Hi lady's and gentlemen :-), I am much interested in HTPC and have a question. How is the Cinema standard sound formats handled in Windows HTPC. Like Atmos Dolby formats DTX and others. Is this a feature of the sound card? Does it come with the proper sound card? And which sound cards fulfill the most output channels and standards? Thank you so much for your guy's friendly and most welcome answers :-)

The example builds in the first section of this article are all designed around simple line-out audio from the motherboard's integrated audio processors (which have come a long way in the past decade).

But you could definitely get an internal sound card or external DAC/amp if you want direct support for surround sound or other specific high-tier audio set-ups. You'll find a couple of sound card recommendations toward the bottom of the second section of this article (on 'Choosing PC Hardware for a Home Theater PC'), although I can't personally speak to which of them sports the broadest support for what you're interested in.

I've been looking for a slim mini-ITX case, and man, are they hard to come by. The best one so far has been the Fractal Design Node 202. I really want a case that doesn't look to PCísh! I am also waiting on the new AMD Ryzen chips that have IGP capabilities. At the time of writing, these are coming to us in the next week or so. I have the Xbox Series X, so I use that for gaming. Yes, it can do everything else, but I also need something I can use as a NAS. I have some external HDDs attached to my Shield, but a lot of what I have is 4k, HDR, and my Shield somewhat battles with this when streaming to external sources. Also, you can't use these drives as NAS of course because the Shield doesn't have the capacity as far as I am aware to perform this function. I've tried using my Raspberry Pi as a NAS, but that didn't work out too well either! I can get a dedicated NAS, but I'd rather spend that money on an ITX build that can do other things but perform NAS functions.

After more than a year of COVID lockdown, I have finally decided it's time to build a HTPC. But I want it to include the ability to digitize the hundreds of DVD's, and regular and 4k Blu Rays I've amassed. It would be much appreciated if you could append this guide to cover ripping disks we own. That, plus a section on adding a NAS to store and play back that content would be very useful.

Thx

Due to it being technically illegal in most situations to create copies of copyrighted material (even for personal use), we are unable to add material covering that process to this guide.

Forgive a potential newb question, but why does the entry-level HTPC suggest an X570 as opposed to the B550, X470, or B450 (mentioned in Poor --> Very Good tiers) chipsets? That feels like overkill, what am I missing?

I do know the 5xx will support Zen3 without the BIOS flash, but for what I'm thinking of doing, that one-way flash aligns with my plan / upgradeability. I'm thinking of building an HTPC / Minecraft LAN-only combo - it would host MC for me and my kids and play / stream 1080 video to the living room TV. Maybe emulate classic games. No NAS, it's all Handbraked to ~10% of the original BluRay file size and still looks fine to us.

Given your MC guide, and that I had an ASUS G73JH serving this function (until the CPU lost 1/3 of its clock speed the last couple days, I guess age finally got to it), it seems the Minimum Tier (B450) could handle what I want just fine.

I do want to tweak that to look for a smaller tower (I'd like to be able to store this in the living room entertainment cabinet/shelving instead of my bedroom desktop) and I'd like future upgradeability = buy an inexpensive minimal CPU now (Ryzen3 3xxxG), but be able to max it out in ~5 years (hopefully Ryzen9, at least a 7, maybe even a 4xxx series that far in the future).

Thank you for a great website. Though I would like 1 more sentence about why you chose MoBo (XYZ) in the matrix. "Price" or "has more USB headers than the competition" etc.

That motherboard question is very fair, and the answer is quite simple: when this article was last updated in the first week of July, B550 boards were not yet widely available, having only been released a couple weeks prior---and the 3rd-gen-compatibility-guaranteed X470 and B450 models were also spottily available in the Mini ITX form factor utilized by this article's example builds.

Nowadays, you can definitely consider a B550 option for a less-expensive motherboard that still has the native compatibility (such as the ASRock B550M-ITX/ac). And if you are indeed willing to do any BIOS-updating that needs to be done, then your own personal set of options is obviously far wider, including older boards.

It is no way $450 for it! More like $700 at least.

Unfortunately, many parts are out-of-stock or price-inflated at the moment (for predictable reasons). That said, adding it up just now, the price for the 'Entry Level' example build is still coming in under $550; perhaps you are also looking at components in a region outside the US, where the figures would be different?

Completely missing from this list are any small boxes like the Intel NUC lineup, which make amazing little inexpensive streamers, and are smaller, easier to build, and less expensive that the baseline item in this article. An i3 NUC with RAM, SSD, and OS is super cheap, and will support 4K video at 60hz, H.264 encoding, and HDMI 2.0 specs.

That's correct! This article is just a research/info article about options for building a powerful HTPC from components, so all lower-tier/prebuilt/build-kit options were left out.

I'd suggest a dedicated NAS to complement your HTPC if you have terra bytes of movies or other media. Your HTPC can double as a NAS but a NAS is a dedicated unit optimized for power, space, and multimedia distribution. And its a lot less hassle to buy one off the shelf than having to configure and tweek your HTPC.

Yep, if you're looking for a massive-capacity prebuilt solution, then an NAS is definitely a good thing to look into. Thanks for pointing that out!

Would love to see a custom NAS guide. I'm starting to branch out from a pre-built NAS into something more powerful and with more drive slots.

While we don't have any immediate plans along those lines, it's not impossible that we could make a resource about that at some point in the future. In the meantime, there do seem to be a number of example builds and other resources about that topic elsewhere on the web.