…using a Thermaltake Lanbox Lite. On top of the monstrous gash I got on my finger from steel edges that are neither rolled nor smoothed, I also spent about 3.5 hours doing what would’ve taken me 45 minutes for a standard ATX chassis, 60 minutes in a Ultra Microfly, or 90 minutes in an Antec Aria.
On top of the shoddy workmanship, the case suffers from an abysmal assembly design and an utterly braindead cooling scheme.
I’ve had some chassis that were difficult to work on before. Antec Arias were awful in that you had to dissasemble almost everything to do anything.
This was worse than that, despite being bigger and more recent.
I also haven’t cut myself this badly on a PC case in almost half a decade, so I’m especially pissed off.
The only thing that pisses me off more than how crappy this thing is to work on is the fact I don’t have enough time to send it back from whence it came and buy something that isn’t shite.
If I can stop one person from making the mistake I did in picking this case out based on looks and some Newegg reviews, it’ll all be worthwhile.
Thermaltake is pretty much renowned for making stuff that sounds impressive but performs awful. I always mentally class them as one of those companies that wants to put trashy neon lights all over.
Also, can’t you pretty much end the subject without the post-ellipsis material? I mean, in a CableCard world where 360s and PS3s work as excellent photo/movie streaming devices and Tivos are the only decent DVRs, is there ever a reason to build an HTPC?
I love my Shuttle XPC, but god damn if it wasn’t a pain in the ass to work with it sometimes. I have nimble hands, but even I managed to cut myself working in the case, and there are mostly dulled edges in it!
Yes, there are a few reasons. First off, the DVR that I built is better than a Tivo, which is important to me, because I record a lot of television. Seriously, a lot. Like, thirty hours of prime time on a particularly full week, plus other incidental stuff. Still trying to figure out a way to turn that into a revenue stream. On top of that, however, I like to play my games on my big, expensive TV so that I can justify my decision to spend way too much money on it to myself, so my playback PC in the living room is also my gaming PC, so that kills two birds with one stone. Also, I don’t know how it works with Tivo, but my caps are all just H.264 or MPEG files with wrappers around them, so if I need to take them out and move them somewhere else to play them, I can do that without a problem. And if I wanted to set up Orb, I could stream my entire set of DVR recordings to any remote device.
And so far as CableCard goes…man, I’ve had nothing but trouble with that horrifying nonsense. It’s only getting worse here in Houston, since Comcast has decided to arbitrarily replace all the Motorola cards that actually worked with Scientific Atlanta nastiness, and I’ve never had a device from them that didn’t suffer from poor design and buggy execution.
I used a Dell Vostro 220s to replace my broken old HTPC, and overall it’s okay except for the fans. They’re still a bit louder than I’d like, though quieter than the old system at least, and occasionally it suddenly ramps the fans up to full speed for just a second for no apparent reason (it’s not CPU load since I can peg it at 100% without the fans speeding up).
There are certainly smaller, quieter systems, but this is a multipurpose Linux box as well and I wanted room for storage and expansion. HD isn’t an issue for me yet since the selection around here wasn’t all that great last time I checked, and I get too much TV to watch already.
I’m using a Macmini and it’s dreamy. Front Row sucks a little bit and the more recent versions of Perian make QT’s H264 playback choppy as fuck but it’s nice not to have to turn the volume up to mask the 360’s fans.
I have Boxee/XBMC on my Apple TV. Since I don’t have the time or patience to torrent (let alone the stomach for it now that I have kids to be responsible for), the lack of HD recording/time shifting capabilities on an HTPC makes the whole premise unappealing.
You can totally do HD recording on an HTPC. You could use the Fusion receiver card (tried it, didn’t work, though I’m told the Fusion Gold does work, whereas the Lite does not so much), or get a SiliconDust HD HomeRun (I have one, it works great and records channels in the clear QAM and on ATSC over the air), or get one or more Hauppauge HDPVRs and do analog capture coming out of a cable box, which I also have two of. So, I’ve basically got 4 HD capture receivers already that are wired into my HTPC. It’s not necessarily the cheapest solution, but it does work.
Granted 99.9% of the population out there won’t go through the trouble or expense to set it all up but the solution is out there and really pretty affordable.
I remember when you linked that blog last year, so I knew I’d take some shit about my comment. :) Yeah, there are ways, but the solution is a bit expensive and/or convoluted for non-OTA broadcasts, and the watching/recording process seems not particularly wife-friendly.
Despite my annoyance that you can’t slap an HD cable card in an HTPC, I have to admit, I’m pretty content with middling-quality Hulu streamed to the 360 via PlayOn. The saddest part is that my HD Tivo is mostly relegated to the role of a capture machanism for Sesame Street and Super Why!
I’ve been interested in that, but I want to be able to watch live TV through the PVR stream (so I don’t need to swap between computer input and cable box input when I want to watch my recorded video). Have you had any experience with this?
I can’t think of a way that that particular recording method he does in that post (I’m one of his users, and I guess I was the initial trial for whether you could hook more than one of those beasties up to a single machine and still operate them properly) would give you that without some additional code on top. For directly tuning HD channels on my PC, I mostly use my SiliconDust HDHR, which basically gives you two ATSC/QAM tuners that any computer on the network can access, tune, and stream video from. You can’t get encrypted channels that way, but when I’m actually tuning live TV it’s usually just me looking for noise to keep on instead of something I actually want to watch, so I haven’t had a problem yet. I don’t know for certain, since I haven’t tried coding anything around it yet, but I’m guessing you could probably put a frontend up that would let you tune your clear QAM and ATSC channels by hooking into that device.
No, since I rarely ever watch live tv.
You might read this:
I also remember some other post with a graph that worked with vlc but I can’t seem to find it right now. Either way I did post how to do a preview graph on my blog and then with IR blasting to change channels (or firewire for cable boxes). It’s still requires several steps and components to get it to work but I would say it is definitely doable. If you can get the stream to work with vlc, vlc has some buffering/timeshifting stuff built right in that would probably work. Still, you would need some sort of guide.
You might just want to look at sagetv which supports hd pvr right out of the box. Not sure if it supports it for livetv though.
for clear qam/astc yeah hdhr is the way to go. No code needed since vlc is supported right out of the box.
Of those I’ve used Boxee and XBMC. Boxee is pretty cool but a little bit busy and most of the attractive features - Hulu, Netflix etc. - aren’t available in Europe so there’s a good chunk of feature there that I can’t use which just makes me feel like it’s a waste.
XBMC is also pretty cool (as well it should be, since both Boxee and Plex are based on it) but the part of me that cuts off its nose to spite its face can’t stand seeing ‘Xbox’ everywhere.
I will give Plex a go and see if I like it though…
You won’t see “xbox” anywhere anymore. All that branding was removed months ago, it’s called “XBMC Media Center” now in one of those recursive acronyms.
Plex is probably better, if you have an intel mac. It’s supposedly more integrated and OSXish.
