CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

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I'm considering going to an HTPC, but I'm having a hard time determining what I really need hardware wise. I have a tight budget (less than $200), and I was looking at buying a used computer. I have a handful of old laptops, and I was hoping one of them would work, but the most recent one (5-6 years old!!) didn't give a great picture. The pj is a NEC 6PGXtra, and I fed it 1080i with the help of powerstrip. Even though it worked alright, the image is much better through the blu-ray player. I might add that in both instances, I'm just watching Netflix. The laptop has an AMD dual core 1.8 MHz, only 1 GB of ram, and ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 (I think) card. The scan lines seemed more apparent; 720p was much worse as the whole image seemed wavy. Hard to describe.

90% of the viewing content comes from Netflix, and I would keep the blu-ray for dvd's and blu-rays. Even the occasional .mkv file I download I put onto a usb stick that the blu-ray player takes and reads no problem. Really I just want a Netflix streamer, which my blu-ray player has, but I want to do it through a web browser, hence the need for a pc. Recently I discovered that Netflix content is different in the various countries that it is available, so I signed up for a cheap VPN service that would allow me to access the other regions. But I discovered that the blu-ray player only supports netflix in Canada and US. I was considering a newer media streamer to overcome that problem (my friends PS3 works) but then I learned that with a recent free web proxy, I could get the same result without paying for a VPN.

All that to say that I need some guidance on what works. I have the opportunity to buy a retired (4 yr old) CAD station from the workplace for $250 (Dell Precision T3400, dual core cpu (xeon!?) with an Nvidia Quadro FX1700 graphics card, 4 Gb of ram, scsi 15k hard drive). Overkill? Inappropriate? Irrelavant? With the reading I've done, it seems a card oriented more for gaming would be better than one for CAD. Then I saw this: http://www.arctic.ac/en/p/free-shipping-item/635/mc001-xbmcus.html?c=2296. It's close to the price range, and it answers the remote issue, and has better sound outputs. I'd have to install windows, certainly not a deal-breaker.

Am I going about this the wrong way? Can I get my old laptop up to speed? Or buy another computer for say $100? What do I look for in terms of cpu speed, ram capacity, graphics card? The HTPC guides I've seen online (avsforum) seem more geared towards building one from scratch. Any input would be appreciated.

Dan

[MikeEby]

I have found that NetFlix from a web browsers is dumbed down. In other words lower resolution. When I use NetFlix it's on my HTPC connected to my old CRT RPTV and it's running thru Windows Media Center and the quality is much higher than in a web browser.

I can play it on the XG but on 110" screen the image is no where close to blu-ray quality I don't bother burning up the tubes in the XG with sub par source.

The Dell you mentioned should do the job fine, although I'm not sure about the video card. Some of the older CAD cards don't do that great of job for HD-Video.


Mike

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Thanks Mike for your insight. I do have Windows 7 on a laptop (that I was able to recently upgrade from starter to ultimate) and I've starting playing around with WMC. I have not been able to install the Netflix app. The .exe I found on the net to install the app does not work. The installation gets to 55% complete, hangs for a while, then tells me there was an error and I need to reboot my computer. I've also read on another forum (thegreenbutton.tv) that many people were having problems just before Christmas accessing Netflix via their app in WMC. It's not clear whether that was sorted or not, and it appears that M$ has declared that the Netflix app is not officially supported on WMC. Or something like that. I'll continue my research on the pc side.