[noggin]

[quote='noggin' pid='2205985' dateline='1452073263']
@brazen1 Many of us initially went down the HTPC route you suggest. The reality is that a PC with 20TB of storage is never silent. I much prefer to site my server in a location where noise is not an issue, and play content from it to various devices around my house. A Raspberry Pi 2 works for me as a client, as does a Chromebox. I have an HTPC in one location (Pentium Sandy Bridge based) acting purely as a Windows Media Center TV solution. This solves a different problem for me. We all have different requirements, different tolerance levels (I would never get away with a 20TB server in my living room...) It's horses for courses.

With all due respect, and complete understanding of different strokes for different folks, statements like this immediately shy away those considering building an all in one htpc. This is misleading imo. I feel a little defense for windows is appropriate. Reality is, I cannot tell if my box is on without looking at the power light because it is so quiet. It is within arms reach as I'm typing. Nothing special to achieve this other than elbow grease. I assume your comment about 20TB's refers to multiple hard drives. Windows has always had a spin down setting. It works perfectly and when a drive does spin up for playback, at 15 feet I can't hear it and when I put my ear to it, the decibels is minimal. Perhaps this might be a problem for the sensitive but 99% of titles have few silent moments and the audio covers up the loudest of machines. The ssd, the only drive running constantly, is silent. As you've stated about your noisy server in another room, this box serves clients too and is the main playback machine as well. The point is, noise is not an issue for me and if I overcame it, the resourceful user I am, anyone could.
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Yep - different strokes for different folks. I spent a lot of time and effort sound proofing my HTPC case with noise deadening material, putting in quieter system fans, quieter CPU coolers, quieter hard drive mounts etc. and it was still too noisy to put up with in my modest London living room. I had to switch it off when it wasn't in use, which wasn't ideal as it was also supposed to be my PVR solution at the time. It was also serving other clients for music and movie replay, so multiple discs were usually spinning (as they were for TV recording)

The issue was most obviously when I was reading, working etc. without any music or TV on, but the fans were running and the drives spinning.

I am much happier with a silent client and a noisier server (which also acts as back-end PVR storage for at least on PVR solution I run). The noisy server is located in a cupboard where I can't hear it...

[quote='noggin' pid='2205985' dateline='1452073263']
@brazen1 Many of us initially went down the HTPC route you suggest. The reality is that a PC with 20TB of storage is never silent. I much prefer to site my server in a location where noise is not an issue, and play content from it to various devices around my house. A Raspberry Pi 2 works for me as a client, as does a Chromebox. I have an HTPC in one location (Pentium Sandy Bridge based) acting purely as a Windows Media Center TV solution. This solves a different problem for me. We all have different requirements, different tolerance levels (I would never get away with a 20TB server in my living room...) It's horses for courses.

[quote='bobneal81' pid='2206103' dateline='1452083696']
I've only had my Raspberry Pi2 / OpenELEC box for a few days and it's been awesome for 3D iso. I'd like to try Kodi on a Windows machine as well. I'm using a Windows 7 machine with a pretty fast i7 processor and I just ordered an ATI Radeon HD6450 that supposedly supports 3D movie playback. Can anyone offer tips? I had to use the Milhouse 01/04 build for 3D iso's to work on the Pi2...is there a special build to use for windows? Maybe one of these?:

http://mirrors.kodi.tv/nightlies/win32/

Anything else to know about Kodi / Windows / 3D iso? Thanks!

I should get a Pi2 using newer builds to see how it works in the real world for me. Have an older 512Mb model clocked at 1100. Folks exclaimed how cool it was to stream content. Tried many builds and O/S. At 1st I WiFi'd and it just buffered constantly using N tech at the time. No problem with compressed rips but they looked terrible. Tried high bitrate full copy rips in the 40-50 range and they started to play, buffered and eventually dropped the connection.

Pi really needed NFS rather than SMB for high bitrate stuff - but was surprisingly capable. I'd never use WiFi for any bluray unrecompressed stuff though. The Pi 2 is an order of magnitude faster in CPU terms and is a very good solution IMO.

Went Ethernet. Same thing. Discovered Pi port was 10/100 only and not 10/100/1000 like all my other client ports that didn't have a problem and chalked it up to that.

That's very odd. 100Mbs is fine for Blu-ray quality stuff. I've had a number of solutions that are running at 100Mbs (Popcorn Hour C200 was one - as you had to run it 100Mbs because of a faulty GigE implementation...) with no problem at all. You wouldn't want your server and infrastructure to be 100Mbs, but a single client should be fine.

Strange thing is WiFi on the other clients was fine, but using same adapter on the Pi didn't work? Was told 10\100 was overkill for 50 bitrate playback and not the problem. No idea what else it could have been? Noticed output never lit up DTSHDMA or TrueHD so I gave it away. Your success streaming native supported 3D iso perks up my interest again.

The Pi 2 still won't light up your DTS-HD MA or True HD lights because it can't bitstream those codecs due to an HDMI bandwidth hardware limitation. However it can decode losslessly to 5.1/7.1 PCM (just as early Blu-ray players did, and the early PS3s) so you get lossless playback of 5.1/7.1 DTS-HD MA and Dolby True HD stuff at 96/48kHz, and 4.0 192kHz stuff.