Over the weekend, I finally hooked up my Zotac HTPC to my TV in the family room…worked beautifully!! I am very happy with it. I went through the My Movies and the Online content and it looked and worked great.
In addition to being able to put all of my movies on my server, one of the biggest reason for the HTPC is to view home movies. I have hours and hours of mini-DV tapes full of videos that we have never watched because there wasn’t a good way to view them as a family. Other than hooking my mini-DV camcorder up to the TV, I have never had a good way to view the videos. I tried and tried to get them to play through my DirecTV DVR, but I just never had much luck. I could see all of the videos, but I could very rarely get them to play. The big problem is that the video had to be transcoded for the DVR to be able to play them and I just always seemed to have problems with that. Plus on the DTV box, everything was text based, no pretty graphics like in WMC.
Anyways, HTPC hooked up to TV and working fine. I ran an optical cable to my receiver for sound and it worked without any problems. My wife and I watched a couple of home movies that I had put on the server so that there would be something there and they played pretty good. I think I need to compress them from uncompressed AVI files to something smaller though because there was some jerking and stuttering of the video.
I also purchased an HD Homerun networked TV tuner just so that I could try out the TV functions of WMC. I got it up and running and configured in WMC and I have to say that it is pretty cool too. I just used an over the air antenna so I don’t get too many channels, but I can certainly see who WMC could replace my DirecTV at some point (more on the reasons it probably won’t though, later). I was not really planning on keeping the tuner, but I am not sure that I want to send it back now that I have seen what it can do J.
DVD playback through My Movies worked great, no problems or slowdowns or anything. The experience is just like popping a DVD into the DVD player! The only complaint my wife had about it was that I didn’t let her finish watching the movie that I picked to try out (Star Trek)! On Monday night the kids watched a movie, which was actually the first full movie watched through WMC. It worked just fine, no problems at all. I was even ripping DVD’s to the server while they were streaming the movie from it and there were no problems at all! Once again, very happy!
Blu-Ray playback was a little different. PowerDVD came up to play the Blu-Ray disc just fine, but once we got into the movie it did not play fine. It was very jerky and pretty much unwatchable. When I tried it out in the Den, the Blu-Ray’s played just fine. The difference is that in the Den, the Zotac was connected to a gigabit switch and in the family room there is just a 100Mps switch. On Sunday I switched out the 100Mps switch with a router a friend gave me that had a gigabit switch. When I tried to play the Blu-Ray again, it worked just fine!!! No slow-downs or jerking at all! Thank goodness that is all the problem was. We bought Iron Man 2 on Blu-Ray Sunday afternoon and I immediately ripped it to the HD. We were going to watch it Sunday night, but ran out of time so hopefully later this week we will watch it see how watching a 2 hour movie through WMC works out!
I also kept feeding DVD’s (and Blu-Rays) into my server all weekend long to rip them to the HD. I am at about 115 DVD’s that I have ripped, but lot less movies total than that. A lot of my movies are special editions that contain 2 discs, plus the Friends DVD set that contains 40 discs of which I have ripped about 20 of them so far.
I also have about 5 remotes sitting on my table now to control everything. I am going to need to do something about that very soon…
So after months of talking about it and planning, I finally have my setup working and almost the way that I want it! My biggest problem now is that ripping all of these movies to the server is eating up my 4TB of disc space very quickly!!!
