Background

As a home cinema enthusiast and casual player, I always fed the idea of having a high quality surround system on my living room. That opportunity presented itself when both me and my fiance decided to buy our first apartment about two years ago, so long before that I started envisioning and planning on the best possible configuration. When our building reached construction phase, my goal was to setup a 7.1 audio channel system. Issue is, unless you are a lucky enough to have a home-theater-friendly wife, you are in for tough resistance. So there were several things that had to be thought of in order to maximize the WAF indicator (Wife Acceptance Factor) at the time of discussing living room layout/design.

1. Cables. A 7.1 setup requires a lot of cabling…. Going everywhere. So cables had to be out of sight somehow, and an under-the-carpet solution wasn’t gonna stick (didn’t bothered to consider wireless, of course). So in order to accomplish this, I added internal wall and floor cable routing tubes. Also added one for the wall mounted flat screen TV, along with power outlet. So, check!
2. Lots of “huge” speakers – as she said. This was tough. It’s all in the eye… I thought if the speakers had the right coloring and design match with the surrounding environment, I should be safe. Indeed I was. Went for Monitor Audio RX1 black gloss finish surround speakers, piano white lacquer Radius HD R45 for back speakers, and black oak vinyl for center/left/right and sub-woofer. It all blended well with living room furniture and general design. Check!
3. Lastly, the looks. It’s 99% of a women’s concern on every purchase. So simple and stylish speakers were in order. Also check!

In the end, combined with our “cableless” 46″ Plasma TV, and an optionally hidden Onkyo SR875 AV Receiver, it made the perfect WAF score and ended up being a great setup for the occasion. And today she is becoming more and more of a home theater affectionate. We’ve been watching High Definition content via cable TV provider and PS3. The latter, used for bluray viewing and streaming from PC via DLNA.

However, streaming from a PC to the living room TV via PS3 isn’t a perfect solution. Even with a gigabit network at your disposal, fast forwarding or similar can be time consuming and even be prone to streaming errors. I’ve used PS3 Media Server for streaming, and from my experience, it still isn’t 100% reliable for its purpose, and other solutions aren’t as good. I often got corrupt file error, stream freeze, and even unbalanced data rate at some point.

In time, this motivated me to build a Home Theater PC that would fit my needs and, at the same time, integrate seamlessly in my living room.

Requirements

There are, however, a series of minimum requirements that I believe should be mandatory on a HTPC, for it to be worthy of the name:

1. High Definition. By today’s standards, a Home theater PC should be able to output current audio and video specifications, as reflected by the market today. That means it should output 1080p video resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels), also referred to as “Full HD” and support both TrueHD and Dolby DTS Master Audio HD audio formats. That is good to satisfy the “Home Theater” direct designation.
2. Consumption. Every watt counts, and a HTPC is likely to be turned on the whole day downloading or encoding content to set things up for you before viewing. So a energy efficient CPU and hard drive are required.
3. Size. This is a major requirement as I’ll want the HTPC to blend in in your living room, nicely stored in your living room furniture. If not to optimize your WAF indicator (Wife Acceptance Factor).
4. Storage. Given my past experience, and also network storage performance, I’m prioritizing a local storage solution. It should be relatively large in order to comfortably store video/music/photos but also good read/write ratio. Also, we’ll want accessible and fast USB ports to be able to read/write content external hard drives or USB pens, even memory cards if possible. All of this, of course, by today’s standards.
5. Speed. Needless to say that speed matters. Either when accessing data while browsing through your media library, or when recovering your PC in sleep mode… You’ll want things to be fast and responsive.
6. Software. No HTPC can survive the test of time without proper usability. I will need a software solution capable of browsing my media library comfortably, provide good information, have good visuals and automation capabilities for cover art, subtitles and file naming.

Taking these into consideration, we’ll start by determining and deciding on the most influential technology/hardware and go from there.

Technical Specifications

Form factor

Size matters for an HTPC. You’ll want to store it nice and comfortably alongside your other devices and minimize the visual impact on your living room, so we’ll need a minimal form factor that would minimize case size but at the same time allow for the minimum chipset features on motherboards this size. Mini-ITX is a 17 x 17cm low-power motherboard form factor and can often be passively cooled due to their low power consumption architecture, which makes them useful for Home Theater PC systems, where fan noise can detract from the cinema and generic audio listening experience. It also has provision for one expansion slot that we can use on a dedicated graphics card, audio card or TV tuner. So this form factor will save us space and also gain portability, while supporting all the good stuff available on larger mainstream motherboard chipsets.

Motherboard and CPU

To comply with the requirements, the motherboard should be able to support Sata 6Gb, USB3, HDMI 1.4a and low power consumption.

On the Intel side, the latest and greatest is the Core i series chipsets, that give way to the latest i series CPU’s code named Sandy Bridge, launched in February 2011, with a new socket, the LGA-1155. From the current Intel chipset ofering, I would consider the Intel 6 series chipsets, that offers 6Gb/s Bus bandwidth and are for Sandy Bridge mainstream desktop and business platforms. Three new chipsets stand out: the performance-focused P67, the integrated graphics-focused H67 and the entry-level H61.

One thing to keep in mind when picking a new motherboard is to make sure the new motherboard comes with the new B3 stepping. This is because the 6 Series Chipset code named “Cougar Point”, which powers the new P67 series Sandy Bridge processors, has a flaw that may impact SATA performance over time. Under heavy use, there may be a degradation in performance. While this issue happens on a VERY small percentage of boards, it was big enough of an issue for INTEL to spend a billion dollars and raise the bar for the industry in terms of taking care of the customer. Even though the problem might not even happen for years, if at all. However, Intel took quick measures to fix this with the new B3 stepping fix.

So given the specs, form factor availability and my local retailer catalog and stock, H67 would be a good option. It has a TDP of 6.1 W and Sata3. Besides, it’s the cheapest motherboard on this configuration available. The following table describes most of the current ITX H67 models’s characteristics:

Given the retail price on each model (not present in the table by the way), and by contrast with overall features and quality, the ASRock model stood out from the rest. The non HT version (no WiFi and Media Center controller) it’s sold for around 78€. Great value, since I won’t need the extras of the HT (Home Theater) version so this motherboard would fit the Intel solution.

Among the available CPU’s for this motherboard there are two that particularly stand out due to their performance/consumption ratio: the Core i3-2100T, with 2.5Ghz clock frequency per core, and the Core i3-2120T that boosts 2.6Ghz, both sharing a TDP (thermal design power) of only 35W, which is ideal for a HTPC. Tests confirm that on CPU burn it maxes out at 33W, 23W on GPU burn, and 9.7W on idle.

They feature two cores (more than enough for HTPC duties), have a 3Mb L3 cache, LGA 1155 socket and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 2000 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), so you don’t actually need a dedicated graphics card unless you’re intending to play heavy games. Even on that regard it performs pretty well: it supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.1 and have decent gaming performance, but not for current games.

For video, features full MPEG2, VC-1 and H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 (also called AVC – Advanced Video Coding) hardware acceleration and 650 to 1250Mhz  (Turbo) core render frequency. The new GPU enables HDMI 1.4a so Blu-ray 3D is supported.

Since only dual-core Core i3 and Core i5 processors have an integrated graphics core, it means that an Intel Mini-ITX system with a quad- or six-core processor inside can only be built using an external graphics accelerator, and that would also demand higher TDP consumption. So these are the ones to go for. We can see these CPU’s in stores for around 110€.

In terms of audio, Sandy Bridge CPUs when paired with an H67 PCH (Platform Controller Hub) allow bitstreaming of up to eight channels of lossless audio typically found on Blu-ray discs. Dolby Digital, TrueHD (up to 7.1), DTS, DTS-HD MA (up to 7.1) can all be bitstreamed over HDMI. Decoded audio can also be sent over HDMI. They will be immediately listed in the display properties page after MEI drivers are installed.

As for an AMD alternative, AMD Fusion is the name. It’s the designation of a new series of APU’s (CPU + GPU) by AMD with the latest being the “Llano” 32 nm processor family. From what I’ve seen, integrated GPU from AMD is far superior to Intel’s HD Graphics 3000. An integrated Radeon HD 6550D generally performs between a Radeon HD 6450 and 5570 depending on memory speed. Compared to, say, the Core i3-2105, you’re looking at a nearly 2x performance advantage on average.

On CPU performance, Intel is still superior albeit the high hopes I’ve seen in specialty websites. You can take a look at a sample review here for your own conclusions. The strong point of Llano is obviously the embedded GPU and combined with their A75 chipset features like native SATA-600 and USB 3.0 support. Next to that, the powerful software suite surrounding Llano definitely brings heaps of advantages to AMD opposed to the competition. But the lowest TPU for desktop Llano (codenamed Lynx by the way) is 65W, which

In terms of power consumption, the the Sabine platform, introduced on June 30 for the AMD Mainstream Notebook Platform, provided some nice 35W TDP alternatives, with A8-3500M (4 cores, 1,5Ghz) and A4-3300M (2 cores, 1,9Ghz) looking promising. Available chipsets are A60M and A70M (Hudson-M2, Hudson-M3). However, I’ve seen no motherboard offering as of yet, so I’ll be forced to analyze a power efficient alternative on AMD.

And that would have to go to the E-350 “Zacate” (40 nm) model, that has a 18W TDP, but it’s 1.6Ghz and shows around 25% of Intel 2100T performance. On the other hand, it has the advantage of reduced price on motherboard + CPU bundle, since A50M motherboards generally have integrated E-350 CPU.

So currently for AMD to directly compete with Intel alternative discussed previously, it would have to sacrifice computational power and stick with A50M chipset limitations like RAID support, but would gain in native USB3, DirectX11, higher GPU performance, lower TDP and final bundle cost. ASRock E350M1 is one of the lower priced motherboards, selling for around 90€.

Since gaming is not a prerequisite on a dedicated HTPC, Intel solution is the ideal at this point.

Storage

Storage solution can take several shapes, depending on budget. There are two main storage interfaces present in today’s available hard drives:

SATA II (revision 2.0) -  3 Gbit/s

Second generation SATA interfaces running at 3.0 Gbit/s are shipping in high volume as of 2010, and prevalent in all SATA disk drives and the majority of PC and server chipsets. With a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 3.0 Gbit/s is roughly double that of SATA revision 1.

Sata III (Revision 3.0) – 6Gbit/s

The 3.0 standard was released on May 27, 2009.It provides peak throughput of about 600 MB/s (Megabytes per second) including the protocol overhead (10b/8b coding with 8 bits to one byte). Solid-state drives have already saturated SATA 3 Gbit/s with 285/275 MB/s max read/write speed and 250 MB/s sustained with the Sandforce 1200 and 1500 controller. SandForce SSD controllers released in 2011 have 500 MB/s read/write rates.

By the way, SSD stands for solid state drive, and it’s a data storage device that uses solid-state memory to store persistent data with the intention of providing access in the same manner of a traditional block i/o hard disk drive.

At the moment, Sata III is only present in SSD hard drives, and although they show great performance, it comes with a high price. If money is no impediment, a Sata III SSD solution would be best. There is one thing you should though… Reliability on SSD drives has been questioned, so my advice is to stay informed before committing.

Other option, for a lower budget, would be to have a smaller size SSD to hold O.S. and dominant apps, side-by-side with a traditional magnetic disk hard drive of higher capacity for your other apps and relevant data, although higher capacity SSD’s are even faster at the same SATA spec.

Finally, the most wallet friendly option, which is using magnetic storage. Typically, ITX cases support 2.5 inch drives, and these are available in 10k, 7200 and 5400 RPM (Revolutions Per Minute). Nowadays a 750Gb 2.5″ Sata II 7200 RPM drive goes for around 80Eur and are 5400 RPM-equivalent power consumption. From a performance stand point, the WD Scorpio Black 750Gb 7200rpm does provide great balance, and has power dissipation values of 1.75W while active, 0.8W idle and 0.4W in sleep mode.

Memory

The AsRock H67M ITX supports dual channel DDR3 1333/1066 non-ECC, un-buffered memory. In this regard a 4Gb low voltage solution is more than enough for HTPC tasks. One of the best price/quality/performance options out there is the 4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3-1333 CL9.

It features a 4GB high performance module for use in high AMD Phenom II or Intel Core i7, i5 and i3 Dual Channel systems, fast 1333MHz with 9-9-9-24 latency at 1.65v, it’s backed by Corsairs Lifetime Warranty and supports Intel XMP (Extreme Memory Profile). The XMS3 family is Corsair’s mainstream line of performance DDR3 memory and are available in Corsair’s XMS heat spreaders.

Case

For a Mini-ITX H67 6.1W paired with the Intel Core i3 35W CPU not much is needed in terms of PSU capacity so the most important aspects to consider are size, front panel connections, build quality and overall design. Lian Li has great aluminum cases with great finish that already support USB 3.0 front connectors. But for my spacing needs, its 12cm height is a bit too tall for the available cabinet space, and would also impact on portability.

The 9cm height Antec ISK 310-150 ITX case has an elegant front finish with a 150 watts Flex-ATX PSU to power the system. It features two frontal USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone connectors, and a has 2.5″ drive opening bay. Both this model and the 300 model would fit the requirements. This one simply has a more visually compatible design, so it will be my first choice. This case goes around for

Overall

So all things considered it all pointed out to stylish, highly performant and cost-effective setup:

I’ve build this exact machine two weeks ago. Ordered from an online retailer from Germany that presented a diverse catalog and good prices. Shipping costs aside, it costed exactly 365,82€, and after playing with it until now I must say its worth every euro. I’m yet to get exact values on power consumption on Idle, Sleep and Burning states (must get a Kill-A-Watt of some kind), but my early estimate dictates it will be around 20-22W idle, and maybe 5W in Sleep mode.

One thing I did when building the HTPC was disconnecting the power LED that lights the power button. I’ve came to the conclusion that its too bright in a dark environment, and since most of the times, the HTPC is in plane sight, the intense blue light disturbed correct viewing a little.

Next I’ll be posting about software I used to optimize and automate the setup. After all, all this is worthless if good software isn’t put into good use.

Just installed WordPress blogging engine Android app into my Dell Streak tablet and this is actually the first run. After a quick 2 min sweep, on a first glance, it seems the very basics are there like post listing, comments and stats. One thing I quickly noticed was that on the Posts tab, I had no way of immediately distingwish between published and draft content. That is something I value due to the amount of drafts I can have at a given time, like the present.

In terms of editing, it lets you do html with no preview, add photos and videos, text styling (basic, no colours, apparently) and supports tag and category setup. Publishing-wise, I’ll see when I submit this micro-review. Overall, It does the job for simple content, you would need html know-how to extend your horizon. There’s a lot of room for improvement so I’ll keep my eye out for updates.

Update: Publishing went smoothly

A WordPress plugin has been released by software developer Daniel Treadwell, called Google+Blog. With this, users will be able to easily and quickly cross post their posts from Goggle+ to also be published on their blog. This happens automatically and should save users a lot of time as they will not have to do this manually anymore. It is great for keeping your blog followers in the loop, especially if they do not have a Google+ account themselves.

You can download the plugin online easily, after checking your e-mails or surfing www.partypoker.fr… There is a free version which features a back link to the plugin, plus the text ‘Post imported by Google+Blog. Created By Daniel Treadwell’. If you choose to download the paid version, it will cost $10 however the back link will be removed. All of the posts you create with this plugin will feature a link to the original post on Google+, so readers will always be able to find the origin.

You set up the plugin with your Google+ ID, and you will also need a Google+ API. To get this, click ‘create project’ and switch on the setting for Google+ API. You will then need to click on ‘API access’ and you will see your API key. When in your WordPress blog, you will be able to choose the number of already created Google+ posts that you want to import. When you publish new posts in your Google+ profile, the plugin will check every hour and publish them itself.

Then you will be able to carry on posting as you wish. This is a great way to update your followers and is also really easy to do. It saves you valuable time and can make your life a lot easier.

At the time of this writing, Apple iTunes download page doesn’t display a direct download link for the application, even if you are unable to download using the current window popup download system. To make things worse, if you head on to the support page, Apple provides you help disabling eventual popup blockers instead. So, getting straight to the point, for those who require a direct download link for the 93Mb Apple iTunes x64 setup file, here’s the link:

http://appldnld.apple.com/iTunes9/061-8727.20100722.Cde32/iTunes64Setup.exe

For clumsy connections this would be a welcome addition for download managers with resume download support.

In this article, I’ll be reviewing 5 different advertising networks that can help you monetize your traffic. If you’re either a novice webmaster or an ad tycoon, there’s enough for everyone.

Since I started blogging, it soon became clear I could use my articles to generate some income and make my blog pay for itself and cover hosting and domain expenses. So I, as a webmaster, started investigating a bit and try to find the best solution to monetize my content. I’m now sharing some advertising networks I read to be the most common and reliable, also generating some extra pageviews while I’m at it

Text Link Ads: Text Link/In-Link Advertising

This network sells paid text links which are typically placed in sidebars and headers. Major advantages are you don’t need banners, they pay on time and expose earnings in a practical and effective way, and they are generally transparent to your audience. No TLA references whatsoever. The downside to it, from what I’ve read, but not actually verified, is that using TLA can get you penalized in search engines. For small publishers this won’t be a significant issue, but if you depend on a strong positioning in search engines and is critical for your business, this should be a consideration. There’s a plug-in for WordPress if you use it. See it here.

Comission Junction

This company is set on affiliate marketing. In this kind of business, advertisers (online merchants that sell products or services) pay publishers (independent parties that promote the products or services of an advertiser on their Web site) only for results, such as a visitor making a purchase or filling out a form, rather than paying simply to reach a particular audience. The publisher is paid a commission by the respective advertiser when a visitor takes a specific action such as filling out a form, subscribing to a service (both lead examples) or making a purchase (a sale). More info here.

Adsense: Contextual Ad Network

Google’s contextual ads are the most commonly seen ad network on the web. The reason is that they are one size fits all, no matter what your site Google probably has an ad for you. Not only that, their fill rate is superb and they are an easy network to get into. What’s the downside? It’s easy to outgrow them, you will eventually find that Google’s payout for many verticals isn’t as good as you could be making elsewhere. At that point, it might be time to start looking at other providers and using Google as a remnant to fill your unsold inventory. Either way, get informed here.

The Lounge Advertising Network

The Lounge Advertising Network from ZerkMedia is focused on publishers and advertisers that are somehow exclusively targeting Microsoft products and technologies. If your site is all about it and you have at least 8k page views per month get in the boat.

Kontera

Kontera can help you if your site context is textually heavy. The downside is you will have a ton of double underlined ads at random locations in your text. For some readers it can be a nuisance and will sure downgrade the overall quality of your website. The code is simple to install and there’s a plug-in for everyone who use WordPress engine. I’ve tested it and its simple to setup and configure. More info here.

For those who are still having questions regarding the new 3D technology affecting movies, games and apps, I’ll leave you with two links I found useful in explaining what this emerging technology is all about.

Whether you buy into the hype or not, it’s plain fact that 3D is everywhere these days. From movies and games to laptops and handhelds, pretty much every screen in the house is going to be 3D-capable in a year or so, even if you opt not to display any 3D content on it. Those of you who choose that path may stop reading now, and come back a little later when you change your mind. Because if you have kids or enjoy movies and games, there will be a point where you’re convinced, perhaps by a single standout piece of media, that 3D is worth it at least some of the time.

CrunchGear: A guide to 3D display technology: its principles, methods, and dangers

AVForums: A Guide to 3DTV: AVForums FAQ 

A quick tip on how to get the current wordpress theme image path when referencing images on your theme php or css files.

<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/images/mainimage.jpg" title="" alt="" />

That’s all there is to it. The bloginfo(‘template_directory’) function will return the current theme path, and appending the “image” folder positions you right folder.

Here are three useful resources for those who are prototyping iPhone apps. To give your demos a realistic look, you can download these iPhone UI elements, available in three different formats:

Adobe Illustrator Vector Elements (.ai) – Mercury Intermedia Blog

Download iPhone UI Vector Elements Now (2.6MB)

Adobe Photoshop (.psd)- teehan-lax Blog

Download The iPhone GUI PSD Here (9MB)

OmniGraffle – Graffletopia

http://graffletopia.com/stencils/413

You can also get them in XAML format through Mike Swanson’s Adobe Illustrator to XAML Export plugin.

It’s here, and it’s finally official. Microsoft recently announced two Windows Phone devices called Kin I and Kin II, the outcome of the highly rumored Microsoft Project Pink.

They both feature Windows Phone OS, but differ in hardware specs. Kin II it’s the biggest, featuring 8Gb memory, 8Mp camera that records 720p video, while KIN I has a smaller form factor and features a 5Mp camera with full VGA Video. It’s been said that battery life will last an entire weekend. But this is still subject of testing, you know how marketing works, right?

The new OS is very much social oriented. It’s main screen, called Loop shows all your contacts strictly organized and somewhat optimized from a User Experience point of view. Personally, It won’t do much to me, since I use my personal devices in a more professional level, but it’s great for social usage scenarios.

Other than this, it seems sharp will be the device manufacturer for the 1st round, and both devices will be available in

Vodafone Spain, Italy, Germany and Uk.

And that’s a rap. The 2010’s Most valuable Professional Summit is now over. It took place in Bellevue & Redmond, Washington, and for those who couldn’t be there for all the good stuff in the agenda, well, eyes wide open for blogs, tweets and streams.

In the meantime, get yourself on the run for that distinguished MVP title and get your ticket to next year’s summit as well as your trophy-kit. The girls will love it… I guess )

Next, on April 12th, Microsoft will be pairing with DevConnections for the Visual Studio Launch at the Bellagio Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, NV. Microsoft will launch Visual Studio 2010, and by attending the Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo, you will not only experience the launch alongside the Visual Studio team and industry legends – you’ll get three days of sessions by the best speakers in the industry on the latest and greatest technologies, such as WPF, Silverlight and .NET 4.0.  Also, If you attend Microsoft Visual Studio Conference & Expo, you’ll automatically get access to both the ASP.NET and Silverlight and the SQL Conference and Expo.