktop, probably buy an external monitor for it as well
-Purchase a 20"+ LCD for bedroom, and connect to a WD Live (not sure if thats the correct name?)
-Replace existing 10/100/Wireless G router with 10/100/1000/Wireless N router

Connect fileserver and PS3 via 1GbE and Notebook's via Wireless N

Edit: Lounge room currently has a 40" Samsung LCD, though it is getting a bit old (3-4 years) so may replace it with something larger and put the 40" in the bedroom - Undecided about this however as I think it might be a bit big for the bedroom.

Pretty impressive. I don't even have a TV.

Cool ideas there.

Just a couple of things I want to mention. FreeNAS is awesome, I'd go that over vanilla Linux distros if I was making a desktop into fileserver.

I would also rethink the WD TV Live. They can't play some of the really high res content and from all accounts the UI is pretty crap. It doesn't have a GPU either so you can't do something cool like put XBMC on there instead.

XBMC supports all Apple TV models now so that's one idea, though being Apple they're obviously pricey.

I've heard good things about the Dreamboxes as well in regards to custom firmware and modding capability. The bonus with them is they also include quality digital satellite/cable TV options.

I'd say get a nice small HT case and one of those Atom processors and you can build a better media player than WD TV Live for not much more cash.

At any rate I would make sure that whatever option you look into uses XBMC as a base. It is seriously the best interface out there, nothing else comes close IMO. I had a lot of experience setting up my and other peoples Xboxes back in the day. If I had it with me I'd still be using it, it's just a pity they can't support larger content.

I played around with this kind of stuff (TV tuner cards, recording schedulers, etc.) a few years ago but big life changes got in the way, though it's something that still interests me greatly. In the future I hope to put together a nice cohesive system as well once funds and location allows for it.

Yeah I'm not too fussed about the bedroom to be honest. I only really plan to use it for some tv eps, dvd rips, etc, anything thats HD/Surround sound I watch out in the lounge room on the big TV and Yamaha receiver.

Have used a WD Live before and didn't have any issues with it, seemed to play everything I threw at it, its tiny and quiet and will connect to a screen with HDMI pretty easily and supports Wireless N with a USB adaptor.

As for the Linux distro, I'm currently running Ubuntu on my Notebook and Desktop, so I'm pretty familiar with it. What will ultimately sway me is if it can run the following:-

PS3 Media Server
Sabnzbd+
Sickbeard

Hey phorte. What made you go for the asrock?

john, i'd definitely recommend you have a look at unRAID which is what i'm using for my server and media store. im running sabnzbd+ on it too and have heard of many ppl putting on ps3ms as well as sickbeard too.

http://www.lime-technology.com/
http://www.lime-technology.com/products/registration-keys
http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Wiki
http://lime-technology.com/forum/ - the forums are incredible. a WEALTH of information

i originally lookede at freeNAS but i found unRAID more flexible with putting things on afterwards. if you read on the AVS forums, most ppl recommend unRAID over freeNAS and i'm glad i went this way...

in summary, it is a different type of raid where the parity is all stored on a single drive (not striped across drives) which means you have redundancy up to one drive failure. because of this parity setup, this means a few good things:

• if any one of the drives goes down, all other drives are still accessible and are not reliant on that one drive to be rebuilt
• because parity isnt striped, you can remove any data drive at any time and it is still readible on a different computer
• because parity is stored on a dedicated drive and not striped, if you write something to a drive, only that drive needs to spin up (and the parity drive) and all other drives can remain spun down, meaning less power usage and less unneccessary hdd wear
• same thing applies when reading data - only the drive that is being read from needs to spin up
• built to be used on older tech so you can build it on older hardware that you have lying around

you can trial it for free... the basic version (free) supports a array width of 3 drives (1x parity, 2x data). trial it and see how you feel... then you have the plus key for $59 which supports 6 drives and the pro key for $109 which supports up to 21 drives.

i currently have an older athlon x2 cpu using an older MSI mobo and 2gb ddr2-800 RAM running headless in my walk-in-robe... ive got around 8 drives in there (ranging from 1Tb to 2Tb drives) and i control it all remotely from my main desktop (eg. for sabnzbd+ for my downloading)


jared, i went with the asrock for a few reasons... mainly because of the size of it. when i priced up building my own box with such a small form factor, the asrock was in the same budget anyway. i wanted to avoid having a bigger PC sitting in my entertainment areas because i hate the look of a pc tower in a tv/ht environment. i wanted it to look like another small player sitting there just like a DVD player would just sit there.

the atom processor isnt very powerful but i knew it was powerful enough to run XBMC's interface. the NVIDIA ION GPU for video decoding is natively supported under the ubuntu version of XBMC so that was perfect too for 1080P material (i try to avoid windows as much as i can at home these days).

i can understand people building something more powerful for a HTPC but to play all 1080P content and BD ISO's, this asrock performs exactly how i want it to. i dont use the HTPC for games (i'll leave that to the consoles or my desktop)...

How much is your power bill per quarter Phorte? Assuming you leave those computers running...

I'm guessing this is the right place to post...

Moving to NZ I left my monitor and TV behind, and now I need to get new ones.

I don't think I need a TV AND a monitor, not at this stage anyway, so I'm thinking I should buy a TV and hook my PC up to it.

I'm thinking of the AOC V27Twhich is a 27 inch TV and retails at about NZ$410. However, it's response time is 5ms, when I've been told that games are better with a lower response time.

So, with that in mind, an alternative is the AOC 2434PW which retails for about NZ$280, and getting a TV tuner in my PC. Thing is, my PC is 4 years old (the one you built me Oil, but with a 8800GTS and ASUS Xonar soundcard put in it) and I was wondering if the tuner would work as well or would it be gimped by the older processor?

And would 3ms difference really be noticable?

I'll be playing WoW and other MMOs, Sims 3, Civ V thru my PC, and Xbox and PS3 shooter and RPG games thru those consoles.

Thanks for any advice!

No, I don't think so.

I remember when my 12ms BenQ monitor (when most were 15ms) was awesome...

the only computer i leave running is the unRAID server. the HTPC's only turn on when i want to watch something.

my power bill isn't a lot... dont have a bill on me atm but compared to before i had the unRAID server + 2x HTPC's (and only had the main desktops), it wasnt a huge amount different. the asrock's dont draw much power.

i used to have my main desktop PC running 24x7 downloading. now i just leave the unRAID server running 24x7 (and hence it only spins up whatever drives it needs) and all my main desktops can go to sleep each night.

the tuner should work fine and imo, 3ms difference isn't noticeable. imo, only the number geeks who want to have the best of everything claim they notice ghosting between 2ms and 5ms. imo.

I think you'll be more than fine with that setup. I used a Dvico HD Digital tuner card in my box a few years ago and it played HD TV perfectly, recorded hi def content perfectly, etc. That box is now about 7 years old (Athlon 64 3000+, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 7600GT) so yours is much better.

I was outputting to an LCD monitor at 1280x768 native resolution though, however with your much beefier video card you should be able to handle that monitor's res of 1920x1080 without a hitch I reckon.

we're about to build a new home and i wanna know what's the best way to go about things when wiring it all up.

this is what im thinking

keep a dedicated media centre in the home theatre with ethernet running from there into al the bedrooms and lounge.
would i be right in doing that? 
all of our tv's run files straight off usb these days, maybe i should just run a usb/hdmi hub from the main MC instead of ethernet, or would they put pressure on the MC box if a few are playing at once?

i guess if i did the usb hubs around the place i could charge my phones etc anywhere too right?

home theatre rookie here so english is awesome!

have a look at my list (first post). if you have multiple entertainment areas (HT, then bedroom, then lounge) then you should look at centralising the storage. you wouldnt want to be lugging around external HDD's to diff areas just to watch stuff. and then what if someone wanted to watch something else in the lounge and you wanted to use the HT... best bet is to centralise it.

easiest option is windows home server which is cheap to buy and easy to setup. it has basic form of redundancy (mirroring) and you can easily dump and share all your movies in there. other options are NAS boxes where you stick in HDD's and it sits on the network. you can also build your own using mediocre hardware and install FreeNAS or unRAID. once this is setup you can just stick it somewhere (in a cupboard for example) and then connect to it remotely using another PC in the house. out of site out of mind. it's just there to store your video files.

at the client end (HT, bedroom, lounge), it depends on how much you want to spend, how much you want to tinker with it, and also how high quality your media is.

for example, if you're dealing with basic avi/xvid files, then a lot of new tv's do DLNA streaming and can just read these files over the network (ethernet) back to your server/centralised storage... this is very basic though and they dont support high def video formats (eg. MKV's). well, afaik anyway (i didnt look into it that much).

if you wanted to spend a bit more, you could look at pre-built boxes that you plug up via ethernet which can handle more formats, look nicer (better gui) and well... they're just nicer. these include the d-link boxee (which is based off XBMC anyway) and a few other variants (eg. Popcorn Hour, etc). you'd need to buy as many of these clients as there are rooms in the house that you want to have stuff playing (eg. 3... HT, lounge and bedroom).

the third option after all of this is to build your own HTPC PC... the two main interfaces to install are: XBMC (which can run standalone on ubuntu, or off ubuntu, or off windows), media portal (which runs off windows), or windows media centre (that comes with some windows). they all look similar but then look different too and can all read all formats that you'd be storing centralised. some require more tinkering than the other. it all comes down to personal preference here. with these HTPC's, youre ultimately having a computer at each of your locations.

a fourth option if you're doing a bit of gaming is to buy multiple PS3's and run PS3 media server on the central storage... its not really pretty and isnt always stable (fairly stable) but can handle all formats. again this will run off ethernet back to the central storage.

with all four of these options, i'd recommend you wire up your house via ethernet. because you're building a new home, to put in ethernet points in your house would be soo easy and cheap. CAT6 runs back to a central point where you'd later have your ADSL router + switch (for the ports). boom. easy.

What's that program your using in the you tune link phorte

XBMC

http://xbmc.org/
http://forum.xbmc.org/

im not really interested in the ps3 option now they have cinavia protection on em.

at the moment my LG plays mkvs just fine with the exception of one or two.

i'd probably look at setting up a nas drive system on the network and not another windows related box seeing as we all run apples here.

what about a mac mini or something like that?  i saw a cool youtube vid today of a guy running one with mame on there as well which would be cool in the home theatre

yea appleTV and mac mini's will do the job too... there are apple variants of XBMC so you can easily put them on there. media portal is windows only so scrub that (i hate windows too). have a look into how apple is supported on the XBMC forums. for some reason, i recall appleTV only supporting XBMC at 720P.

for centralised, you can have one big beast (eg. unRAID or freeNAS) or look at getting multiple smaller NAS boxes and just plugging them into the switch... freeNAS and unRAID will need a bit of tinkering to get up and running and also a bit of tinkering every once in a while to maintain them but the otb NAS boxes you can buy will do the job from the get go (netgear, qnap, synology, thecus, etc...)

The issue with having the media server/centre in a seperate room is you need to ensure you have some sort of remote that isn't infrared.

If you have a lot of movies etc that you want access to pretty easily then a PS3 or a Centralised PC with data storage (like Phorte has suggested) is the way to go. I would recommend the centralised PC and not the PS3 purely for compatibility of many different formats. Also Cinavia will only affect you if you try to play the files directly on the PS3, if you use PS3 Media Server the PS3 doesn't have any idea what is actually being played and therefore can't block it using DRM. You would need to have PS3 Media Server running on a PC/Mac however.

The only issue I really have with the PS3 is MKV files - PS3 Media Server can transcode them and send to the PS3 but it struggles with fast forward, pause and rewind.

Failing that if you don't actually want to purchase something too big and are happy with the interface etc then a WD Live should do the job as well and you can network it back to your central storage pc/notebook. Can also connect USB drives, external hdd's etc and it supports HDMI.

also to note with the WDTV Live is that they struggle with some MKV's too... everyone at work seems ot have them now and when i bring in my movies, they always complain about one or the other. theyve all updated to the latest official firmware too.. other option is to use the custom firmwares for the WDTV Live that iv'e seen floating around too.

I run a simple setup.. PC running PS3MS over ethernet, streams 1080p up to ~10gig fine (majority are 4 - , any format.
Klipsch bi-amp fronts & surrounds.. still need a good center. DB-Dynamics sub.
Yamaha amp, Sony Bravia LED & PS3 320gig.

I love it to be honest.. sub $8g for everything mentioned above. D/l, store & serve off the one box that gives fantastic sound & picture for the lounge. If i want ridiculously large screen and/or 3D I just go to the movies where it's better anyway.

this is my opinion but i will disagree (im sure you meant for your setup but im just talking for my setup). i used to be a massive movie go'er... often 2 movies a week down at marion or norwood cinemas (norwood having the best sound in SA) on  friday's and saturdays (ive always been a big movie goer) and since building my home theatre room, i will never go to the cinema again. since building my home theatre, i went to see tron 3d at the ciname and wish i didnt. ive set my home theatre up to have the best viewing distance and viewing angle for where im sitting... lots of moeny on the sound. and i dont have to put up with some idiot behind me talking, some idiot in front clearing his throat or sniffling all the time.

im happy to wait a few weeks for a 1080P bluray rip to come out (which these days, is how quick it is - i dont bother with screeners or telesyncs) and then i'll enjoy the experience at home.

sick whats the ins and outs of this keen to get this set up

what do i need etc to have it on my tv

Have you even read the thread?

There's plenty of solutions already posted.

Got nothing compared to you phorte - what the fuck do you do for a job and do you need an assistant?

Hitachi full HD 42"
For media - LG blu ray, xbox 360 on hdmi  and an older yamaha dvd player - runs alot of foriegn discs
For sound yamaha reciever and accusound speakers...


keeps me happy



edit - on the LG blu ray i gots a usb in so i run a 1TB portable hd and thats got more than enough movies and tele to keep me amused

I've been running XBMC for a few years now on an amd x2 based pc. Originally ran Mythbuntu but the built in IR receiver on my Antec case was a pain in the ass to get running so switched to windows vista (now 7) and it all works perfectly. Getting to the point now that I have to think about some sort of NAS solution as I'm running 2x2tb hdds in the case, plus an external esata box with with a couple more hdds in there. Would love to get some sort of surround sound setup happening but that will have to wait till I move into my own place.

Tasty set up Phorte!

Since 2006 i have used a very simple HTPC setup in two rooms:

Living room - Mac Mini (now with XBMC) to play the files on a 32" LCD.

Study - Windows XP desktop to download and store the files.

I have networked the two computers together using an ethernet cable via my router and Windows file sharing (ie a home network which the Mac Mini can read and write).

Has served me very well for 5 years but will look to reduce power consumption by phasing out the desktop and buying a NAS drive (2x 2TB).

After running v8 for too long I finally updated to xbmc v10 a few days ago.  Excellent software, so good for open source too... 

It's had a long lifecycle though. It's been nearly ten years I reckon. The old Xbox really drove it's development for a long time.

I remember the days when I was cranking the bleeding edge SVN builds every week or so just to see the new features they were implementing. Easily one of the best open source projects ever IMO.

Easiest way to get started is to use an old PC which outputs video to your TV. Old laptops are good sometimes.

The "Budget" build here: http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/rmp_sg_whirlpoolpcs_htpc will play most things and costs $370 to build.

From there you just move up to nicer cases and quieter builds, network storage for serving media to multiple rooms, building a PC which will play games as well as movies etc...

Be aware that playing movies is a pretty easy task for a modern computer, hence building a PC purely to use for a home theatre setup can be very cheap compared to building a gaming PC or something. The costs can rise as you start to add multiple rooms and central, networked storage etc.

I made up a USB key of XBMC the other day and I've been running it on an old laptop. It's pretty nice, though for some reason it outputs to a small box on my TV, ie. not to the edges. It's mildly annoying. If I used desktop clone/extend via Windows I get it all the way to the edges.

It takes forever to load though, I wish I could get rid of the stupid OS boot select screen which adds a bunch of time to the boot, I thought the idea of a USB key is so you can make that selection manually (as in, remove the key if you don't want to load it!).

XBMC now has a better method of using add-ons, apparently.

http://gizmodo.com/#!5768356/power-up-your-xbmc-installation-with-these-new-add+ons

Reading through this stuff, I might switch to XMBC on my PC (I currently just use Win Media Centre to watch stuff / play music)

 I am upgrading to a new laptop so will be looking at using my old desktop for a media server soon. Trouble is it's noisy as hell so I don;t really want to keep it in the lounge.

 A few years ago I bought an original X-Box to use as a media centre so maybe I can get that up and running.

 

Fans? You can get quiet fans that will probably make a huge difference. I may have a few spare actually...

 
 My pc sounds like a chinook taking off.
 
 

Sounds like whoever built it has NFI what they were doing...

They are seriously awesome as a media centre man! Mine is sitting back home gathering dust but when I was at home it was on nearly 24/7. In fact next time I go back, I'll be bringing it back with me.

The only problem is if you want to play HD content it can't handle it, but everything else is fine. Rename your files correctly and it will download movie info/posters and everything as well, TV shows will collapse into seasons, etc. as well. So handy.

Great for music too.

Grab the latest stable or bleeding edge releases here: http://www.sshcs.com/xbmc/