MediaBox Blog

What do we ask of a great media centre PC? Well the purpose if this blog is to find out just that.

My mind has been in gear now for some time to setup the perfect media centre/home theatre PC. I have been doing lots of research over the last 12 months on various pieces of software and hardware that I will be using. Now that I have decided to take the plunge I thought it would be good idea to document the good, the bad, and the ugly. What better way than using a blog!

Follow up:

So, what will you find here? Well anything and everything that I can muster during the creation and maintenance of a perfect HTPC that I hope someday will help others do the same.

So let’s cut to the chase. I’m sure you don’t want to hear me ramble on about the perfect media centre PC for paragraphs on end so let’s start with what I will be looking for in a HTPC

Looks
First and most important in my opinion is looks. I want a media centre that will fit in with the rest of my AV equipment

Cost
I also don’t want to sell my left kidney to come up with the money to finance this project, so I will be trying to keep the cost down to a minimum, but doesn’t sacrifice the looks too much

Reliability
I’m sure we all can agree that we would like a reliable media centre that doesn’t need rebooting every 5 minutes

Features
Plenty of features is a must, I would like to play the most up-to-date common video and audio formats both from optical media and local hard disks, display photo albums on screen, play some of the old classic arcade games and watch/record live TV as I currently do with my current Sky+ subscription (TiVo for our friends on the other side of the pond).

Ease of Use
A media centre that is not intuitive enough for even the biggest of technophobes won’t cut it, so my aim is to make it easy to use once setup.

So with the above points in consideration, this is the hardware that I have decided to go ahead and buy (or in some cases recycled from older machines) for the first stage of my setup.

• Omaura TF5 HTPC Case (£125)
• Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H Motherboard (£55)
• Recycled AMD X2 4200 CPU from and older PC
• 2x512GB of DDR2 5300 from an older PC
• A homebrew IR receiver using a TSOP1736 for the remote control

The Omaura TF5 case will take a mATX or Mini-ITX motherboard and also has a built in USB card reader.

Here are some pictures of the Omaura TF5 to get your taste buds tingling.

I did find some other nice looking cases like the mCubed HFX, but that conflicted too much with my second goal of keeping the cost down. So I think the TF5 was a good balance between cost and looks.

There are a few extras you can purchase for the TF5, like the OLED display kit and an IR receiver kit, but again, I am trying to keep to my second goal, so I decided not to go ahead with them for now. You may be asking yourself "An IR receiver is a must though", and you would be correct, but I have opted to go for a home brew IR receiver connected to the CD-In on the motherboard(more on that later)

I have chosen the GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard for my media centre pc for two reasons,

1. It has the RS780G (Radeon HD3200) IGP so no need for an add-on video card
2. By using the RS780G it opens up the possibility of connecting the media centre to your display via HDMI (with sound too!).

It's an all round board with plenty of connectivity options which should suit a media centre PC quite nicely.

So that’s it for now, on my next post I will cover some of the software I intend on using for the media centre PC, and to follow that will be my findings into using the IR receiver via the CD-In port on the motherboard.

Ciao for now....