PC help needed for techie dunce
Ok, firstly, I am grateful for any advice you lot can offer. But please use words of one syllable and as few acronyms as you can. You are talking to a techie dunce!
The situation is this: I am having a bit of a rearrange of my audio and video set up. Currently CDs and DVDs get played on my bluray, with the DVDs projected on an Optoma (which is, so I have recently learnt HD Ready 720 ) (the grammar probably makes no sense there). Ok. Well, I have recently moved my computer and have managed to get the video linked in to the optoma too. Havent sorted sound on that yet as I need to get it plumbed in (I told you I dont have the vocab for this) to the amp. Currently it's still only from the computer speakers (boo). Anyway, mostly well and good, except the new arrangement has upset my bluray, which now gets U73 errors. Hm....bugger, I'm thinking. But then a nagging little Welsh voice starts badgering inside my skull "Media pc good...21st century...out of the Dark Ages.... join us, join us".
So, essentially Doc Foster has persuaded me that my best bet is to forget the Panasonic bluray player and play everything from my PC. So, what I need to know is...how I do dat den?? Firstly, am I going to be able to get rid of my horrendously noisy PC DVD player? I will need a bluray player to replace it, but can I get ones that dont sound like a helicpoter about to land on my house?
The Doc has advised JRiver Media Centre and some kind of bluray reading software (wtf??) I'm assuming this is standard?
My graphics card should handl all this I think: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 . But I have no idea how memory hungry CDs are to a poor old chundering pc like mine.
It all sounds wonderfully idyllic if I can get it all to work. But, as you can tell, the path to that golden land seems pretty impenetrable with my current level of understanding on all this magical stuff.
All help gratefully received!!
Comments
Basically, my thinking is that my media PC does everything (except play vinyl), so why shouldn't Suzy's...? JRiver sounds great on PC, and I've found it easy to get on with (well within the capablility of a slightly above average woman, certainly...).
If Suzy's current PC is capable of running JRiver (I'm pretty sure it must be) and her HD can handle all her CDs and DVDs then the only thing that stands between Suzy and media heaven is a few quid for JRiver and a lot of time spent ripping all her CDs and DVDs (hence the niosey drive won't be an issue when listening). There's also a nifty remote control ap for JRiver so one needn't ever leave one's seat once the PC is on.
The only issues that I can see are:
1. I don't know how good the soundcard is in Suzy's PC.
2. I don't know how big her HDD is (but in any event, an external one could be bought cheaply).
3. I don't know how well her PC would get on with blurays (she'd need something like AnyDVD HD, and a bluray drive certainly - but again, external ones are available relatively cheaply).
478.74 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space
Optiarc DVD RW AD-7200S ATA Device [Optical drive]
3.5" format removeable media [Floppy drive]
Generic Flash Disk USB Device (16.22 GB) -- drive 2, SMART Status: Healthy
Hitachi HDP725050GLA360 [Hard drive] (500.11 GB) -- drive 1, s/n GEC534RF3B4SLE, rev GM4OA5CA, SMART Status: Healthy
ST250DM000-1BC141 [Hard drive] (250.06 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 6VYBJ8NT, rev JC4B, SMARTStatus: Healthy
Realtek High Definition Audio????????????????????????
If you're going to stick Blurays on it, you'd probably get a few on (in my experience most Blue-rays are <40GB).
No idea about the other stuff. We'll have to take a listen to what your PC sounds like.
I'll pop up soon and we'll do a full kit audit... from software to speakers. We'll identify what's needed, or at least what questions to ask. :-)
I don't know if you're wanting to throw money at this, but when I was looking for a silent PC with blue-ray capability and some processing horsepower, I found about £700 covered it. Now that's a lot of clams, but it's a decent machine, and completely silent (passively cooled). The only moving part would be the disc drive.
Here are a couple of options I looked at:
Mini-ITX
At Last!
In the end, I decided to go with a machine with no moving parts at all or blue-ray capability, partly because I want an audio-PC and an external drive can be plugged in when needed, and partly because I have blue-ray anyway.
I hope you find a reasonable and elegant solution. It won't be Ben...