HTPC Guide 2. 01. The NUC Blog. Are you thinking of building a media PC to connect to your TV Or maybe you want a pocket sized streaming PC that you can put in your pocket and take with you and connect to the hotel room TV when youre on your travels. Intel NUC series of mini PCs make a good option. In this article Ill explain why is that and what you should consider when building your HTPC. What Makes Intel NUC a Good Media PCOf course there are several models in the NUC product line, but most of them share the following good characteristics for a HTPC. Theyre small in size and inconspicuous if needed. You can even mount the NUC behind your monitor or TV with the provided VESA mount. The NUCs consume only a little electricity. This is important especially if you plan to keep your HTPC on for 2. Theyre quiet and with a 3rd party case can even be made totally silent. GPUs include hardware accelerated video decoding thats supported under Windows and Linux. Theres an in built infra red receiver for remote controllers. Tasks for a Media PCBefore building a HTPC, its good to think a bit about the things you want to get done with it. Different tasks put different requirements on the hardware, so its important to understand your needs and wants before buying the hardware. Some tasks for a HTPC could be Playback of video from local storage and streaming services. Playback of music. Receiving and recording live TV be it cable, terrestrial or satellite TV. Transcoding video to other formats and streaming it further to other devices such as smartphones or tablets. I just did a fresh install on an older Dell Laptop. Very well documented install. I did notice the formatting for setting the time zone needs a little TLC but. Intel Customer Support home page. Download Drivers and Software. View and download specific drivers and software for your system. Switch Mode Power Supply Design Tool here. Thanks to Intel, Jason Snell is optimistic about the future of the Mac mini. The latest PC gaming hardware news, plus expert, trustworthy and unbiased buying guides. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 10, replaced by the new app Paint 3D. Microsoft lists. Possibly gaming or streaming a game from another more powerful PC to your living room. In this article Ill mainly consider the more traditional definition of a media PC that does not include gaming. If youre looking more into gaming with your NUC, Id suggest reading my reviews of the Core i. NUC6i. 5SYH and the Core i. NUC6i. 7KYK. In addition to providing some more muscle for gaming these more capable NUCs will definitely work as a HTPC, even if they might be a bit overkill for some of the use cases. Streaming Only vs. Time-Machine-network-backup.png' alt='Install Mac Os X On Intel Nuc' title='Install Mac Os X On Intel Nuc' />Media Storage. Like I just said, you will need to think about how you are going to use your media PC. If you want to store your whole movie collection on the device you will need a big disk. As the NUCs typically have only slots for a single 2. Now there are 4 TB disks out there from Samsung and Seagate but they are 1. NUCs only have a slot for a max 1. The higher end Core i. NUCs also have an M. SSD. There are some really big SSD drives available these days 1 terabyte SSDs but they tend to be rather expensive. If you only need it for storage of media itd be mostly waste of money as a conventional hard disk will be more than enough for that purpose. However, it really pays off to put the operating system itself on the SSD drive. This does not only speed up the boot up times considerably but it also makes the system more snappier overall. Finally, you can store your media outside the NUC. With no Mac mini launches since 2014, there were fears that Apple might have called it a day with its cheapest Mac, however, the company has confirmed that the Mac. On Monday, we learned that Microsoft was killing off the iconic Microsoft Paint program after 32 years and replacing it with Paint 3D in its upcoming Windows 10 update. ClaimBitcoin is the Bitcoin generator that everyone has been waiting for. Currently it is the only working Bitcoin generator out there, and at the moment it can. There are a few ways to get a create a live Linux USB drive that will boot on your Mac you can do it with freeware, or get your hands dirty with the command line. Screen%20Shot%202016-11-23%20at%202.05.14%20PM.png?w=800&r=80' alt='Install Mac Os X On Intel Nuc' title='Install Mac Os X On Intel Nuc' />A network attached storage NAS is a small device that hosts typically 1 5 hard drives and is attached to your home network. Minicom 3. All the computers on your network can access these disks and if youre using wired gigabit Ethernet, you wont notice much difference to a locally attached hard drive. If youre more adventurous you could attach a large USB disk to your NUC but I would really consider the other options first. Of course, if you just plan to use your HTPC for streaming content out from the Internet, you wont need a large disk at all In that case youll be fine with a single SSD drive that will host the operating system. Which Media Center Software to Use There are several options available for a HTPC. Kodi. Kodi Main Menu. Kodi is the original open source media center software that was known with the name XBMC before. Its available for multiple platforms including Linux and Windows and is highly customizable and includes live TV support. If youre unsure where to start, Id suggest starting with Kodi. After using Kodi youre much better off comparing the other media centers to Kodi. Kodi can run on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. For lower performance hardware, I strongly recommend taking the Linux approach and using Libre. ELEC as your Linux distribution. Libre. ELEC is a recent fork of Open. ELEC and has the backing of most former Open. ELEC developers. Installing Libre. ELEC is easy and you dont need to know basically anything about Linux to use it. Just create a bootable USB stick, plug it in, and install Full blown Kodi machine in a matter of minutes. Plex. Plex is another popular alternative. Plex is actually split into two parts the Plex Media Server and various clients to watch the media from the server. The client could be running on your tablet, your phone, your Play. Station or on your PC. Plex really works hard to decouple your media from your TV. Note that you could run the Plex Media Server and the Plex Home Theater their PC client on the same physical machine, such as your Intel NUC. While youre watching a movie on your living room, your kids could be streaming cartoons to their tablet in another room. Basic version of Plex is free to use, but some of the more advanced features require subscription. The server exists for Windows and for Linux, but the Plex Home Theater is only available on Windows. For watching local content you can get by with a lower performance hardware, but if you want to stream content to your mobile devices, Id suggest getting at least the Core i. Media. Portal. To make your choice even more difficult, there are more options Media. Portal is a Windows based media center that offers similar functionality as Kodi and some extra twists as well. Unlike Plex, you can also connect your TV tuners to watch satellite, terrestrial or cable TV. Steam. Valves Steam is mainly enabling gaming, but it has something called Big Picture, which can be used to turn your PC into, if not a full blown HTPC, at least a gaming console with some video player functionality. You can run the Steam client on Windows or Linux, or you could install Steam. OS on your NUC. With Steam on your NUC you can turn your TV into a gaming console furthermore, for those demanding games that only run on your big gaming PC you could use Steams In home Streaming to stream the games from your more beefy gaming PC to your living room. If you plan on doing this, its good to have fast, wired connectivity. A gigabit ethernet connection between your gaming PC and the NUC is ideal. Note that Steam. OS does not support Skylake GPUs at the time of writing June 2. If you want to use Skylake NUC and Linux for Steam, install an up to date Linux distribution such as Ubuntu 1. Steam client using the standard package management. Recommended Hardware. Here are my current recommendations for HTPC setups. Please read the next page for more detailed description of these setups. All around HTPCBudget HTPCTake anywhere HTPCNUCNUC6i. SYHNUC5. CPYHSTK1. AW3. 2SCChipset. Skylake. Braswell. Cherry Trail. CPUCore i. 3 6. 10. UCeleron N3. 05. 0Atom x. Z8. 30. 0RAMMax. 3. GBMax. 8 GBFixed 2 GB2. Slot. Yes. Yes. No. M. 2 Slot. Yes. No. No. Card Reader. SDXCSDXCmicro. SDXCRecommended OSWindows, Linux. Linux Libre. ELECLinux Libre. ELECSuggested Frontend. Kodi, Plex, Mediaportal. Kodi. Kodi. 4K Support. Yes, 3. 0 fps6. Yes, 3. Yes, 3. Accurate 2. Hz. Yes. Yes. Yes. HEVC Decoding. 8 bit only. Deinterlacing. Yes, motion compensated. Yes, motion compensated.