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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

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How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500

August 21st, 2012Top Story

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500

By Whitson Gordon

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500Click to view Between the Blu-Ray player, cable box, laptop, and everything else hooked up to your TV, your home theater situation is a mess. Here's how I rolled all those devices into one awesome media center—the media center of my dreams—for under $500.

Music by Pex Mahoney Tufvession.

What This Media Center Can Do

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500You can put together a home theater PC using just about anything: an old computer, a cheap nettop, or even an Apple TV. However, if you really want to get the most out of your HTPC, building it yourself is the way to go. We've tried a lot of different builds over the years, but not every build can handle everything you throw at it. This build will allow us to play virtually anything, including:

  • All of your ripped or downloaded movies, TV shows, and music
  • All of your DVD and Blu-Ray discs
  • Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime streaming, plus nearly any other streaming channel you can imagine like CBS, NBC, Bravo, MTV, Comedy Central, SyFy, USA, Revision3, TWiT, and many more
  • Any video game you can install on a computer, from old school emulators to modern PC materpieces

Part One: Choose Your Hardware

In order for my media center to accomplish everything I wanted, I've found that I needed a very specific set of hardware, since a lot of HTPC builds are too low-powered to handle things like video games or even Netflix. This build is powerful enough to handle nearly anything you throw at it, and at a very reasonable price. It won't necessarily play the latest games on ultra high settings, but you should be able to play them on lower settings pretty easily, and all your streaming video should run like a dream.

If you're already set on your hardware but still want to know how I set everything up, feel free to skip down to part two below. Otherwise, you're free to tweak certain aspects of the build to fit your needs, but here is what I recommend:

  • The CPU: AMD A4-3400 2.7Ghz, $60: This processor is not only inexpensive, but it's more than powerful enough to handle any tasks your home theater PC will throw at it. Plus, it has an AMD Radeon HD 6410D built in, which means you can do some solid gaming without a separate video card. If you want even more graphical power (for more advanced, modern games), you can upgrade to the slightly more expensive A8-3850.
  • How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500The Motherboard: ASRock A75M-ITX, $90: This tiny motherboard has support for 7.1 HD surround sound, HDMI out, and some nice features for managing the speed (and noise level) of your fans, which is great for keeping your home theater quiet.
  • The RAM: Corsair 4GB DDR3 1333 Memory, $25: It's inexpensive, high quality, and gives us enough memory to do the aforementioned gaming, since the built-in graphics chip uses your regular memory for video.
  • The Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB, $120: We like Western Digital's Green drives for their low power consumtion and quiet operation, which is ideal in a home theater PC. 2TB should be enough to hold a ton of movies on your HTPC, but if you're storing them somewhere else—like your own home server or NAS—you can just get the cheaper 500GB model for your HTPC.
  • How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500The Case: APEX MI-008 Mini-ITX, $46: It's small, attractive, and has a few USB ports in the front for your gaming controllers. It doesn't come with any fans, which is great for silence, but if you feel like you want a bit more cooling, the side vent holes are perfectly sized to fit a couple of 80mm fans that you can buy separately. It also comes with a power supply. Alternatively, a lot of people like cases designed for home theater PCs, but I've found these tend to be much larger and louder than necessary.
  • The Blu-Ray Drive: LITE-ON Blu-Ray Combo Drive, $50: If you want to watch DVDs or Blu-Rays on your device (not just ripped and downloaded media), you'll want one of these. Blu-Ray isn't perfect, and if you really wanted to, you could skip this part and save a few bucks, but at $50, it's only $30 more than a regular DVD drive.
  • The OS: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, $100: Despite the popularity of Linux as a HTPC solution, Windows is the only OS that will give you true play-everything capabilities. Netflix, Blu-Ray, and video games are all difficult or impossible to play on Linux, so we'll be using Windows for this build. Home Premium will set you back $100 off-the-shelf, but chances are you can find it for significantly cheaper elsewhere.

Total Cost: $491

Optional Hardware:

  • GELID CC-Siberian-01 CPU Cooler, $10: Your processor will come with its own cooler, but for $10 you can get a more effective cooler like this one, keeping your HTPC cooler and quieter. Note that it doesn't come with thermal paste, so if you don't have any of that already, you can grab some cheaply.
  • GELID 80mm Case Fan, $9: If you want a bit of extra cooling, an 80mm case fan will fit perfectly in the holes on the above APEX case. This one's cheap, quiet, and comes with a 4-pin connector that goes into your motherboard, so you can control its speed (and noise level).
  • How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500A Remote Control for couch-friendly TV watching. We've gone through all your different remote options before, so I won't get into it here. Check out our guide to HTPC remotes to find out which is best for you.
  • Some Xbox 360 Controllers for your video game needs. These are perfect because they have enough buttons to emulate nearly any video game controller, and they work out of the box in Windows. If you want to do a bit more work, you could convert an old NES gamepad for a nostalgic feel, or buy a cheap USB adapter for controllers you already have lying around, but those could involve other drivers and more hassle. If you want something wireless, you can also grab a few wireless 360 controllers for only $20 more.

Once you've got all your hardware rounded up, it's time to put everything together. Check out our complete guide to building a computer from scratch if you're unfamiliar with the process. The only thing you'll want to take special note of is that your CPU fan should go into the CPU_FAN1 socket, and your case fan should go into CHA_FAN1.

Part Two: Set Up Your Operating System

Again, we're going to be using Windows for this build, not Linux. It may cost a bit more, but Linux can't play Netflix, doesn't play games very well, and is far too complicated when it comes to Blu-Ray, so Windows is the only OS that really gives us that "play-anything" experience.

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500Grab a spare keyboard and plug it into your computer. Turn it on, and press the Delete key as it starts up—this will bring you to the BIOS screen. Go to the "Boot" tab and make sure your CD drive or USB drive—whatever you're using to install Windows—is first in the boot order. Lastly, insert your Windows CD or thumb drive and go to "Exit", saving your changes. This will reboot you into the Windows installer, which should guide you through the process of installing your OS. When you're finished, reboot into the BIOS and set your hard drive as the first boot item.

When you're finished installing Windows, you'll need to install a few drivers. If your internet isn't working out of the box, install the LAN drivers from the CD that came with your motherboard first (if your internet works, just skip this step). Then, open up Internet Explorer and head to your motherboard's driver page. Choose your OS (which should be Windows 7 64-bit, if you followed our build guide above) and download the following drivers:

  • AMD All-in-1 Driver
  • Realtek High Definition Audio Driver

Unless you have a specific reason to install one of the other drivers, don't download them, because we won't need them. Once you've installed all these drivers and restarted, you'll need to tweak your graphics settings.

Right-click on the desktop and head to AMD VISION Engine Control Center. I found that on my TV, my desktop didn't fill up the whole screen, so I had to go to Desktops and Displays > Scaling Options and turn my Overscan setting up. You may also want to browse around the Control Center and see what other tweaks look best to you on your display.

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500Next, you'll want to adjust our fan speeds. Restart your computer and head back into the BIOS. Under the Fan Control tab, you'll see the speed of your CPU fan and, if you have one, your case fan. Here, you can adjust your target temperature for your CPU and Motherboard, as well as the target speeds of your fans. You may need to play around with this over time to find out what nets you the best balance between good temperatures and good noise levels, as everyone's home is different. I just turned my case fan all the way down so it keeps up good airflow, but doesn't make very much noise.

Lastly, bring up the Start menu and type in "Power Options". Click on the first result and click "Choose what the power buttons do" in the left sidebar. Change "When I press the power button" to "Sleep" in the dropdown menu. This means your computer will sleep instead of turn off completely, which makes it much quicker to start back up. It also means hitting the power button on your remote, if it supports the power function, will put it to sleep instead of shut it down.

Part Three: Set Up XBMC

Lastly, it's time to set up the central piece of this box: the media center software. We've shown you how to create a kickass, seamless media center with XBMC, so I won't go into a ton of detail here. Check out that guide to get your fully customized XBMC box up and running like a champ. Here are the things you'll want to know specific to this build, though.

First, download and install XBMC. Then, head to its installation folder—by default, that's C:\Program Files (x86)\XBMC, and right-click on the XBMC.exe program. Choose "Create Shortcut", then drag that shortcut into your %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup folder. This ensures that XBMC will start up automatically with your computer. You may also want to go to %APPDATA%\XBMC/Userdata and add the following line to AdvancedSettings.xml, under the first line:

  <fullscreen>true</fullscreen>  

This ensures XBMC will always start in full screen.

Next, open up XBMC and head to Settings > System > Video Output. Set your Display Mode to Full Screen if it isn't already, and check the "Use a fullscreen window rather than true fullscreen" box. This will solve some video problems XBMC has in full screen mode.

Set Up Streaming and Video Game Add-Ons

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500Now, it's time to install all your add-ons. Our original XBMC guide should have everything you need to know about setting up Hulu and other channels, so check that out for more info. At the time of this writing, XBMC Flicks (the Netflix add-on) isn't bundled with XBMC, so you'll have to download it from here first. You may also want to check out XBMCFlix-o-Mate to get your remote working with Netflix.

If you want to set up video games, check out our feature on turning your XBMC media center into a video game console with Advanced Launcher. It has everything you need to know.

Set Up Blu-Ray Playback

Lastly, if you want Blu-Ray playback, you have a few options. Our old Blu-Ray playing method doesn't work in the latest version of XBMC, so we're going to use a Blu-Ray playback suite to get the job done. Your Blu-Ray drive probably came with a program like PowerDVD or WinDVD, and you can use those to play Blu-Rays right from XBMC. All you need to do is head to %APPDATA%\XBMC/Userdata\ and create a new file named playercorefactory.xml with the following code inside:

<playercorefactory>
<players>
<player name="Disc_Player" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\PowerDVD9\PDVDLaunchPolicy.exe</filename>
<args>"{E:}"</args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>true</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
</player>
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
<rule name="Blu-Ray" filename="D:\\.*" filetypes="bdmv" player="Disc_Player"/>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>

Change the filename="D:\\.*" and <args>"{E:}"</args> lines to correspond to the letter of your Blu-Ray drive, and change the C:\Program Files (x86)\CyberLink\PowerDVD9\PDVDLaunchPolicy.exe to correspond to your Blu-Ray program of choice. For more info, see the XBMC Wiki entry for External Players—your config may differ depending on your hardware, Blu-Ray program, and other factors.

How I Built the Media Center of My Dreams for Under $500If you don't have a Blu-Ray capable program, or the one that came with your drive isn't working correctly, you have a few choices. We've rounded up some of our favorite Blu-Ray playback suites, but the bottom line is that all Blu-Ray programs will cost you money. AnyDVD HD, while the most expensive, is going to be the easiest bet. You won't need to go through any of the above hassle; just install it, run it at startup, and XBMC will automatically detect Blu-Ray discs and play them when you select "Play Disc" from your main menu.


There you have it. With the right build and the right software, you can unleash the full power of XBMC and put together a media center that plays anything your heart can desire, from streaming TV to modern video games and everything in between. Again, be sure to check out our complete guide to creating a media center with XBMC, as well as our guide to building a computer if you're unfamiliar with the process. When you're done, you'll never have to use those old DVD players, cable boxes, and other junk again.

Photo by Ezhov (Shutterstock).

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Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo's Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming Handhelds

August 21st, 2012Top Story

Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo's Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming Handhelds

By Stephen Totilo

Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo's Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming HandheldsNintendo president Satoru Iwata can tell you when Nintendo would stop making its own handheld systems. He can tell you, hypothetically, when a line of machines that has gone from Game Boy to DS to 3DS would end and Nintendo's games would appear on the hardware made by other companies instead.

Last week in San Francisco, he told me when that could happen. (Hint: do not hold your breath.)

"I think that if we are able to provide experiences on handheld devices that consumers cannot get on another device, then we will continue creating software and hardware going forward, and if it comes to a point when we're not able to do that, I think, yeah, you will see portable handheld gaming devices go the way of the Dodo, I guess."

Iwata and I spoke for about 45 minutes last week, his answers translated from Japanese to English during a chat that wound up being one-third dedicated to the future of dedicated handhelds.

The CEO of Nintendo is a relaxed and cheerful man, frequent to laugh and calmly confident in the future of his company, despite the public doubts that seem to return every few years like especially bad hurricane seasons. These days, Nintendo is on the verge of releasing a new console, a transition that is precarious for even the strongest players in the gaming console war (see Sony's miserable transition from the dominant PlayStation 2 to the embattled PlayStation 3, for example). But the future of Nintendo's home console business might be a less pressing issue than Nintendo's continued prospects for making dedicated handheld platforms.

Iwata on the logic of smartphones displacing dedicated handheld gaming machines: "I don't think that opinion is completely nonsensical."

It is in handheld gaming that Nintendo has been dominant like no gaming hardware company in history. Its Game Boy had no serious rival; same for its Game Boy Advance. Sony gained a foothold against Nintendo with its PlayStation Portable, but the Nintendo DS was nevertheless a monster hit (more than 130 million of them sold worldwide, as of late June). The 3DS, launched in America in early 2011, has had greater struggles, its price cut by a third just a few months after launch and a consistent swirl of questions that maybe Nintendo should just put Super Mario Bros. on the iPhone and call it day. After all, Apple's the hot company and Nintendo's, well… isn't the line that smartphone gaming is up and dedicated handheld gaming is in deep, deep trouble?

The entirety of what you might need to know about how Satoru Iwata feels about the supposed threat of Apple and iOS gaming is that, during our interview last week, Iwata read 3DS sales figures to me off of a MacBook Air, which was plugged into a white iPhone, presumably his. When a gaming reporter goes to a showcase for, say, a Wii game or an Xbox game, Nintendo and Microsoft show their games on non-Sony TVs. They don't let you see hardware from supposed rivals. But there was Iwata, sitting around the corner of a table from me, laptop flipped open, Apple icon presented toward me.

Nintendo's Latest and Greatest: The 3DS XL Nintendo's newest portable machine, the 3DS XL, came out in America this past weekend. It's a good machine (I gave it a very positive review.) "With the addition of the 3DS XL we're looking at expanding the overall lifecycle of the 3DS as a platform," Iwata said, noting that consumers began asking for a larger 3DS right after the original unit launched. "Up until recently it really wasn't possible for us to provide a bigger screen to consumers at a reasonable cost, and I think we've been impacted by the progress in terms of LCD screen technology." Iwata says the 3DS XL is the best device Nintendo can give gamers at a reasonable cost right now. It probably won't be the last. While it seems a safe bet, based on Nintendo's past that this isn't the last 3DS iteration, it seems clear Nintendo is not going to go even bigger: "I think that would create some portability issues," he said. "Even if we could have … provided a bigger screen I don't think we would have." No 3DSXXL for you. The 3DS XL is big enough.

Iwata didn't let the presence of an Apple laptop and the iPhone do all of his talking. He never said the words "Apple" or "iPhone" or "Android," but when I pointed to my iPhone that was recording our interview and began asking him about why some people think that device is the future of portable gaming, he knew exactly what I was talking about. He knows people wonder about the long-term viability of dedicated gaming handhelds. He cited the arguments himself and proposed that there are people who argue that the period of gaming handhelds "has passed us by" due to the popularity of gaming on "a device that you're always going to be carrying with you at all times"—a phone. He knows that logic is what produces the doubts. "I don't think that opinion is completely nonsensical," he said.

Iwata has been running Nintendo since the latter days of the Game Boy Advance, so in explaining Nintendo's persistence to make its own portable hardware for its own machines, he goes back to when he started. "I was asked during the Game Boy Advance period by folks who said, 'Hey, now you're able to play games on mobile phones so maybe the time of the handheld is done,' he said. He was beginning what amounted to an approximately 16-minute counter-argument for the dedicated handheld and, specifically, for the 3DS. "Because we understood that, that's what drove us to create the Nintendo DS. And I believe we were able to offer on the Nintendo DS an experience that you could not get on phones that were available at the same time … after the DS that kind of slowly faded into the background. That being said, with more smartphones and more tablets being on the market now and becoming very popular this conversation has risen again. Obviously it's a fact that smartphone technology is advancing very quickly and the things you can do on a smartphone are much different than what you could do on a regular cellphone back in the day."

Iwata said that Nintendo had an advantage of creating its own software and hardware and could best integrate the two. (Apple and Google, the makers of Android do not make their own games for their phones, a contrast Iwata didn't state but was easily inferred.) Iwata said that the 3DS basically had to be as exceptional as a phone, maybe even cooler: "It's just like in the day of the GBA our challenge was to provide experiences you could not have on a cellphone at that time. In the same way, we have to look at the Nintendo 3DS and other platforms in our future as being able to do the same thing in terms of what smartphones can provide as well."

Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo's Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming Handhelds

I had heard and read much of Iwata's argument for Nintendo's continued relevance in making handheld gaming hardware before, but I had to share a few personal anecdotes with him: one of my niece whose long-time curiosity about my old Nintendo DS had seemingly been displaced by her enjoyment of free games she played on a hand-me-down iPod Touch from her mom; another about my own observations that people on the New York City subways I ride each day seem to play DSes and PSPs less and yet are consistently playing the likes of Angry Birds or Temple Run on their phones every day. I asked Iwata what he thought was going on there. And, as he began to talk about Nintendo's ability to offer deep games, I asked if he thought that was the domain of Nintendo or even of dedicated handhelds. His answer put us on a different track.

"I think a lot of this discussion is based on the premise that the handheld gaming device market is shrinking or vanishing and I don't think that is true and I'd like to address that," he said. He turned to his MacBook Air as he began to cite some stats.

"Something that [Nintendo of America president] Reggie [Fils-Aime] said at E3 was that the Nintendo 3DS hardware was selling more or faster than the DS, and I think that's something.. that a lot of people are aware of. But something that Reggie also said is that the 3DS software sales were exceeding DS software sales." (Fils-Aime had told an audience at the E3 gaming show in June that the 3DS had sold 10.5 million physical games in its first 14 months, more than the DS had sold in the same period of time.)

Iwata: "Previously we had to think, ok, 'How are we competing with Sony?, How are we competing with Microsoft?, How do we compete with all the other software titles and all the other publishers out there?' That environment has changed."

"I think this is proof that even though we see an increase in smartphones and tablets and whatnot and there's obviously a huge flood of games in the market, I think the software sales that Reggie alluded to and pointed out really prove that these people, even with this flood of free games and whatnot for these portable devices—[these] non-game-centric devices—are not keeping people from purchasing software for dedicated hardware."

Iwata was on a roll. As I noted, his answer was long and it was clear he wanted to get as much of this out in the open as possible. He continued:

"As of last week, 3DS sales in Japan reached seven million, and that's the 77th week post-launch. If we look at DS and DS Lite which people were saying, 'oh my gosh this thing is selling like hotcakes, it's crazy!' it reached the seven million mark at week 72. And for the Nintendo DS that was two Christmases. For the 3DS it's only been one Christmas. And we also had a large earthquake in Japan. And of course now there's a smartphone boom in Japan, we're right in the middle of it. [Note from Stephen: The Nintendo 3DS has sold 19 million units worldwide since launch, as of late June.]

Unintimidated By Apple, Nintendo's Boss Says The World Still Needs Dedicated Gaming Handhelds"I'm not saying there aren't people out there who aren't going to purchase a dedicated handheld device based on the availability and the fun factor in their smartphones. The examples you gave are factual. I'm not saying that that's not true. I do want to say that there are still people buying our devices and that is also factual.

"I don't think there's not a bright future for handheld devices but I understand that the competition, again with the rise of smart devices is different, and I do recognize that.

"Previously we had to think, ok, 'How are we competing with Sony?, How are we competing with Microsoft?, How do we compete with all the other software titles and all the other publishers out there?' That environment has changed. And the games available for smartphones, I'm not saying  that none of these are interesting, rich or fun experiences, because I know that there are some. And one way we can ensure that there's a market for handheld gaming devices is by continuing to bring out entertaining and engaging software that will provide users experiences that they cannot get on these other devices."

Through translation, that was much, not all of Iwata's 16-minute assertion of the validity of the dedicated gaming handheld. It was eye-opening, because it did not conform with the critique from some quarters that Nintendo's head is in the sand and that it does not appreciate the threat of cheap, downloadable iOS and Android games. But it was also short on specifics of how Nintendo would set itself apart in a world that seems more gaga over the next iPhone than over, say, the 3DS' glass-free 3D.

In the quarter-hour we spent on this topic, Iwata didn't make what I expected to be an easy comparison between his company's portable gaming machines and those of Apple and other top mobile players: the presence on the 3DS of buttons and control pads. He didn't go there. He did, however, go to another intriguing topic, one that might be related and may signal where Nintendo actually sees meaningful difference between the handheld experiences it provides and those on smartphones:

Iwata: "I think that consumers who are willing to pay money for a gaming experience are looking for something that is more rich."

"I think within games you have two needs that people fill. One is the time-filler need. The other is that it's a very important time for me and I want to have a rich experience. Those are two separate needs, I think." His implication was that Nintendo handheld gaming satisfied the latter need in a way that smartphone gaming typically did not.

"The other thing is how much are consumers willing to pay to play. I think that consumers who are willing to pay money for a gaming experience are looking for something that is more rich and are willing to spend some of that valuable time on that experience. I believe that as environments change and as the world progresses we're going to have different ways in which people want to spend their time. That being said, I don't think we're going to see the desire to have, again, rich and deep sort of gaming experiences... we're not going to see that vanish. That's not going to go away."

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