Having a HTPC will change the way you watch movies or play games, setting one up is easier than ever but be warned once you get the bug it can prove to be an expensive hobby.
Imagine settling down in your lounge with all your games, music, movies and TV series at your fingertips, no more rooting around looking for discs, no more scratched media.
This is the golden ticket to home entertainment.
What is a HTPC
A Home Theater Personal Computer (HTPC) is a PC that plugs into your TV or AV receiver and is used to serve up content (music movies etc) at the touch of a button.
My HTPC
After a few years of dipping my finger in the HTPC pool I finally decided to spend some cash (actually a lot!) and build what I think is a great HTPC, the criteria I wanted to hit for my build where as follows:-
- Quite - this PC is going in my lounge and I do't won't anything sounding like a demented hair dryer screaming in the corner
- Expandable - storage is everything in a HTPC my build needed the ability to add more hard drive space as my collection grows and newer hard drive technology becomes available
- Games - must be able to act as a gaming PC
- Plex - the HTPC will act as my PLEX server
- Re-use existing parts - I've been building my own gaming PCs for years so had a large collection of bits I could re-utilize
The parts list
So with this in mind I took stock of what I had at home and did some shopping and ended up using the following components for the build.
- ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus ATX Motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 5 3400G Processor
- Corsair CMK16GX4M1A2400C14 Vengeance LPX 16 GB (4 x 4 GB) memory
- Fractal Design Define R5 White Gaming PC Case
- 6 10tb ironwolf hard drives
- 2 10tb WD red hard drives
- 256gb SSD
- Dark Rock Pro cooler
I'll not bore you with the details of how to build this and there are plenty of guides on the internet.
The Define R5 is a truly amazing case, I've been a huge fan of Fractal Design PC cases for many years and newer model doesn't disappoint, its quite roomy without being massive and can hold eight hard drives comfortably.
Some reviews of the case can be found below
Software
So you now have a monster PC and want to make it into a an awesome movie machine you'll need some software to get up and running.
- Makemkv - allows ripping of blu ray and 4k discs
- Plex or Emby - server software that allows playback of movies
- Stablebit drive pool - allows hard drives to be "merged" into one drive within windows
- snapraid - allows software raid
Ripping Blu rays
Having to go rooting through cases looking for a disc is a pain let alone waiting for it to load having, stupid animated menus and piracy warnings all make playing physical media painful, that's why I rip all my discs and store the movies digitally.
For this you'll need MakeMKV (https://www.makemkv.com), it's currently free, the unlock key changes ever month but is publicly available while the programme is in beta, the key can be found here.