Terence's @rchive

The basic hardwares needed to setup a HTPC are a TV Tuner Card and a Display Card with TV-Out Capability. There are alot of TV Tuner Card in the market but to be able to control Astro (use HTPC to change Astro channels), a TV Tuner Card that bundles an IR Blaster is needed. So far I only know Hauppauge PVR-150MCE and PVR-500MCE include an IR blaster in the package.

My Hardwares:

• Pentium III 933 Mhz Processor (Existing)
• Asus Geforce 4 MX 440 with TV-Out (Existing)
• 384GB SDRAM (Existing)
• 80GB Samsung 2MB Cache Hard Disk (Got it free when I subscribed HWM during PC Fair)
• DVD-ROM (Existing)
• Panasonic 21″ TV (Existing)
• On board sound (Existing)
• Hauppauge PVR-150MCE TV Tuner Card with IR Blaster and Remote (RM 499)
• Logitech Wireless Keyboard and Mouse (Existing)

Setting up the connections between HTPC, TV and Astro:

Install the Hauppauge PVR-150MCE card into a PCI slot. Preferbly the 1st or 2nd slot according to the card’s manual.

Various input options of Hauppauge PVR-150MCE and output options of my display card.

Connect a composite out cable (AV cable. The yellow, red and white head cable) from Astro AV out to the TV-Tuner card Composite In (AV In). If your video card has a S-Video Out port, you will need a S-Video to Composite converter in order to connect your TV’s composite in (AV In). There are many ways to output your HTPC’s display to the TV, S-Video Out to TV’s S-Video In, Composite Out to TV’s Composite In and etc. As long as the out and in ports are different you will need a converter cable to connect them. Even S-Video has variations of 5-pins and 9-pins. Find the right cable to connect your TV and display card. Then use a 3.5mm Jack to 2 RCA Composite Cable to line out your HTPC’s audio to the TV or speakers.

Connect the composite cables from your display and sound card to your TV’s AV Input.

Next connect the IR receiver to the USB port of your HTPC and stick the IR blaster on the Astro decoder’s infrared receiver.

The IR blaster from another angle.

With these hardwares, I am able to run my HTPC smoothly. Performance while watching and recording Astro programme is very good, just like watching Astro direct from the decoder to TV. But I experience slow performance when I try to multitask my HTPC by watching Astro and running other applications like Internet Explorer. I guess I’m demanding too much from it. But this setup is definately good enough to be a dedicated media player for Astro, DVDs, musics, pictures and MPEG4 shows.

Recommended Hardwares (My target):

• Samsung 32″ R7 LCD TV or similar LCD TV with HDMI inputs. (RM 4998)
• Intel Core Duo or AMD AM2 X2 Processor (Budget RM 600)
• 1GB DDR2 RAM (RM 320)
• HTPC Casing (Budget RM 3-500)
• A SLI/Crossfire and RAID capable motherboard that can fit into the HTPC casing (Budget RM 400)
• A display card capable of HDMI output or at minimum DVI-out. (Budget RM 700)
• 2 x 250GB HDD on RAID 1 configuration (2x RM 300)
• Creative XFI Extreme Music sound card (RM 450)
• Logitech Z5500 THX/DTS 6 piece speaker (RM 1500)
• Microsoft Wireless Keyboard for Windows MCE (RM 350)
• 802.11g Adapter Card (RM 100)

When I get my LCD TV, I will slowly upgrade my system to the above setup because I can’t get all at 1 go, cash flow issue. With FFDshow on a better hardware setup, it is possible to do post processing on video (Astro, DVDs, MP4s) signals to upscale it to HDTV quality. On top of upscaling, FFDshow is also capable of sharpening video outputs to make them very clear like the demo videos the shops used for LCD/Plasma TV demo. I tried to enable post processing on FFDshow to sharpen Astro shows, the frame rates drops like crazy and video became jerky because my CPU cannot handle the load.

Other than TV functionality, I would like that be able to play PC games on my HTPC as well. That’s why I budgeted RM700 for the display card. Imagine playing Need for Speed Most Wanted on a big screen using a sterring wheel. That will be really fun. Coupled with a good sound card and speaker combination, my HTPC will be able to deliver very good sound for not only the games but videos and musics as well.

The large HDD drive serve as a recording media to store hours of shows from Astro, musics, photos and downloaded movies. Running RAID 1 configuration will greatly protect me from losing all the data in the hard disk and save me precious time from reconfiguring the entire system again in the case of Hard disk failure.

Although I have a set of wireless keyboard and mouse, Remote Keyboard for Windows MCE by Microsoft is still worth getting. It has built in function keys that integrates very well with Windows Media Center and its looks alot nicer and cooler than my Logitech Keyboard. Bottom line this keyboard is designed to be used when sitting on a couch. A must have for me when my HTPC is capable of doing more things than plain watching shows. Check out the screenshots of the keyboard. You will want 1 if you have a HTPC with Windows MCE. (Pictures taken from this review):

Part 1, Introduction
Part 2, Hardware Setup
Part 3, Software Setup

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.