Silent Freesat HTPC query

[stevedd]

Hi Guys,
I have been dabbling in this field for 7 or 8 years and built several systems. I try each time to produce something quiet with adequate power but have yet to succeed. My most successful ie USEFUL HTPC was an intel celeron micro-atx running XP & MCE2005 on Freesat. It had better functionality than Win 7MCE which keeps crashing on me and I hate the new gui! However it has always been noisy and struggles to keep up with HD TV.
I recently bought a Humax Freesat PVR thinking it would solve all my problems but it is a very poor substitute for my MCE2005 system when it was working well!
I now plan to build my BG3620 tuner card (or my BG3540) in to a fanless Streacom F5 chassis with separate PSU and possibly a SSD + 1 tb HDD.

My question is, what Intel CPU, motherboard and memory would be appropriate for such a system running MCE2005 and XP? I'd likea degree of future proofing but don't want to be cracking nuts with sledgehammers! Bearing in mind that there is only room for one card in this chassis - the tuner card so there has to be a good on board gpu. I have no games requirement.

Also I did struggle on occasions to get the PC to recognise the tuner card and find the channels correctly. Was this issue ever resolved satisfactorily?
BTW I can't use freeview due to being in a poor signal area (Scottish Highlands)
I eagerly await your suggestions!
Steve

[barnabas1969]

Take a look at my thread (link below). This PC will do what you want. It isn't cheap though. So far, I've spent almost $1000.00 US.

http://www.thegreenbutton.tv/forums/vie ... f=7&t=5587

I don't understand why you would want to stay on XP. There are many improvements in Media Center on Win 7.

[milli260876]

You will have to go at least vista for freesat hd...
and basically any sandy/Ivybridge will run a freesat htpc i have a celeron that does hd without issue...
you will only need more processing power if you add extenders.

[asm495]

I've no idea why you had issues with Win 7MCE. It is an improvement in every way over XP MCE.

Anyway, I am running 4 DVB-S2 tuners as FreeSat on Windows 7 and have been for several years. The TV part works really well. I dedicated the 7MCE machine to server duties and only use Extenders (Xbox 360s) for consuming content. I would really only recommend going with Win7. I have an Intel i3 with 8GB of RAM and a SSD boot drive however I'm sure you could get away with less. You don't need a particularly powerful CPU and most onboard graphics are well up to the job. The component that makes everything seem a bit faster is the SSD.

Having said all of that the other aspects, Music and Movies etc. can be quite slow if you have a reasonable collection. I am actively pursuing implementing XBMC with a TV backend instead and using Intel NUCs running OpenElec as front-ends for that. Especially now MCE seems to be a dead product with no new features coming.

[stevedd]

Hi all,
thanks for your comments, all useful.
My needs are not great but I do want a SILENT pc. I've also had enough of cleaning dust out of cases (broke one mini ITX mb in the process!)
My xp pc would occasionally hang and when it did I could simply invoke task manager and shut down then re-start the offending program. Win7 mce just re-boots or hangs giving me only the switch off option. MCE 2005 would allow me to watch say 5 mins of a program then press record and it would record from the beginning. It would also pause a program indefinitely (if I remember right) win7mce and my Humax start recording from the point in the program when I press the button forgetting what went before. They also jump to the current point in the program if paused for about 15 mins losing the earlier part. Finally I hate the useless Win7mce counterintuitive horizontal scroll recorded prog index that has no beginning or end but has pointless thumbnails attached. The ONLY thing I like about Win7mce is the way it automatically goes to sub titles when I mute the sound. I've seen no other benefits, I'm sure there are some but If I can't see them I doubt they are worth having.

Anyway I've started on the road to silence having just bought a 256Gb SSD on ebay and will follow this with the Streacom f5 case, probably an Asus mb and i3 or i5 CPU. I guess 8GB of memory is worth having as memory price these days is so low.
My main worry is that I might not get my Black Gold card to work properly.
Is it safe to check out a SSD by plugging it in externally via a USB adaptor?

[milli260876]

No other benefits? HD is kinda a big deal around these parts....

[milli260876]

Also why would you want to plug the ssd in with usb?? Pretty counterintuitive not enough bandwidth

[barnabas1969]

Hi all,
thanks for your comments, all useful.
My needs are not great but I do want a SILENT pc. I've also had enough of cleaning dust out of cases (broke one mini ITX mb in the process!)
My xp pc would occasionally hang and when it did I could simply invoke task manager and shut down then re-start the offending program. Win7 mce just re-boots or hangs giving me only the switch off option. MCE 2005 would allow me to watch say 5 mins of a program then press record and it would record from the beginning. It would also pause a program indefinitely (if I remember right) win7mce and my Humax start recording from the point in the program when I press the button forgetting what went before. They also jump to the current point in the program if paused for about 15 mins losing the earlier part. Finally I hate the useless Win7mce counterintuitive horizontal scroll recorded prog index that has no beginning or end but has pointless thumbnails attached. The ONLY thing I like about Win7mce is the way it automatically goes to sub titles when I mute the sound. I've seen no other benefits, I'm sure there are some but If I can't see them I doubt they are worth having.

Anyway I've started on the road to silence having just bought a 256Gb SSD on ebay and will follow this with the Streacom f5 case, probably an Asus mb and i3 or i5 CPU. I guess 8GB of memory is worth having as memory price these days is so low.
My main worry is that I might not get my Black Gold card to work properly.
Is it safe to check out a SSD by plugging it in externally via a USB adaptor?

First, if you had a problem with Win7 where it hung and didn't give you any other options... then maybe you had a HARDWARE problem! Windows 7 is widely recognized as being the most stable and useful version of Windows ever. Perhaps your hardware was just too old?

I don't believe your comment about "pause indefinitely". You can increase the pause buffer in Win7. It's just a registry setting.

Also, I question whether or not XP MCE would record from the beginning of the program when the recording was started after watching the program for a while. I definitely miss this feature from the DVR that I had (leased from the cable company), and I would wonder why Microsoft included this in XP, but not Win7.

The Win7 recorded TV menu can be changed. Simply press the Info button on the remote (or press CTRL-D on the keyboard) and choose "view list".

My current HTPC (see the specs at the link in my signature) is silent from a distance of more than 1 meter. The new HTPC that I'm building is just as quiet (search my recent threads). If you want something even quieter, then you need one of the cases from TranquilPC. They are exorbitantly expensive (at those prices, I would expect a supermodel to service my needs in addition to the PC), but require no fans because the entire case is a heat sink.

[WarrenH]

Refer my specs re a Tranquil, I would recommend the Streacom as your next best although once you add in all the components it works out pretty expensive Streacom charge separately for the power board, supply, IR, etc. Make sure you use a lowish powered CPU as you'll only have120 to 150W power, and the box does run very hot. Don't expect to do any gaming.

[stevedd]

Barnabas,
You might be right about the hanging issue.
MCE2005 absolutely definitely recorded from the point when you switched to a channel if you press record at a later time or if you paused for a period then pressed record it would still record from the start. To me this is a major benefit lost with Win7MCE.
Any way even though I hate many aspects of win7 - far too many things changed for no good reason, eg why move the desktop button from one side of the screen to the other? I know it's a minor point but typical of the thinking that runs through the whole of win7. I have seen a comparison of XP and Win7 on another site and grudgingly accept that there are worthwhile reasons to change, driver issues being one.
So I will use win7, do whatever I have to to change the recorded TV menu and suffer the rest.
I plan to use the Streacom FC05evo case with an Asus intel 77 chipset matx motherboard, 2tb 2.5" HDD, 256gb SSD, 8gb memory.
Thanks again for all the comments.

[mark1234]

I've run both MCE2005 and 7MC for ~4 years each and the TV playback experience is very similar, almost identical, between them. The only real difference I can think is that 7MC has better skipping functionality and the x1.5 playback speed.

Both will only record from the point at which you press record and both pause for 30 minutes by default - both can be hacked to change this buffer. MCE2005 did have a plug in to change the record behaviour; I never tried it to see how well it worked.

See here for the plug in: http://experts.windows.com/frms/windows ... 48493.aspx

The transition from MCE2005 to 7MC isn't painless (the "Other showings" functionality in 7MC is effectively broken when compared to MCE2005) but on balance I much prefer 7MC.

--EDIT--

One other thing that's useless in 7MC is the option to record at around x time. In MCE2005 this was +/-2 hours and it was an option I used a lot. 7MC changes this to +/-15 minutes and it's become a feature I never use anymore. Though, I think the recording scheduler is better to compensate for this.

[barnabas1969]

I understand the attraction to a fanless chassis, but when you can build a PC that you cannot hear from a reasonable distance in a case that sells for almost half the price, I wonder why you would do that. I sit 10 feet (3 meters) from my HTPC, and I cannot hear it. Sure, I have to blow the dust out of it every 6 months, but that's not too much work.

I looked up the Streacom FC5OD Evo at quietpc.com. It sells for 179.16 GBP. I paid $135 USD for the Morex 887 plus $30 USD for the heat sink and fan. That's 107.94 GBP.