DIY HTPC w/ XBMC

mdaudioguy

Anyone here doing this? Built myself a little streamer this week with an Intel NUC kit. Easy and fun. Now, what to do with it?

mdaudioguy

This:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-kit-dc3217iye.html

With 4GB RAM, 128GB mSATA SSD, running Ubuntu 12.04.

EndersShadow

LOL... yes I did this, built a cost no object HTPC using a AMD A6 FM1 APU. Worked great!

Due to the needing cash for bills had to sell it.

Planning to build another one based on the AMD FM2 APU motherboards and chips paired with a using a Fractal Design Node 304 case which will allow me to have 6 3.5" hard drives or in my case 5 x 3.5" 3TB drives + 1 2.5" 120 gig SSD.

Hoping I can start building it after we get into our house.

I went with Windows for XBMC so I didnt have to worry as much about driver issues with any USB DAC I wanted to try with the system. It also made it easier to be able to listen to MOG/Pandora/Youtube, etc.

Now what you need to do with it is build a BIG server to store all your FLAC files and then start tweaking your XBMC and possibly install JRiver so you can add digital room correction while still getting a bit perfect file.

msg

cool! how do you interface with it? and what services do you have set up? got any on-screen photos or anything like that?

mdaudioguy wrote: »

This:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-motherboards/desktop-kit-dc3217iye.html

With 4GB RAM, 128GB mSATA SSD, running Ubuntu 12.04.

EndersShadow

msg wrote: »

cool! how do you interface with it? and what services do you have set up? got any on-screen photos or anything like that?

I used it as a portable headphone rig at work paired with a VGA monitor (never used) and a 7" touchscreen USB monitor (Mimo 720S). I used XBMC to play all my local files (off a 1TB HDD) and Firefox to play MOG. I navigated everything with the USB touchscreen.

Beyond that I didnt do much with it. I had plans to add a small Logitech DiNovo Mini keyboard so I could post on forum's, etc w it but didnt.

I do however still run XBMC on my main PC which is connected via coaxial to my Sunfire TGP-II pre-amp. I use a Logitech DiNovo Edge keyboard to control any/all playback currently, but am working on getting my Logitech Harmony One remote to work with a IR reciever that I have connected to the PC so I can control at least XBMC navigation through that.

XBMC also has a app for iOS and IIRC Android that lets you use your phone to control everything as long as they are both on the same wireless network.

If you truly want to see what it can do, head over to the XBMC forums and see what they all got going on. It can do some pretty wicked stuff. I was mostly focused on 2 channel audio, but in the future I can see myself creating a big NAS and storing rips of all my DVD's and blu-rays on it as MKV's to access through streaming devices in all the rooms I need it.

nguyendot

I have a REVO RL100 as one client, an when clients decommission old i3 or higher laptops I grab those up and install XBMCuntu (or whatever it's called) and plug the HDMI into my TV/theater.

I interface with it using my android phone with the XBMC remote app that shows all the IMDB and cover info for the media.

I am building a NAS to house this all, but I see no point currently to build a standalone box when a repurposed laptop is cheaper and requires almost no configuration. Given, if I did not have that option I would build something mini-itx or the NUC like above in a heartbeat.

TurboGTU

I've had a few boxes running XBMCbuntu, in the last few months however I picked up a raspberry pi and am running RaspbMC. All my files are out on a file server, it's working well enough that I may pick up 1 or 2 more for other rooms.

strider

What a timely post. I'm pretty certain I fried the mobo in my computer doing something stupid the other day. Won't power on at all now. For what I used the computer for, which is mainly running JRiver Media Center and Firefox to watch Netflix the computer was way over spec'ed. I could swap the RAM and SSD into one of the NUC series and replace the big box case with fans.

I like this one as it has USB 3.0 slots: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102053

mccarty250

TurboGTU, what type of performance are you getting out of the RaspBerryPi architecture? I've been curious about that. I haven't really seen any performance issues on just about any architecture that was intel/amd based since it appears that hardware acceleration takes care of most of the video playback on most platforms but the Pi is so miniscule that I was curious.

I just helped a friend build yet another XBMC server recently, this time we went with a nice little Lenovo unit that was comparable to a Zotac Zbox in specs and price.

With those of you using ubuntu, have you had success getting IR and standard keymapping going with a logitech harmony?

I've gone all wintel and windows 7 for my builds since I'm dangerous with linux but not having sysadmin level expertise on the platform. One of my buddies however is pretty dangerous with Linux and ended up after a 6-8 months struggle with tons of IR issues falling back to wintel. Unfortunate considering I'd prefer not to have to pay for an OS.

To the OP, I wouldn't spend a lot on any type of box with massive horsepower. If you can play 1080p video without stutter you've got enough ponies for anything within the XBMC realm. If you get a logitech harmony remote and microsoft MCE complaint IR eye you can map everything conceivable to the harmony and have a lot of customization. I do literally everything within XBMC via my remote without needing a mouse/keyboard. On the rare occasion where I want to interact with the OS I just remote desktop in and do what I need to do. If you go with windows and end up with starter addition or a version with no RDP support then just install free vnc and you can remotely admin it that way.

For a file server, you don't need anything potent or fancy there at all. If you have the bucks and want redundancy you can get a NAS or you can build a PC and use a software raid system. Myself I just pile up stacks of whatever external USB hard drive is the cheapest bang for the buck as I need to expand and make sure to occasionally back up my data between USB externals. I then create a share pointing to my repositories. Youc an spend as much as you like or can get away with being cheap, you can get as fancy as you want with the server or can keep it simple. You don't have to go crazy to get a good set up going.

mdaudioguy

strider wrote: »

What a timely post. I'm pretty certain I fried the mobo in my computer doing something stupid the other day. Won't power on at all now. For what I used the computer for, which is mainly running JRiver Media Center and Firefox to watch Netflix the computer was way over spec'ed. I could swap the RAM and SSD into one of the NUC series and replace the big box case with fans.

I like this one as it has USB 3.0 slots: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102053

Hey Ben! Sorry about the mishap. FYI, these take laptop memory and the tiny mSATA solid state drives. I think the one you linked is the newer generation. Micro Center off of Joppa Road had a good sale on the previous models, which is what I got. They may still have some.

mdaudioguy

http://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=Intel+nuc&N=#

Here you go.

EndersShadow

I too am curious about the PI.

John I AM hopefully building another standalone system next year. I will have to bring it over once I am done.

I also know Jonathan is going to be building one soon as well.

mccarty250

EnderShadow, the folks at work that evaluated the Pi had poor experiences with performance when performing mundane operations so I am kind of concerned with their performance, I would like to hear a fresh eval of the platform here. On the other hand, I don't think you need to BUILD anything for your HTPC, if you're not gaming on it and it's just for media with a few hundred bucks you can get a smaller footprint appliance-like unit and save a love of money. No reason to over-engineer, just need to be able to play 192/24 files and 1080p videos unless it's doing double duty as a gaming rig IMO.

As far as bringing a system over you know that my opinion lies with that of a few others that may have spoken to you - should you decide to sell a system going forward please remove acquired media that you've gotten from others before passing it on. Your decisions can effect more than just you, they can effect some of your benefactors as well.

TurboGTU

Well, for the PI, there are some things about it performance wise that can be limiting. The first thing is the memory card you use, if you make the same mistake I did and get a class 4 memory card (those available at the likes of walmart, target, etc) you WILL have performance issues. I ended up using a usb stick I had laying around and using the sd card as a boot drive, performance was much improved after that. I also turned off many of some of the services, samba mainly, can't remember the others.

All of my library is stored on a FreeNAS file server (for now, working on an Ubuntu Server that will be able to do transcoding for me, and also run MySQL so I can have a shared XBMC database) so I have no local files stored on the PI besides the XBMC operating system files and database. I have probably about 350 movies in my library, and maybe 400 tv episodes. Many are sd rips from my dvd collection, but there are a few files in there at 720p. All files are mkv h264 encoded and have had no video performance issues.

The only probably I have so far is menu performance. I "think" this may be remedied somewhat when I move the database off the usb stick and onto my file server. The menu performance for some is what will make or break the device, for me it hasn't been a problem.

Harmony Remote: this is related because I am in fact using my harmony 600 with my RaspBMC install. Here is a link to the remote I bought: http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Microsoft-Center-Control-Receiver/dp/B006TPPVKE/

It isn't available, but pretty much any remote that will work with WMC can be made to work with XMBC. I simply programed my device and a WMC device and it worked without any messing around. This was also the case when I was running XBMCbuntu (which should be very similar to running it on Ubuntu with an XBMC install from package manager).

Hopefully this gives you guys some info, I put off the pi for quite awhile, but finally bit the bullet (I mean, it's only $40 bucks right) and it's nice to not have the computer sitting in the living room anymore. Good Luck!

EndersShadow

mccarty250 wrote: »

EnderShadow, the folks at work that evaluated the Pi had poor experiences with performance when performing mundane operations so I am kind of concerned with their performance, I would like to hear a fresh eval of the platform here. On the other hand, I don't think you need to BUILD anything for your HTPC, if you're not gaming on it and it's just for media with a few hundred bucks you can get a smaller footprint appliance-like unit and save a love of money. No reason to over-engineer, just need to be able to play 192/24 files and 1080p videos unless it's doing double duty as a gaming rig IMO.

Gotcha, my reason for building is more that well, I am a builder at heart. The other reason is again this unit will be taken to work so its got to stand alone w/ lots of HDD's and function like a NAS. If its just a streaming device I do totally understand, hence interest in the PI for my house (where media is stored elsewhere). Right now I use a Squeezebox classic for my media downstairs, but when we move who knows.

mccarty250 wrote: »

As far as bringing a system over you know that my opinion lies with that of a few others that may have spoken to you - should you decide to sell a system going forward please remove acquired media that you've gotten from others before passing it on. Your decisions can effect more than just you, they can effect some of your benefactors as well.

Understand. Not planning on selling any more systems I build.... that was a one time thing as a result of unfortunate circumstances that hopefully should not be repeated in the future.

mccarty250

TurboGTU, it sounds like you have done things as optimally as could have been done using that platform. Even when storing your DB remotely when you first add your music it seems like the initial scan (initial being the operant word) takes as long as if the refresh was done local but then subsequently there is a gain/advantage. For the Pi scenario I bet that really helps. Not running samba would probably be a hindrance in my scenario considering my shares are SMB based but for others not locked into the Wintel world it sounds like this may be viable. Have you tried any 1080p files?

It sounds like you did what I did as far as remotes, bought an MCE compliant remote and then programmed it on your harmony. My buddy was having tons and tons of issues running an MCE IR eye with Ubuntu. I'm not sure why but he switched back to windows as a result after fighting for months and he's pretty linux saavy.

Thanks for the write-up, much appreciated. I am sure the total cost of the Pi was tiny! BTW, did your Pi have any form of digital audio out besides HDMI?

TurboGTU

HDMI is the only digital out of any kind (video and audio). Otherwise it has a composite video out, and a head phone jack.

The initial setting up of the XBMC library for me was brutal. The scanning and updating of the library pretty well maxes out the PI, so doing anything while this is happening is pretty much not going to happen. I really think moving the database to a file server is going to be a bit of a bump, but time will tell, I've kind of stalled on this project as I've been doing a lot of wiring on my home network (just added a rack with a punch down panel so my solid core wires don't go right to the switch).

When I say I turned off samba, I mean samba on the PI, having all my stuff on a file server, I have no reason to copy files to a drive mounted on the PI, hence it being unnecessary. If on the rare chance I do need to push stuff to the PI, I still have ssh enabled so I'll just use scp. My shares on my file server are samba being that I also have windows pc's in the house and they also need access.

Remotewise, here's an option I've seen mentioned many times on the PI forums as well and is supported out of the box by it. I've heard people having good luck with it on linux as well. Flirc: http://flirc.tv/product/flirc/

mccarty250

That answers my other questions. The gain from centralizing the library wasn't as awesome as I thought it was. I figured that any type of scan on the Pi would render concurrent playback impossible/unusable. One of my biggest complaints about XBMC is that they keep moving forward with new versions when they need to circle back and fix the things that there are issues with currently.

That is a GREAT link, I will pass that on to my buddy, maybe he'll restart his crusade!

TurboGTU

I don't think the scanning is that bad in xmbc itself. When I was running XMBCbuntu I could do a library scan and put a movie on and watch it just fine, and actually you "can" do that with the PI as well. Obviously it has a caveat to it though, the processor is spiked while doing the scan, this makes moving through the menus difficult and a pain in the butt. However, if you do manage to get to a movie and hit play, the movie will play just fine as the gpu is doing nothing during the scan task and that is what runs your movie, the scan will keep going in the background. So basically you can't do anything, but if you wait for the lagging menus while scanning you can play a movie.

My biggest reason for central is I plan to have multiple devices going at some point (wife, kids, 2 tv areas, it'll come up).

On last up for the PI: with the tiny bit of electricity that it uses, it is an always on device for me. There is no waiting for the HTPC to boot up if you don't like it sucking up power when not in use. It uses less power than a cell phone charging (which I'm actually using a cell phone charger to power it).

Glad I could help anyone looking into this, with all the research I've done, good to save other people some time.

mccarty250

That makes total sense to me, I know that most of the movies are GPU offloaded for acceleration but I figured there would be some small component that actually hit the proc and when the proc is that small...you know what I'm getting at.

You're in a similar situation to me. In my HT I have a legit wintel XBMC box, in 3 other rooms I have WDTV Live's hitting the same collection and of course whatever PC's or laptops are in different areas.

I like the idea of always on, no dealing with sleep or wake up BS. I'm still concerned with the 1080p x.264 playback at this stage. What was the price of a pi? Man, you are full of good info, thank you.

strider

mdaudioguy wrote: »

Hey Ben! Sorry about the mishap. FYI, these take laptop memory and the tiny mSATA solid state drives. I think the one you linked is the newer generation. Micro Center off of Joppa Road had a good sale on the previous models, which is what I got. They may still have some.

Yeah, it happens. Another excuse to upgrade I guess. I caught that about the memory and the drive size, guess it can't always be easy. Still, spec'ed with new 128GB SSD, Bluetooth/wireless card, and 8GB RAM it's in the low $500's at Newegg. The form factor is really appealing on these, I'm so ready to not have to look at another huge box on my rack. I still haven't gotten over to Micro Center yet, it's only 5 minutes up the road from me.

EndersShadow

mccarty250 wrote: »

What was the price of a pi? Man, you are full of good info, thank you.

Newegg actually sells em now

http://www.newegg.com/LatestGreatest/PromotionStore/ID-2035401?Tpk=raspberry%20pi

mccarty250

Interesting, one of them is going for 46 with a 16 gig flash card....sounds like an entire turn key solution if all you want is HDMI out.

EndersShadow wrote: »

Newegg actually sells em now

http://www.newegg.com/LatestGreatest/PromotionStore/ID-2035401?Tpk=raspberry%20pi

TurboGTU

Don't know if anybody is still interested, but I finally got my setup the way I want it. There is a nice tutorial on doing the shared mysql database. I finally got my new file server up and running to replace FreeNAS, I'm very happy with the performance of Ubuntu Server. Much snappier while browsing files over the share as well. I got MySQL 5.5 installed and set up the advancedsettings.xml for xmbc on the pi and my laptop. Performance of the pi reading from the database is WAY better than from the flash card. Still not near what a normal desktop will do, but very usable.

In other news, I managed to get my Raspbmc Pi playing through the Xbox One without locking up. You can find the setting here: http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=11350

Anyway, if you have a setup where you can do it, I'd say a a shared database for the pi is going to help. Let me know if you need any more info, it's quite easy to get setup.

mccarty250

That is a great update! Wow, that opens things up for very very cheap media streaming if you don't need optical out. Perhaps a pi will come out that has some form of spdif that will make it suitable for DAC/digital audio output.

nguyendot

I picked up an OUYA last weekend at Goodwill (cheap). It may have failed as a gaming box, but for XBMC it's a beast. I got som eof the streaming stuff set up on it (navi-x) and so far it's awesome.

Cancel cable soon? Who knows....hehe

maximillian

The sub-$100 XBMC streamers is difficult. This is why I am still running an original Xbox with Xbmc and also use a WD TV Streaming Live for HD content. I found the Raspberry Pi and the Rikomagic MK802 II to be lacking for HD. Last time I tried was months ago so it might be better now. I know the MK802 has been updated a couple times by now so maybe it's better. They had a hard time getting hardware acceleration to work last time I knew.

So I am waiting a little longer for the "perfect" device. The Ouya is an interesting device. I also grabbed this in anticipation:
http://flirc.tv/

since using a "standard" remote control is a must. I would be interested to know other options.

TurboGTU

mccarty250 wrote: »

That is a great update! Wow, that opens things up for very very cheap media streaming if you don't need optical out. Perhaps a pi will come out that has some form of spdif that will make it suitable for DAC/digital audio output.

Raspbmc supports external sound cards such as usb ones.

Maybe something from here would be usable: http://www.raspyfi.com/the-right-usb-dac-for-your-raspberry-pi/

EndersShadow

TurboGTU wrote: »

Raspbmc supports external sound cards such as usb ones.

Maybe something from here would be usable: http://www.raspyfi.com/the-right-usb-dac-for-your-raspberry-pi/

Wonder how my dacmagic would sound through it....

May have to give it a go sometime and just buy one of these puppies..

TurboGTU

EndersShadow wrote: »

Wonder how my dacmagic would sound through it....

May have to give it a go sometime and just buy one of these puppies..

From the little bit I've read about the PI and using a dac through usb, you may want to get a powered hub to take the strain off whatever power supply you use for the PI.
Some links that may interest you EndersShadow:
1. http://www.raspyfi.com/
2. http://www.raspyfi.com/the-best-raspberry-pi-power-supply/ <-- Info on power supply's with raspberry pi.