HTPC questions

[jayn_j]

My son is starting college and convinced me to get him a new laptop suitable for engineering. That means his gaming PC is now mine for HTPC uses.

Quad core. Currently has 750 GB drive, pretty heavy graphics card (I think GEForce 98XX series), TV tuner (analog and digital). VISTA. Graphics card does have HDMI and second monitor support.

I have a 2 TB drive ready to go in. I also picked up an LG combo BD/HD-DVD drive and installed it last night. Looking at it, I will probably need to upgrade power supply before adding the second drive.

OK, here are the questions:
1. Is VISTA sufficient, or should I be looking at upgrading to windows 7?
2. Is AnyDVD my best bet for ripping to HD.
3. Need recommendations for cataloging/launching software for files ripped to HD.
4. Best player for BD/HD-DVD material?

I would like to go where Don has been discussing with ripping my library onto HD. I'd like a cataloging solution with cover flow and info to select. Would prefer to rip just the movie and bypass the menuing/extras in most cases. I still have the discs for all of that as I'm not trying to bootleg, just make access more convenient. Eventually, I'd like to set up a flow where I could stream intro material, cartoon, movie and exit music seamlessly.

Anything else?

 

[dfergie]

Actually, my thoughts think using this pc to rip with and get a popcorn hour, it will play the BD's as is & the HD DVD's when converted to mkv's , AnyDvd & MakeMkv for ripping...
I put all my HD DVD / mkv's on one EHDD in a folder titled that, BD, Iso's & Hauppauge files the same.

 

[dfergie]

Right now I have 2 EHD's connected to this pc, one is a 1.5 TB & one 2 TB

 

[jayn_j]

Just looked at the popcorn hour on Amazon. Makes me nervous that there are the same number of 1 star reviews as 5 star reviews (15 each) and not much in between. Negative reviews seem to be from folks who are fairly tech savvy and seem to say that this thing is still a proto with lots of bugs.

 

[mdram]

windows media center on win7 is amazing, id upgrade just for that

 

[dfergie]

Ask Mike123abc about his... I rarely watch BDs from a player as the popcorn plays them flawlessly & when through can watch something else immediately with no disc swapping etc... plus my HD DVD players are 1080i, I can watch the mkv's in 1080p ...

 

[diogen]

A gaming rig is way overkill for today's HTPC.
A miniITX-based board with onboard Intel video is enough...

>>>>> 1. Is VISTA sufficient, or should I be looking at upgrading to windows 7?
Get Win7. Home Premium should be enough.
And start with its Media Center as the 10' interface. Go from there...
>>>>> 2. Is AnyDVD my best bet for ripping to HD.
If you plan to buy and rip BD's going forward - yes.
If you just need to rip a handful and be done - there are free tools...
>>>>> 3. Need recommendations for cataloging/launching software for files ripped to HD.
Media Browser. MyMovies ain't bad either. Both are MC plug-ins...
>>>>> 4. Best player for BD/HD-DVD material?
For DRM-less rips? WMP does a decent job. MPC-HC has more configuration options.
A lot depends on how you want to process audio...

Diogen.

 

[jayn_j]

A gaming rig is way overkill for today's HTPC.
A miniITX-based board with onboard Intel video is enough...

>>>>> 4. Best player for BD/HD-DVD material?
For DRM-less rips? WMP does a decent job. MPC-HC has more configuration options.
A lot depends on how you want to process audio...

Diogen.

Thanks for the response. I know the graphics card is overkill, but I expect it will still be used to play games down there.

I want to process audio through HDMI into my Onkyo 8506. I am willing to look at other solutions.

 

[diogen]

I want to process audio through HDMI into my Onkyo 8506. I am willing to look at other solutions.

The lossless soundtrack (DTS-MA for most BD releases of movies not older than 10 years) can be either
bitstreamed (what you want) or decoded in the HTPC and spit out as LPCM.
Both can be done today on an HTPC. HDMI can carry both. Don't know about NVidia cards, but ATI can handle it since the 5xxx series.
I prefer bitstreaming, i.e. keep the signal (audio and video) in the digital domain as long as possible...

Have a look at ffdshow-tryouts.
They will help practically any DirectX player - 7MC, MPC-HC, etc. - to bitstream lossless audio to the AVR for decoding...

Diogen.

 

[diogen]

Before you start loading up on storage, consider detaching the hard drives
from the playback devices, being it HTPC or standalones, i.e. use NAS.
This way you might be able to access the media even with players like this.
They won't do lossless audio (yet) but can handle the hidef picture just fine.

Diogen.

 

[mike123abc]

The popcornhour box to get is the C-200. It does an excellent job playing back BDs that have been ripped. It does full 1080p with lossless sound via HDMI. But, it is not like a GoogleTV box or Roku box for watching stuff over the internet. It really is specialized to playing back local (LAN or attached) videos, not surfing the web. I do not see netflix any time soon on it. I love it because I can watch any BD, DVD or HDDVD I have (getting close to 500 now) without having to get up and find it and put it in a player. I can simply move it to any TV in my house and all my movies follow since they are served off a fileserver in my basement.

AnyDVD is the only program I use to rip BDs.