HTPC - Home Theater PC

I have been running two modified XBoxes (original ones) as HTPCs for quite a few years now. It required a hardware hack that has been thoroughly documented on the Internets.

For the software part of the HTPCs I was (am) running XBMC - XBox Media Center. Let me just say that it works great, nice interface (that uses the XBox remote) and runs pretty much all media files (even DVDs as .ISO files) as well as most online media sources (YouTube, internet radio).

There are only a couple of drawbacks right now, no Hulu or Netflix support, and no ability to play Blu-ray disks, or files, or .ISOs.

Right now most of my most played media is stored in a NAS (or two). But recently I have been playing with Blu-ray disks. My BD player takes (it seems) forever to boot and load a disk, so if I want to watch a BD disk, I had better plan on putting in the time. And although the BD player has online media access (youtube) it is slow and clumsy.

So I started ripping BD disks. I am still experimenting with file type, so I use AnyDVD (hd) to rip an ISO, and I use MakeMKV to rip into both MKV files, and to rip the disk into a backup. I have the files (because I save the ISOs and other files, about 100gigs a BD disk) on a Buffalo Linkstation with a 2TB USB drive plugged in. I needed the space, and I wondered if this setup had enough throughput to stream the HD video.

First test was on my main gaming Win7 machine...VLC played the MKV files just fine...but not the ISO.

My Linux machine would not play anything back, even with VLC.

Meanwhile I had picked up a Dell Optiplex GX280 SFF (small form factor) computer (3Ghz P4), and put in a ATI HD 4550 SFF video card. (has the HDMI out). So I thought I would see if this little machine could play back the BD files.

The answer is yes...although at first I had a lot of trouble...VLC on that machine (winXP) stuttered on playback...so I installed Media Player Classic HD (MPC-HD) and that played better but at 100% CPU and still a bit of stutter at times...then I looked at task manager to see what was running...

The person I got the PC from had installed Windows Security Center (or something like that) an all inclusive antivirus, firewall, malware etc blocker...unfortunately it used a ton of processor power any time you did anything else with the computer...so I turned it off, and suddenly BD playback was just fine. I uninstalled that, and installed Avast! antivirus (regular windows firewall was still there).

So ok I can play back these files on a windows machine...but was there a better interface?

That brought me back to XBMC. Now they have versions for all the OS platforms and a Live CD version. So I tried out the Live CD.

I had to boot the Optiplex hooked up to the PC monitor and the HDTV and use the ATI software to correctly use the HDTV as output device on windows...but after that it worked fine on windows.

Booting from the Live CD was fairly quick. Once XBMC had booted, I had to go into the settings and put the audio outputs to HDMI...and I had to play with the video rendering option...autodetect did not work on any media playback.

But BD playback was a no go using the Live CD.

So I installed the windows version. Again I had to set the audio output, but some of the other options were different than the Live CD. This version could play back the BD files...but it was choppy.

So I needed to be able to use MPC-HD to play back the BD files...and I needed XBMC to use that program to do the job.

A workaround that is pretty good is this on MediaSmartServer.net.


Create a file named playercorefactory.xml and place it in your [user]appdata/XBMC directory.
The location depends on what version of Windows you are using, and the location of the "mpc-hc.exe" file also depends on version.

I personally removed the -filename=".*1080p.*" rule...because none of my BD files have that in the title.

It now works pretty well, XBMC starts mpc-hc when it finds the MKV files (BD) and pops back up when playback is over.

Only weird part is, if I stop the BD playback...I have to tell mpc-hc to exit.

So until I find a better option...this setup will be my new HTPC.