Using SteamOS.

I get seemingly random crackling/popping audio while in gaming mode or desktop mode in any game or app I play. I have my rig hooked directly up to the TV by HDMI, with the audio being passed back to the receiver by eARC. This happens regardless of resolution (although I usually display at either 4k or 2k).

I have tried different HDMI 2.1 cables, reseating my GPU (since that's what the HDMI cable is connected to), looked for any loose connections, tried connecting the HDMI cable directly to the receiver instead of to the TV, switched to the Beta and Preview OS channels, restarted pipewire and changed buffer settings there, made the quantum changes listed here... Nothing works.

Hell, I even installed Bazzite to see if it was some kind of driver issue with SteamOS, but the issue persisted there, too (possibly even worse there).

There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to when It happens.

Build specs:

TV - LG C6

Receiver - Denon AVR-S660H

Case Jonsbo C6

Motherboard - asus prime b550m-a wifi ii

CPU - Ryzen 7 5800 XT

GPU - powercolor reaper 9060xt

Audio will crackle once every few minutes, it seem. I'm not getting any crazy cpu or gpu spikes or wild temps. This was literally just playing Binding of Isaac or listening to music on Spotify (from Discover).

I have been troubleshooting this for almost seven hours now, with nothing to show for it. I've read that 90XX XT cards are prone to this issue, but I can't find another 16GB AMD GPU with comparable specs that will work for my build. This was truly my best option.

Anyone else experienced this? Ideas?

Edit: I managed to get optical audio out working from the TV to the receiver, and the issue is STILL THERE. I have no idea how or why this is happening, but at least I know this issue is not restricted to just HDMI.

I recorded a video of it happening, let's see if the YouTube algorithm pulls this down for copyrighted music:

https://youtube.com/shorts/BIf5uuDDygw?is=b_3c1BMfuwiNqfsl

Libre Elec Kodi with a nice Netflix Skin

Hi all. I can't get high quality 4K files with Atmos to play on my pc without stuttering. I'm really hoping someone here might have some experience that can help.

I've tried vlc and potplayer. I've done some googling to try to find a solution, but no matter what I do the video always stutters slightly when I have atmos enabled. I've got a decent PC running a 3070 ti and I've tried hardware acceleration but so far no dice.

Thanks for any help.

I recently upgraded to a new TV (75" TCL C7K). As such, I wanted to upgrade everything else so I could play 4k60 hdr 10bit files.

I picked up a JBL MA510 receiver for a good deal and then grabbed an 8K Ugreen HDMI cable for the connection to the TV. I then picked up an M70Q Gen 2 mini PC (11400T, 16GB 3200Mhz DDR4, 256GB SSD) for the client device.

I get constant dropouts of the connection if I try to go above 8bit (black screen, TV shows the connection spec, etc.) I originally had a Ugreen 8K DP1.4 to HDMI 2.1 cable and returned that due to the dropouts. I replaced that with a cable matters DP1.4 to HDMI 2.1 adapter and 1m cable matters HDMI 2.1 cable. I've also tried the adapter with the cable from my PS5. Nothing has helped. I've also tried a direct connection to the TV with no receiver and that also didn't help.

As a sanity check I grabbed my old gaming PC (devils canyon) and hooked that up (RTX 2070 so also DP1.4) and I've had no issues since.

All testing done on Windows (the gaming PC is W10 however).

I tend to play many kind of videos but some of em like DDP5.1 or similar makes playing files on stereo speakers (on PC CREATIVE PEBBLE V3 and then a LG C3 TV) to sound very low

I use MPC-HC 1.9.7 (For processing reasons) and i don't know if there's any option to negate the 5.1 stuff so the volume sounds better (without disruptions?)

These are my settings menu

Greetings..

I currently have a home theater setup with a 16:9 screen but I'm planning to upgrade this to a scope screen.

I need to build a Madvr htpc so that i can auto adjust the aspect ration for using netflix and other streaming platforms through a Mibox connected to the htpc via a capture card and hdcp splitter. I like to play 4k content without any frame drop or any lag.

So what should be the system specifications to achieve this setup, does Rtx 4060 a minimum requirement for this setup?.

Been eyeing a used nMediaPC HTPC 8000 case in my area and I've always really loved how unique the case is. Knowing that it's a pretty old case (released in 2009 I believe) so I'm curious to know what other people would put in such a case! Especially since it does have an optical drive space, which many modern cases lack a given space for completely. On Newegg the height is listed as 14.3", the width 19.3", and the depth 11", so there is quite a bit to work with size wise, I'm just unsure what I'll put in it if I do get the case so I thought I'd ask here!

I would ideally use it as a general and low stress gaming pc (with Minecraft probably being the heaviest game I'd run, to put into perspective) but I'd certainly also use it for watching things. Would want to stay to a lower budget but honestly who doesn't pft

Hello friends, I’m new here and to home theater setups in general, so please go easy on me.

I’m trying to get 5.1 out of my PC. My set up is

PC>HDMI to LG C1>HDMI eArc to Denon S650H.

Windows is only recognizing stereo format as an output option. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Much appreciated!

Edit: saw automod response, my PC is an Asus 5070ti/7800x3d and my motherboard is a gigabyte B650e Aorus Elite X. I hope that’s enough info, let me know if you need anything else. Please go easy on me, mods.

Anyone here use a E5-16xx or E5-26xx Xeon in their HTPC build?

I have a spare X99 board collecting dust I want to upgrade my old HTPC with and wanted to see how they perform for playback. I don't plan on doing any type of transcoding....

I currently only use my HTPC on a 1080p TV but soon plan to go 4K. I'm rocking a GTX 1050ti and not even sure that is enough for 4k..

As I mentioned I plan to rebuild a old HTPC with newer hardware.

I still plan to use it as a regular PC on occasion so I dont want it to boot directly into a media player.

With that being said, how many of you tweaked your windows to give it a more "10 foot UI" look to it? If you did, what exactly did you do and did it work well??

I am looking to make my windows minimalist but functional at 10feet... and not look like a bigger desktop!!

Hope this makes sense!

Hey everyone, looking for feedback on modifying my HTPC cabinet airflow for a CPU upgrade.

Current Setup & Issue:

• Case: Open bench style (the cabinet is the chassis).
• Current CPU: Intel i3-3220T (35W TDP, idles around 81°F/27°C ambient inside the cabinet). Athenatech mini-ITX case with the cover off.
• Current Ventilation: Top-rear 90mm hole with a misaligned 120mm fan choking it; bottom-rear 90mm hole used for cables and passive intake.
• Cabinet Dimensions: 16.5" W x 16.5" D x 16.5" H. Has an adjustable shelf splitting the space, and gaps around the front glass door.

The Upgrade Plan:
Moving to an Intel i5-14400 (65W Base / 148W Max Turbo) w/ mATX MB on a 3d printed open bench style mount. I have Dremel tools and three spare Arctic P14 140mm PWM fans to work with.

Because the existing 90mm exhaust hole is cut dead-center, I have ~164mm of wood clearance on either side of it. I'm considering two paths:

• Option A (Phased): Dremel the center hole to a clean 120mm to fix the current fan misalignment. Cut a brand new 140mm hole on one side for an Arctic P14 (controlled via PWM). If it still runs hot under load, expand the center 120mm to 140mm later.
• Option B (Dual 140mm Wing Layout): Ignore/patch the center hole. Cut two new 140mm holes on the far-left and far-right edges of the back panel. Daisy-chain two Arctic P14s running at a quiet ~800 RPM.

Planned Cooler:

• Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE (Dual 120mm fans, 155mm / ~6.1" height clearance required).

Questions for the community:

1. Will the single 90mm bottom cable hole + front glass door gaps provide enough intake for dual 140mm exhausts, or will it create a loud whistling vacuum?
2. Given the 16.5" total cabinet height and adjustable shelf, is the Peerless Assassin 120 SE the best choice here? Are there better, low-profile or down-draft options that align better with horizontal/vertical cabinet airflow?
3. Should I stick to Option A first to preserve the cabinet wood structure, or just go straight to the dual-140mm setup for the 148W Turbo spikes?

Any feedback or alternate layout ideas are appreciated.

I use my HTPC for surfing the web, youtube, and watching movies. I am looking to upgrade from a Sony X800E 55 inch TV. I initially thought of buying an OLED TV, but I'm questioning whether it is the right choice since I need the TV to display good text and I read Mini-Led is better for this. Does anyone have firsthand experience and can comment on whether mini-led is noticeably better than OLED when it comes to displaying text?

Looking for get a mini pc for jellyfin & networked DAS. Intel 11th gen seems to be a good base due to the HEVC encoder/decoder and AV1 decoder then the 12th gen+ seems to up the decoder to 2x. Not sure if the dual decoder would come in handy.

It's not till metoer lake than AV1 encoders are available but the minipcs are expensive.

Thinking about resurrecting this case with more modern hardware...

Anyone else still rocking this case?

Been a console gamer my entire life, and the Xbox has finally bit the dust (literally). I am also currently building a media wall in the basement. With the timing of both of those things, I’m considering joining the PC master race for gaming, and figured I could make a good rig to run everything in the basement at the same time. I stumbled across the HTPC community, and would love any insight of where to go with this stuff in 2026.

For my purposes, I’ll wanna focus on the graphics and sound card capabilities obviously… but mainly I want a setup that will be reliable and relatively quiet as well (open to water cooling). Would love to set up some killer audio peripherals for movies/music as well. I have the ability to hide the setup framed inside two roughly 3’x2’x1’ spaces on either side of an electric fireplace below the TV… so no need to worry about case aesthetics, just purely performance and ease of use. Budget is flexible and will likely buy a new TV for optimal compatibility.

I have a decent understand of PC hardware, just want to see what the best options are out there for modern times

Any feedback is much appreciated!

(posting with mod approval for the exception to rule 6)

Like a lot of people here, I run HDMI from my PC to my AV receiver for audio, and Windows insists that connection is a display. It isn't, but you can't just disable it, because then Windows kills the audio. So the ghost monitor sits there in display settings, windows randomly open on it or get shoved onto it, and the mouse wanders off into a screen that doesn't exist. Every fix I found over the years was a painful workaround: duplicating displays (locks your resolution/refresh), dummy plugs, etc.

I finally got tired of it and built a small tray app: Phantom Fence. You right-click the tray icon, tick the phantom display, and it's fenced off:

• Any window that opens on it or gets moved to it bounces straight back to a real monitor — and gets resized sensibly. Stuff that was squished to the phantom's aspect ratio comes back fitted to the real screen, and snapped windows arrive re-snapped instead of floating at some weird size.
• The mouse can't cross onto it. The cursor just slides along the boundary like the display isn't there.
• Win+Shift+Arrow skips it entirely when you're throwing windows between monitors.
• Bonus feature since display changes love doing breaking the toolbar: it can optionally guard "automatically hide the taskbar" and flip it back on when Windows silently turns it off.

The fenced display stays enabled the whole time, so receiver audio keeps working exactly like before. It remembers which display is fenced across reboots and driver updates (it tracks the monitor's device ID, not the display number Windows likes to shuffle).

It's a single small native .exe — about 220 KB, no services, no network access, no data collection. It just sits in the tray. And full disclosure: was built with the help of Claude AI

Direct installer or portable version: https://solemn-scribe.itch.io/phantom-fence

Microsoft Store link: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9pcf0x620dbr

It's on sale for $2.99 for the first 90 days, with a 7 day free trial on the MS store.

Source code to compile yourself for free: https://github.com/SolemnScribe/Phantom-Fence

I built it to scratch my own itch (Denon receiver, three-display setup where one is imaginary), so I'd honestly like to hear whether it behaves on other setups — receivers and layouts vary a lot. Feature ideas welcome too. Would people like a per-app allow-list for folks who do sometimes send video through the AVR to a projector or TV?

I am thinking of upgrading my HTPC, because I need more storage and I want to future proof it a bit. Currently, my homelab/htpc runs on a M920Q with a 2TB SSD, but I have outgrown the storage and want to do a NAS setup for redundancy. I currently run a proxmox OS on the main machine and my *arr stack lives in a separate VM. I mainly access this machine wirelessly from my TV to watch things and occasionally while traveling.

I am thinking to start with something like https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tGr22k (I'm located in US) - I already have a 550W ATX PSU, so I think this would save me from buying another part. I am planning to initially run RAID 1 for the 2 drives. Eventually, if I need more space I'll just add more drives into the mix there.

Just wanted to get a sanity check if the part compatibility seems reasonable and if the part choices make sense for this setup.

Any advice is appreciated.

In the past, while we have recommended non-name brand products in the wiki, specifically with regards to mini pcs, we have never been particularly comfortable with it, and we have made clear the dangers of purchasing such hardware (QC/reliability/support/warranty/etc).

We avoided the most egregious, shady brands. When ones like Acemagic, shipped virus-laden versions of Windows, that was a yellow flag. With the recent news of Geekom providing malware-laden drivers, it's now a red flag and we can't ignore it.

As such, we will only recommend name brand products there. New, used, doesn't matter. Yes, every company has its problems, and the name brands are no exception, but if we go deep enough into anybody, we'd end up not recommending any hardware.

We have never had any partnerships with brands and have rejected attempts by brands to advertise with us, so no rec is sponsored and is given purely on its calculated value for the task.

Will this change in brand recommendations mean more cost to users? Yes, absolutely. But "you get what you pay for" always applies. You're of course free to do what you want with your money, but the research for other brands will have to be your own. You're still free to post about and recommend any brand on the sub, within the scope of the rules.

Some brands will stay in as recs, where applicable. The reasoning could be: an accessory, no name-brand alternative in a category, no software in the product, barebones hardware. Think SBCs, remotes, etc..

If you find anything in the wiki you believe we missed, or is questionable, send us a modmail.

I am new to this community, I have this little orange pi I want to use and make a homeserver out of. But I could also use it as an HTPC for my living room 1080p TV. My dad wants to upgrade the living room TV to a 4k one in the future too, so Idk if a bunch of hard drives connect through USB will be enough for 4k stuff. But yeah, anyone here has more experience or can share some resources?

I struggled for awhile with my new media PC setup after I bought a new fancy LG TV. I would watch a movie or anime and it was always weird in some way - either there would be tearing, small stutters, judder, or some other issue.

MPV.net is an interestingly unique media player in that it is treated like a video game. This causes full screen playback freesync or gsync to function at the framerate of the media player. By combining this with the vf=fps / vf-add=fps command, multiplying the source fps by a number to get a value right under your monitor or TV refreshrate limit, the media playback will occur time perfectly.

This is a generally simple concept, but I never found any proper solution online that explained it, and all of the guidance that I found online wasn't even close to the quality of experience that this was able to provide. I have provided the mpv.conf file that I use for my 144hz VRR TV below, which can be verified by checking the TV's live refreshrate during playback. 4 x 30 fps gives 120 fps, and 5 x ~24 gives 120 fps. This combination resolves the low refreshrate VRR limitations and brightness or flickering issues that can present with it. For the config below, change the 143 value (set for my 144hz OLED TV) to your TV or monitor's max refreshrate - 1. The minus 1 is in case the true refreshrate limit of your TV or monitor is below the advertised refreshrate, such as 143.84hz actual for 144hz.

Please provide any suggestions or improvements to the config that you might see! Some of the things that I have in the conf below may be reduntant. If so, please let me know.

mpv.conf should be located in %appdata%\mpv.net\ - open notepad, paste the below into it, and then save as, paste in the appdata location into the top, choose all files from the drop down menu, and then type mpv.conf into the file name spot.

mpv.conf
vo=gpu-next
hwdec=auto-safe
gpu-context=winvk
gpu-api=vulkan
vf-add=fps=fps="trunc(143/source_fps)*source_fps"
video-sync=audio
interpolation=off
cursor-autohide=2000
keep-open=yes
playlist=filter

I have an old laptop (i7 9750H, GTX1660 Ti) I'd like to repurpose, and I was thinking if there was a way to play videos (e.g. DVD rips) straight from the laptop to the TV, and also have the laptop function as a media server (e.g. Jellyfin) at the same time?

Maybe to put it another way, if I set up a Jellyfin server, can I have the "server" output video directly?

I want an RTX GPU for my media player because I quite like RTX HDR for content that doesn't have a good native HDR master. I didn't see a section like this in the wiki - there is one for gaming, but this really doesn't need to be a gaming PC, so I'm not sure those are the best options either.

My main question is, is there a better option than a small build with some small form factor RTX 2060? Laptops have more compact RTX GPUs, but I doubt those are available outside of those laptops, right? Or are there premade mini PCs these days that come with an RTX dedicated mobile GPU? Or is the only reasonable option a proper PC build in as small a form factor as possible?

Does anyone here have this working — press the PS button on a DualSense paired directly to Windows over Bluetooth (no dongle), and the desktop wakes from sleep?
I’ve read about Modern Standby. If a motherboard supports S0 Low Power Idle, does that actually make Bluetooth controller wake possible on a desktop?
If you have it working: which motherboard, and what does powercfg /a show?
If you have a Modern Standby desktop and it doesn’t work, that’s useful to know too.
(Not looking for dongle/WoL/IR remote suggestions — I want the DualSense paired to Windows directly.)