My HTPC is acting up and I’m looking for advice before jumping in and just building another HTPC. I completely cleaned the PC, re-installed Windows, fresh build, and it still bluescreens during playback too often to be sane.
I’ll keep the list of needs short. The use of this player is for use in a home theater setup. The most oddball requirement, is it can play multi-channel flac, without transcoding. There are of course other needs but if it can do multi-channel flac direct play, then the rest assuredly will work.
So far the HTPC is the only player I’ve found than can do it. Everything else transcodes. This includes the Nvidea Shield which everyone thought would work (including the Shield people). Most good players do 2 channel flac, but multi-channel is a thing apparently.
Blue screens are often a sign of hardware defect(s).
Particularly if the machine has already been running for years.
Thermal compound dries up and loses part of its thermal conductivity.
Capacitors leak and/or dry out as well, thereby losing their capacity.
Depending on the general humidity of the room and whether it has frequent temperature changes, all connections inside can corrode.
For movies, the Shield direct plays FLAC 5.1 & 7.1, both 16-bit and 24-bit. It sends it to my AVR as PCM 5.1 & 7.1. I ran a portion of two movies through Handbrake, transcoding dts-HD MA 5.1 to FLAC 5.1 and TrueHD 7.1 to FLAC 7.1.
Shield <–HDMI–> Denon AVR-X4300H <–HDMI-ARC–> LG TV
I’ve no multi-channel FLAC music, so not sure how well that is or is not supported on the Shield.
Update. Ran a quick test with a FLAC 4.0 96kHz/24-bit music file.
Plex Media Server direct plays, but the Shield sends it to my receiver as PCM 2.0. Also, it is sent as 48kHz. Not sure about bit depth, as the receiver does not show that info (using the Denon app on my tablet to view channel mapping, bit rate, etc).
So, if multi-channel FLAC for music is a requirement, looks like the Plex Android TV app on the Shield will not work.
Yes, these are multi-channel flac music files, high end rips from SACD’s and Blu-Ray Audio disks. To allow them to transcode sort of defeats the whole point of having them to begin with.
This leaves me back at an HTPC which to date is the only player I’ve found that will do it.
Agreed. I currently use a ZBox that I bought used a few years ago. The Zbox offered a compact format with a nVidea GTX 1050 chip rather than just using the onboard Intel video. Over the past year or two the frequency of spontaneous reboots during playback was increasing. A week ago I completely re-installed Windows, and just put Plex HTPC, keep the OS as clean as possible. My spontaneous reboots have been replaced by blue-screens and even more frequent, so I’m assuming the box is shot.
If I wind up with another HTPC I’ll be looking for the most compact system to get there.