New Toy

bretty

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Jul 20, 2007
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Hey all,

Ive just taken delivery of a HTPC, that i'd had a local company custom build for me. I got it because after my Boxee Box died, last year, I discovered XBMC and loved the beauty of it. Problem was I couldnt get it to run smoothly when playing full fat, HD films with HD audio soundtracks. I tried numerous media players, and none of them had enough grunt to perform the job adequately.

The cost of all the components wasnt particularly cheap, coming in at around £700, but if I was to buy a machine off the rack with similar, it would cost at least double, so it's a good deal really, especially when you consider that it's a windows 7 pc, as well as a media player. Also it's got a 4.3 inch touchscreen interface on the front of the case, just for the gadget lover in me!

The guy that built it for me told me on the phone before I picked it up that it was like lightening, and he wasnt lying. It less than 20 seconds to boot up. My laptop takes 2 minutes!

But, the nicest surprise for me has been the improvement in audio and visual quality, over all the media players i've had in the past. Pictures are more colourful and crisp. The sound though has had a more dramatic improvement. The sound coming from my fronts was always locatable to those speakers, but now the sound is being thrown out wider than the speakers, sounding like it's coming from the side walls, instead. When I put some music on, the amount of detail coming through, especially on vocals and strings, as well as realism of drums actually made me pull a Robbie Williams smirk. So good! without doing a side by side, id say its pretty darned close to my hifi, which is very, very, very good.

Ill try and post a picture. it's been a while, so bear with me........

10351328_10204426531596089_4208874442679244131_n.jpg


If anyone likes the idea of a HTPC, and wants to know what went into this, let me know and i'll pass it along.
 
A

Anderson

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Nice case! I built myself a HTPC sometime ago with all the usual bells and whistles and it incredibly useful. However I've found myself relying less on it for media consumption of late. This is mostly because I have been moving everything to the cloud. For music I solely use Google Play Music, pictures go to Google + back up and films I do Netflix. I've got 600 albums roughly 5.5 thousand tracks and about 7 thousand pictures all on Google. Films I'm using my PS4 for blue rays and Netflix for general viewing.

Congratulations on your new toy!
 

john1000000boy

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Sep 17, 2007
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Something I have never thought of... A HTPC. Was that cost including hard drives??

Can you stream all media through the home from this unit?? Seems quite reasonable money for such a multi purpose unit. Player, Storage etc. lowers the box count too.

Very nice

john
 
A

Anderson

Guest
john1000000boy said:
Something I have never thought of... A HTPC. Was that cost including hard drives??

Can you stream all media through the home from this unit??  Seems quite reasonable money for such a multi purpose unit.  Player, Storage etc. lowers the box count too.?

Very nice

john
Yes you can.

I've used both Windows and Ubuntu on mine. Truth be told Ubuntu was better but thats another discussion.

I had mine configured to turn on when my phone connected to the home WiFi network using WOL.

The girls all have android tablets and phones. I forget the name of the Android app I used but they were able to view my shared media folders on the HTPC and stream whatever they wanted at will. It was handy enough.

You could know yourself together a discreet HTPC with nice case for about £450 but sky is the limit in terms of cost. OPs case would have cost a fair whack of his total budget.
 

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