Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners HTPC setup

I have concluded that trying to futureproof yourself is simply an act in futility and I have wasted more good money than saved in the vane process of trying to do so.

I remember getting into video animation when younger and buying a $15000 on a dedicated hardware video animation station in the early 90's that could take individual animation cells from a PC and string them together to play in realtime. Was mind blowing and considering that systems like the AVID cost easily in the hundreds of thousands thought it was a steal. Then 5 years later you could do it easily with a $300 consumer video card on a home computer. If I had only invested that money into some real estate in High Park I would be a multi-millionare now.

I bought a top of the line laptop 6 years ago thinking it would last me 3-4 years, only to see my dual core be overshadowed by a quad core 7 months later, and by the end of 2 years the laptop is now considered obsolete.

It is far cheaper to buy trailing edge tech at discount that does what you need now, and replace it every year, than buy leading edge in the hopes it will still be good in 2-3 years. You end up with better hardware over the same time period, and it actually ends up costing you far less.

I built a crysis rig and lasted through to skyrim.

Is an i5 266 (1156) up to the batching task?

An i5 can do the job, but would be about 20% slower. it's missing the multi thread capability.

Is it not a true 4 core? I used to batch 4 dvds overnight. A bluray would be crazy i thought so I stopped trying.

How do you guys keep it from becoming a chore? My wife hated it and didn't bother learning to use it. Discs remain.

It's a true 4 core. The i7 could correctly be termed not a true 8 core.

What app were you using to convert? From my way of looking at it, drive space is pretty darn cheep now. Like you can even get a 6TB drive sub $300. So, uncompresses, you could fit 100 bluray onto it.

For backing up my disks, I break it into two parts. First part is a simple rip of the disk to the hard drive that removes the DRM and gets the files local. That takes about 20-30min per full length movie.
Once local, I can convert it into a x.264 mkv file to watch. On the current software they offer the new CRF encoding (level 24) that takes a 35gb bluray down to around the 10gb with the sound directly copied. the process takes about 3 hours on my i5 or 2.5h on my i7.

It's not that I buy that many movies that I want to store forever. if it's a great movie then I will, otherwise I just watch it on the disk and then return it (rental) or sell it off at the local fle market.

To be quite honest, most of the shows I watch, it's far easier to simply torrent grab them the following day. I am about 9 months behind in any of the TV watching that I do. There are quite a few shows that I started to watch but just got board and figured the jumped the shark and don't bother any more. Some times it just waiting for the right mood to watch.

What I really like about Kodi, is that it runs as a database so it can track what shows that I have watched, gives me a synopsis of old episodes so I can remember. has a great interface to quickly jump forward/back while watching. Have setup so if I pause for more than 8 seconds, it will jump back 5sec in the show from the pause. Helps with my slow brain.

I know it's not like a cable/sat PVR for recording shows. It does take work to keep ontop of it, but I take it as just one of the things I do in the day. I find it quite fun.

I have over 450 full blu-ray rips (in .MKV format) and they average just over 27GB each. I have 2 server apps running on my media server. MediaBrowser 3 which works great with anything that needs to be transcoded as it can do it on the fly with multiple movies at the same time, but I stopped using MediaBrowser on my HTPC because of a couple of issues that I was running into... Forced subtitles (like when aliens are speaking, etc) wouldn't work. It was always on or off, and only in MediaBrowser. Other programs using the same LAV filters and such worked fine. It also doesn't support exclusive mode for MadVR video processing, so turning on MadVR to get even better images would cause noticeably dropped frames.

I am now using JRiver Media Center as my "other" server software and the main software on the HTPC. I liked a lot of the bells and whistles of MediaBrowser right out of the box, but if it can't do some of the basics that are key to watching most (subtitles) or all (MadVR) movies, then what was the point.

I use MakeMKV to rip the movies and subtitles at full 100% quality. It works around the copy protection, so no need (or desire) for other software like AnyDVD, etc to get around that.