Any love for HTPC still? :)

Looks like this sub-forum is pretty quiet, but im still rocking a HTPC in my HT as my main movie player!

One of the main reasons is because i can easily run separate Video and Audio via 2 HDMI cables as im still running and old-tech pre-amp that wont do HDMI ARC properly. Yeah i could get a splitter, but this setup works really well for my needs right now.

Currently using a modified Silverstone LC17 (black) - i really like these cases as they match my HT equipment pretty well and are one of the more minimalist cases.

Im running Kodi as the front end, with MPC-BE, Lav and MadVR as an external player for movie/tv show playback from my Plex server via Plex-Connect. This doesnt do DV/HDR - however MadVR is very good and i prefer the smoothness of the video playback via that stack than using LAV (that does support DV) by itself.

Music is still courtesy of foobar (asio & bit perfect flac's ofc!), tho i'll admit to usually just using the chromecast-audio and spotify these days, especially since they now offer 'lossless' and after a few whiskies... well its good enough!

Hardware wise, its an old i7-7700k 32gb ram and a 1660 super video card on Windows 11 - its a little nosier than i'd like when MadvR is flogging the GPU, but acceptable at reasonable volume levels. Connectivity is via a MSI Herald BE - this is awesome and heaps better than the asus ac88 it replaced.

Keyb/mouse combo is an ancient logitech k400.

Backend is a big unraid server running plex, which i recently moved from windows server - am really liking unraid and its ability to actually spin down drives (which pissed me off super bad with windows server after ver 2016).

There's just something appealing about being able to do some browsing, fire up MAME or mess around with apps on the HTPC and big screen that I would really miss if i retired it!

Anyway, long live the HTPC!!

Cheers

 

I miss my HTPC running MediaPortal. They were originally an Atom/Ion N330 and later a repurposed Surface 1 until the fan died.
Neither had H265 hardware decoding so became less and less useful as time went on. Moved in to a rental and wired ethernet became a challenge which was the death-nail for the setup.

I now run Plex locally and stream straight to the smart TV, but would really like to go back to the MediaPortal interface which was much better (decent option for a text based folder tree rather than a bunch of unlabelled folder icons)

One of the 8th gen mini PC's and Win11 would be a great replacement, but I need to find a decent MCE remote...

 

4k Fire stick max is my htpc in bedroom. Very convenient unfortunately. Tech sure has changed. Even has a USB hub plugged into it with a wireless game pad as a controller because my remote disappeared into the ether

 

I've been running MythTV since 2003.