A Home Theatre PC build from spare parts

So it's 2011 and I thought it was time I did something about setting up a HTPC as an entertainment system. So gathering the necessary parts from the rather large collection of spare parts which have been stored away, along with a HTPC case on permanent loan from a friend. I have put the system together and got it working smoothly. In building the system I was looking for any easy solution. I did not want to spend lots of time trying to sort out compatibility or configuration.

A few issues encountered during the whole process were unsupported video card hardware in Element OS. Element OS is a linux operating system build specifically to run as a HTPC. It seems the major problem is the limited support for some hardware that linux has, because other than that it was easy to install and use. It installs XBMC as part of the installation so you don't need to download/install any other software.

Having tried the linux solution, I moved onto Windows 7. Like Element OS, Win 7 comes with some HTPC software as part of it. Windows Media Center is the Microsoft equivalent of XBMC, and is closed source software which means there are less customisation packages available for it.

Now that I had an Operating System which supported all the hardware, it was time to choose the HTPC software package to run. I experimented with Windows Media Center, XBMC, MediaBrowser and MediaPortal before deciding to go with MediaPortal combined with the Moving Pictures plugin and Media Scout to retrieve metadata. All the HTPC software was easy to install and use, the differences lay in the look & feel of them.

The final problem encountered after the system was setup, was an audio streaming issue. The system was setup to stream video + audio over HDMI to the tv, but when they system was stream HD video + HD audio the audio stream would break up every minute or so. The obvious problem being the drivers for the video card and the solution was to update the drivers for the ATI Radeon  HD5700 video card. Unfortunately there seems to be some conflict with the latest version of the drivers and Windows 7 because after upgrading to Catalyst 10.12 every single media application on the computer crashed when you attempt to start it(Even Windows Media Player).

As a result I was forced use google to locate the previous version as the support site for ATI Radeon video cards does not provide an easy mechanism to locate previous versions of drivers. I was able to locate Catalyst 10.11 and after installing it, the system functions perfectly.