Building A Digital Media Home Theatre

I remember the days when we used to shop for VHS tapes and DVDs. Technology has come a long way in the past 10 years. With the advent of the digital age in music, TV, movies and other mediums it appears it is here to stay.

Blu-Ray is the latest rage and even more is the ability to copy Blu-Ray discs to different video codecs. There are some great authoring software available to assist you moving your digital media from a disc to server readable format. One of the most popular codecs is the .mkv codec. This little gem can encode an entire 720p or 1080p movie into a file size around 5 to 8 GB and retain image quality. A standard Blu-Ray is around 25 to 50 GB in it’s raw file format.

On top of the excellent compression of this codec it retains DTS, Dolby Digital, DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby True-HD audio tracks that can be decoded by any receiver that can play these audio formats. Most media players such as the WD-Live and Asus O’Play can playback a multitude of video/audio file formats and output to your receiver in their native format.

The Hardware List

To build a Digital Media Home Theatre you need several things.

• A digital source to play media from such as an external hard-drive or hard drives in a home server. I recommend 1.0 TB 7200 speed SATA hard drives  for HD streaming.
• An operating system for the server, Windows, Linux, name your flavor.
• A playback device to watch the media from such as an ASUS O’Play or WDTV Live that has network capability. Wired is the way to go – wireless is can run into interference issues.
• An amplification device such as a receiver to play/decode the audio from the playback device.
• Speakers to listen to the media, cabled to the receiver and working!
• A TV, preferably a flat screen, either Plasma or LCD. I prefer plasma as it has much nicer black levels and color.
• 4 port SOHO switch 100 Mb/s
• 4 port SOHO router 100 Mb/s

Depending on your room setup I recommend building a home server that your can stream files from a shared folder to your playback device. It is not an expensive endeavor but gives you much more flexibility than buying a NAS if you plan on expanding your storage down the road. The server does not need to be anything fancy and a 100 mb/s home network is more than enough bandwidth to stream HD movies.

Gimme Some Space, Hard Drive Space That Is!

You will need lots of it and luckily most storage as of this document writing is dirt cheap. I would recommend a server with an 80 GB drive for the host operating system, Windows 7 or XP will work (I use Server 2008 R2). Then two 1.0 TB hard drives for movie/music storage. Make sure your motherboard supports at least 4 SATA connections. 1 for the Operating System, 1 for optical drive (for initial server setup which can be disconnected once OS is installed), that will leave you with 3 for storage drives when all is said and done. There are some newer motherboards support up to 10 SATA drives now and are not overly expensive at all.

You can get away with a dual core processor in the 1.6 to 2.0 GHz speed and 2 GB of system memory (RAM). This will be more than enough to stream that content from the PC to the media player.

Connecting The Receiver & Media Player

Let’s start with the media player to receiver connections. Most newer media players use HDMI and Component TV connections for video and optical TOSLINK for audio. I recommend using HDMI from the output of the media player to your receiver as it kills two birds with one stone (audio & video). This keeps everything in the digital domain until things are ready to be fully decoded – Bonus!

You should consult your receiver manufacturers guide for all speaker connections and sound setup.

Back to the media player. Then connect your HDMI cable from the media player to the back of your receivers video XX input. You will then need to connect an HDMI cable from the video out of your receiver to the input of your TV.

What you want to ensure is that your receiver is setup so it can strip the audio from the HDMI connection coming from the media player and process the surround as required. The video is passed on to the TV. Consult your manufacturers guide to confirm how to set this up.

Older Receivers: Using TOSLINK (Optical) & No HDMI

If you have a receiver that has no HDMI connections do not sweat it. You can use the TOSLINK output of the media player to connect to your receiver and decode the audio this way. Simply connect your HDMI cable directly to the TV opposed to through your receiver.

Connecting The Router, Switch & Server

Now it’s time to get the network side of things up and running. Connect an RJ45 (Ethernet) cable from your network port at the back of your media player to any one of your 4 free switch ports. Connect another RJ45 cable from any of the 3 free ports on the switch to any free port on your 4 port router (make sure DHCP is enabled in the router settings). Finally connect your server to any of the 3 free ports on your router. It is recommended you set static IP’s for your server box and media player. Now your all set! Any questions on this section please feel free to drop me a comment!

Media Players

• Asus
• Western Digital

Servers/NAS Devices

• QNAP
• Windows Home Server

Switches & Routers

• TP-Link
• Cisco/Linksys
• D-Link