2012-09-10, 03:35
Background:
I have an four year old HTPC (Athlon X4, 4GB RAM, ATI 54xx card, 4.5 TB Storage {2 TB + 1TB + 1TB + 500GB}) with Media Portal and XBMC as the frontend. Overall, I've been really happy with it but lately, I've been feeling the urge to either upgrade the current HTPC or build a media server. The reason for this is that I have some new additions in the home... namely, two tablets and a Roku player and I would like to stream my media to those devices as well.
I have tried using Plex to stream HD movies to Roku, TF700T and Nexus 7 with mixed results. Since everything is connect wirelessly via
Asus RT-n56U, at first I thought that my wifi connection is the bottleneck but upon further investigation, I found that it's my HTPC that's choking up when transcoding 720/1080p movies to serve up via Plex (CPU usage pegged above 95% constantly).
Budget:
As cheap as possible. Ideally, I would like to keep it below $500, unless there is an advantage of spending more. If I were to upgrade the HTPC, I was thinknig about going with i5 3750K + 16GB ram (just so that if I want to play games, I can also do that...but that's very low on the priority list)
Questions:
- Should I keep the setup as is (HTPC and Media Server in one box) and just upgrade to a beefer specs (to help with transcoding)?
- Keep the HTPC as is and build a heavy duty media server and just stream everything to HTPC?
- Upgrade the HTPC (with i5 3570K) and use the current parts to built the media server and then just use it as a storage place which can serve media to XBMC via shared folders (this way HTPC will do all the transcoding....correct? )
- How efficient are powerline adapters for media streaming (trying to avoid running LAN cables through out the house. Also, I don't know how much it will help to have wired connection because my tablets will still be accessing media wirelessly)?
I have an four year old HTPC (Athlon X4, 4GB RAM, ATI 54xx card, 4.5 TB Storage {2 TB + 1TB + 1TB + 500GB}) with Media Portal and XBMC as the frontend. Overall, I've been really happy with it but lately, I've been feeling the urge to either upgrade the current HTPC or build a media server. The reason for this is that I have some new additions in the home... namely, two tablets and a Roku player and I would like to stream my media to those devices as well.
I have tried using Plex to stream HD movies to Roku, TF700T and Nexus 7 with mixed results. Since everything is connect wirelessly via
Asus RT-n56U, at first I thought that my wifi connection is the bottleneck but upon further investigation, I found that it's my HTPC that's choking up when transcoding 720/1080p movies to serve up via Plex (CPU usage pegged above 95% constantly).
Budget:
As cheap as possible. Ideally, I would like to keep it below $500, unless there is an advantage of spending more. If I were to upgrade the HTPC, I was thinknig about going with i5 3750K + 16GB ram (just so that if I want to play games, I can also do that...but that's very low on the priority list)
Questions:
- Should I keep the setup as is (HTPC and Media Server in one box) and just upgrade to a beefer specs (to help with transcoding)?
- Keep the HTPC as is and build a heavy duty media server and just stream everything to HTPC?
- Upgrade the HTPC (with i5 3570K) and use the current parts to built the media server and then just use it as a storage place which can serve media to XBMC via shared folders (this way HTPC will do all the transcoding....correct? )
- How efficient are powerline adapters for media streaming (trying to avoid running LAN cables through out the house. Also, I don't know how much it will help to have wired connection because my tablets will still be accessing media wirelessly)?
