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Progress on my home theater PC + Room


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I've been working on my collection, getting games installed, artwork collected, and integrating my regular media server (PLEX), and here is about where I am with my progress

I've been working on this for a few months now. I'm getting close to finishing the front end/metadata part of it, I should be ordering hardware this summer and connecting everything up to my living room home theater. The theme I'm using is the NESiCAxLive Theme by @shoes23. I currently have everything mapped to work with a wired XBOX 360 controller, however I've been working long and hard at collecting USB adapters and controllers for the consoles that I'm emulating.

controllers.thumb.jpg.66431e46ccc0d0900658d2cd08c55cb7.jpgRight now I think I've got my livingroom setup for the most part. Last year I took to wiring up my surround sound, and fishing all of the wires into my wall and under the house (scary down there...)

HT8.thumb.jpg.12a64622f0bcaad545a5da035942d6d2.jpgHT7.thumb.jpg.9c46dee8ecc8a4736eddfba4c0bb730f.jpgHT6.thumb.jpg.067a056e02dddadde326ee3a2da0fe26.jpgHT5.thumb.jpg.2e69a83f3425f45aa33a832fdbe62409.jpgHT4.thumb.jpg.aee2da61d27f2aa2adfca2cc18369558.jpgHT3.thumb.jpg.360d4afcdde9211c49f9e87b8215dd1e.jpgHT2.thumb.jpg.493c28fc700b36c052467043a863c540.jpgHT1.thumb.jpg.228b551ea9e4e807707259fc2416525b.jpg

Probably next year I'm going to have a projector/screen installed to complete, what I think, is the ultimate in home theater and gaming. This is a 3D model I made in Blender to sorta get an idea of what it'll look like when my project is completed. Not 100% to scale, but I did my best (I'm not a professional artist).

PR1.thumb.jpg.20e08ad7fb47f9316bbdbfd2e8918038.jpgPR2.thumb.jpg.581dfdbf0deba96bc6e9b4d665e4f367.jpgPR3.thumb.jpg.abc83f7182012953cbece36bb2f5557f.jpgPR4.thumb.jpg.8a6a8e670adeeb480fed0b9cb56f63d8.jpgHopefully XENIA will have gotten more development in by then. Although you can play the Mass Effect games (via mods) with an XBOX 360 controller, it would be nice to remove the 360 from my setup and allow BigBox to be the center of all of my everything. Aside from XENIA making some progress, I think the only other thing I'd want is a way of having DD/DD+ from Netflix that can be launched from BigBox and still use a media remote or controller to navigate with.

I'm currently looking at this hardware for my HTPC build. I'm trying my best to future proof, without completely breaking the bank. My goal is to get this HTPC setup, and a PS4 (looks like all of the XBONE exclusives are coming to PC soon), and keep my Roku 3 around, then that's it. I'll be fairly future proofed :-) 

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2 minutes ago, keltoigael said:

Really cool set up and build man. I am glad I am not the only one who likes the idea of tying plex into BigBox. I made a wheel just for it but have not added it in yet.

Thank you :-)

PLEX was a bit of a "must have", I'm sad that Plex Home Theater isn't a thing anymore, it would be cool if I could make the PLEX interface match the BigBox interface, but I can deal with PLEX Media Player. At least I'll have DTS HDMA available when I watch my movies now. But BigBox is a really awesome front end for launching the media player from, but I do wish I could make it so Plex doesn't show up countless times in the wheel. But it's a small price to pay for the added convenience of it.

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Gotcha, yeah, I think it would be nice to be able to launch Plex directly from the main wheel, and not have to go into a submenu for it. I'd be all over it if there was a plug-in that did that. I really need to re-install MS-Visual Studio so I can work on little things in BigBox.

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7 hours ago, Fnkngrv said:

Awesome dedication man. I really need to stop doing the Pi stuff for a bit and take care of my big box build. :-(

Sent from my XT1635-01 using Tapatalk
 

Hey nothing wrong with having both! I love my RetroPie setup. I take it over friends houses all the time so we can arcade up on a bigscreen and take it anywhere.

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Hey nothing wrong with having both! I love my RetroPie setup. I take it over friends houses all the time so we can arcade up on a bigscreen and take it anywhere.



Problem is if you let it Retropie will chew you up and spit you out when it comes to incessant tinkering...lol

Sent from my XT1635-01 using Tapatalk

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17 minutes ago, Fnkngrv said:

 


Problem is if you let it Retropie will chew you up and spit you out when it comes to incessant tinkering...lol

Sent from my XT1635-01 using Tapatalk
 

 

True but I have a build that I have been happy with for sometime now.

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4 minutes ago, angelobodetti said:

Since Plex Home Theater isn't a thing anymore - what version of Plex is that? The Windows store version?

It's Plex Media Player, it's what replaced Plex Home Theater, it's downloadable from their website as an ".exe" installer. It's not as pretty or customizable, but it does have a lot more file codec support, and is easier to setup. It's really nice that it handles x265 encoding, I've been slowly re-encoding my library to use it. I get at least a 50% cut in file size, so it's very nice, although my media server still has very little available free space.

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45 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

I don't like PMP I think it lost a lot of the great functionality that PHT had.

idk, outside of theming it, I like it well enough. I was using the Roku app pretty exclusively for a while (my HTPC and main work PC are the same and I had to drag it back and forth from the livingroom). PMP looks almost exactly like the Roku app, so I can't really complain too much.

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I didn't like that I couldn't go to the next episode with out navigating to the arrows and hitting enter instead of the arrows just going to the next episode just seemed unintuitive on the desktop compared to what I already had.

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