Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler HTPC

I’ve found that Chris’ way is the most efficient and cost effective because it allows you to try before you buy.

I made an HTPC with the intent of eventually ripping everything CD and DVD but found the process is just to labourious for the convenience and wow factor it gives. Most things BD and SACD I enjoy are things that I spend time with so the convenience of switching them quickly is pointless for me. The stuff I do find convenient to have quickly switch able are audio files I want to listen to casually where the most important feature to me becomes the media manager I use. It’s also convenient to quickly switch between music videos but for everything else the time I would have wasted ripping would never have been recouped in watching.

As far as H.264 MKV they look and sound fine but I’ve never A/B compared the audio to something playing in my BDP83. I have compared PQ and as long as the PC video signal is HDMI I think it looks almost as good as a regular BD. Just a guess but I imagine the audio isn’t as good since the sound card is usually the weakest link in most HTPCs.

However, I still use the HTPC more than all the rest of my equipment combined since I capture tens of thousands of songs from streaming radio each year and use it to watch various online content from the likes of Hulu, Netflix and others.

The biggest advantage isn’t the HTPC itself but rather the NAS I store stuff on. Having over 6TB of storage space is cool though it runs out very quickly. The other advantage is being able to access it remotely over the internet is great when on long trips overseas since most of my music and over 4 TB of compressed video is a few mouse clicks away almost anywhere in the world. Now if I can just figure out how to login to is from my new phone I’ll have it made.

Also an HTPC can double as a good gaming machine.

I think the main advantage for me in ripping DVDs would be TV shows, but it would only really be handy with a bunch of metadata for each episode, so I could quickly locate an episode I just remembered. So yeah, they need the entire script of every episode to be part of the searchable data. I'm surprised TV show downloads don't have a lot more of this kind of convenience. That's one thing they could do to make downloads more appealing. Ideally, I'd be able to buy a disc, then be able to download more feature-rich versions for playback on my computer or over my network to a media streamer.

I'd really like a good place to buy high-def versions of music videos of my favorite artists. Those would be great for a jukebox-type application.

I’ve found some HD both video and audio of artists I like on Youtube. Most are Japanese but that could be just because most of my favorite artists now are. I’ve found sever HD versions of Perfume concerts videos that are very good. Not quite BD quality but surprisingly good for something off Youtube.

Good luck on all that metadata since someone has to generate it.

Ha ha, yeah. You'd think they could at least make the subtitles searchable, though.

I do download music video stuff off of YouTube and other sources, but it's definitely more compressed than I'd like. I'd be willing to pay for high-quality versions.

Not really. I would like to know if it can pass bitstream audio through hdmi in Trye HD and or DTS

I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

I did not think so. With a real HTPC I should be able to do this. This should then produce sound as good as my PS3 from blu-rays. Am I correct in thinking this or am I missing something?

Thanks.

It depends on the HDMI interface built into the HTPC, but more and more do support bitstreaming. You'll also need player software which knows how to put the bitstream out there. Most current versions of BD software can do this when playing actual BDs, but getting lossless audio out of repacked (MKV) files isn't all that well supported.

I found these results from forums via a quick search-

-"WD TV does output AAC via HDMI, but when the same sound is outputed via optical connection make sure that the reciever that you are connecting to has AAC decoding functionality.
For instance I have the movie Spy Game that is in 6-channel AAC audio. WD TV is able to decode and output the same via HDMI. So far so good. BUt when I got a 5.1 Logitech Z-5500 audio system and connected the WDTV via its optical out, I had no sound. The reason being the Z-5500 wasn't able to decode the AAC. And remember, when connected via optical out of the WD TV, the WD TV does a simple pass through of any and all digital audio formats, which is called Bitstream audio.
That's not the case with other media players, like say the Popcorn Hour or the Dabhoda, wherein they decode the relevant audio format internally and then pass it through their optical out, which is called PCM audio."

-"It understands the codecs, but does not support them. It will not pass or bitstream them through to your receiver (but it DOES pass Dolby TrueHD, fyi).

The WDTV Live currently downmixes DTS-HD MA to DTS Core 5.1ch or Stereo 2.0 ch, depending on the options you've chosen in the WDTV Live settings."

I don't know how factual these statements are, I just posted them in an effort to help you out .

Cheers

Thanks guys. I plan on using WMC 7 with the Shark 007 codec packs. From the little research I've done so far it sounds like I should be able to configure the machine to pass through bitstream audio as long as the hardware supports it.

The ASRock website states that their new system supports this functionality.