Hi there,

I have a gaming computer with a 1TB of storage in my office. I was thinking about setting up an HTPC in my HT room but then started thinking, perhaps there was a way to serve my A/V content to my HT Receiver to watch media on my projector. I don't need a PVR or guides or anything. I'm just strictly looking at serving media. I can do this wired or wireless, but am not saavy with respects to the possibility of this, or the hardware involved...

Any ideas?

I've read about Linksys extenders etc., but they look to just extend MCE running remotely. I'm not using MCE and am not currently interested in using it.

Thanks!

What kind of inputs do you have on your projector?

If you go with the HTPC plan, the bandwidth/throughput of full-duplex 100 megabit ethernet is enough to handle video over a conventional Windows network share, so I don't think you need to look at a client/server streaming model if that's what your LAN is. Just open the share and click on the mpeg. There might be some latency in menus or scene selection if you're sharing a DVD due to its hardware being much slower than hard drives.

The only issue would be whether any of the media requires local software on the HTPC, but for most video and audio that's not a big deal because Media Player will handle it.

Have you considered one of the DLINK media units? They are not tied to MCE and seem to play any type of music or video.

Jup

Yeah a list of potential ones in the Sticky in the Digital Media streaming forum.

Let us know what you go for!

I've got HDMI and Component input on my Receiver so I'd just feed it through that. I've havn't looked really close at the DLink stuff, but thanks for the point in that direction...I'll go look now.

I have been reading some info on using an XBoX 360 for this purpose, but that doesn't seem like the way to go...I forge ahead.

How far is the "office computer" from the theater room?

The office computer is about 60 feet from the HT rack.

Since you are using a projector you should really consider building a dedicated htpc for playback as it will give you the best possible image quality. It could be built with pretty low specs as you dont need a whole lot of processing power. You can access the media from the server either wired or wirelessly for network. Ive tired both the dlink media player and linksys media centere extenders and was not happy with the playback quality or the files they could play and ended up returning them and building a new dedicated htpc.
I have 4 computers at home and two ot them share all my media across the network. Then I use my movies from within media center to display and play back all the movies on each computer. As long as the server is hard wired I have found that wireless on the client computers does work well about 95% of the time. With wirless I do get drop outs occationally.

Look at the some of the new geforce 6150 gpu based motherboards as some have component video output, digital audio out and can utilitze Nivida Purevideo codecs(greatly reducing the cpu load for media playback).
These all in one boards go for about $100-$130, not bad considering they have audio and video on board that will do great for a hometheater! Just add a processor, ram, case, a bit of software, and old hard drive and your good to go.

If you go with the HTPC plan, the bandwidth/throughput of full-duplex 100 megabit ethernet is enough to handle video over a conventional Windows network share, so I don't think you need to look at a client/server streaming model if that's what your LAN is.
In all reality DVD playback should require no more than 10Mbit/s (1.2MB/s), so using 802.11g wireless (54Mbit/s) on HTPC should be more than sufficient IMO. MPEG4 playback will require even less bandwidth.

Ctown...after reading a bunch and trying to work this out, I came to the same conclusion. The all in one mobo's from gigabyte and asus seem like a good start and the entire thing can be thrown together for under 1K...I think I'll just go the dedicated HTPC route and try the media extenders to serve other rooms but not the home theatre room.

Thanks...I'll post the components I'm looking at.

The gigabyte board is is sweet! I run a amb 64 4000 with 1 gig of ram and when playing back movies it now sits at about 30% cpu usage after installing the purevideo codecs. Studder free 1080p playback too, just need to upgrade the projector now. They also output 7.1 surrround

You're running a pretty hefty processor for an HTPC! That's awesome! I was thinking of the Gigabyte board with a 3200+ and 1G. What case are you running? I was looking at Silverstone LC17...I just have to decide on psu and drive(s)...this should be fun to build.

Oooo...I just found your thread on your HTPC...hmmm...looks like a good shopping list to me!

The processor is because I also use this as a server for the network, encoding dvds, and satellite pvr. But a 3200 should be fine for dedicated htpc.
I went with the Silverstone Lc17 with a coolmaster 120mm psu. The stock case fans on the silverstone are a bit loud so I may replace them if i get ambitious. One thing to watch out for on these cases is what cpu cooling you go with, I had a thermaltake big typhoon and it had very little clearance to the top of the case so I had to go with a zalman 7700 cooler. Stock coolers do work just as well but not nearly as quite.

Also you need to buy a spdif adapter separatly if you go with the gigabyte as its not included. Mine cost about $10.

I'll confirm that a 100 MB Ethernet LAN using CAT5 cable works just fine for streaming DVDs. I use Daemon Tools on the client to create a virtual drive for the ISO image sitting on my media centre.

However, my network throughput for a simple file copy usually hovers around 80 MB/sec. So I doubt wireless will reach its maximum rated troughput of 54 MB/sec. Down the road I expect I'll have to switch to Gigabit Ethernet for HD sources. I doubt wireless will keep up. Of course, I'm just justifying hacking holes into my drywall back when I previously predicted that wireless would never match wired!

1 terabyte of storage? Wow!

I'll confirm that a 100 MB Ethernet LAN using CAT5 cable works just fine for streaming DVDs. I use Daemon Tools on the client to create a virtual drive for the ISO image sitting on my media centre.

However, my network throughput for a simple file copy usually hovers around 80 MB/sec. So I doubt wireless will reach its maximum rated troughput of 54 MB/sec. Down the road I expect I'll have to switch to Gigabit Ethernet for HD sources. I doubt wireless will keep up. Of course, I'm just justifying hacking holes into my drywall back when I previously predicted that wireless would never match wired!

Who said anything about copying ;)? I thought we were discussing playback off the network share... HD content in MPEG4 form requires ~ 8Mbit/s bandwith (for 1280x720p content), so wireless should be OK for that too.

Is serving an actual DVD allowed now?

When I looked into this several yrs ago, the copy protection/encryption prevented you from putting an actual physical DVD into a drive, then using it elsewhere on the network

Once the retail DVD has been massaged with DVDDecrytper (or equivalent), then no problem, but that requires either storing iamge files on the server, or reburning with something like ImgBurn or DVDShrink

Having AnyDVD on the server computer may allow sharing, as it "fools" the OS into thinking the DVD is unencrypted and unprotected

In all reality DVD playback should require no more than 10Mbit/s (1.2MB/s), so using 802.11g wireless (54Mbit/s) on HTPC should be more than sufficient IMO. MPEG4 playback will require even less bandwidth.Theoretically this is true but practically your mileage may vary. I have tested the actual throughput of my 802.11g wireless network and found that even though it said I was connected at 54Mbps the actual throughput was substantially less than half that (measured both by bytes transferred per second and watching the networking display in Windows Task manager). Maybe I have a lot of interference in my house so my results may not be typical but I would be wary about using wireless for streaming video.