HTPC - "Access points" for rooms.

M

MYST_2

Gawd
Joined
May 4, 2000
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I'm about to set up things in the new house and wanted to get some opinions. All rooms will have 1Gbit wired connections.

6 Rooms - Living, 3 Bedrooms, Dedicated HT, Office.

The HT room will have a higher end i5 based shuttle box which I already have running now. The other rooms need a lightweight system that can run XBMC and decode video at 1080p along with Netflix.

XBMC will be set up with mySQL so all the clients can access the library without trying to get everything in sync on each individual box. Dedicated NAS for storage and a box running esxi for the XBMC database along with sabnzbd and everything else.

What do you guys recommend for the clients in the rooms? I know the low power stuff has progressed in the last couple years but I haven't kept up. Feel free to suggest any other cool things that can be done.
 
That looks interesting. How does the performance compare to an atom based box from a couple years ago? That thing drove me nuts.
 
i mean this is exactly what the Media Center Extenders do.... other than the fact that you run XMBC in stead...

The AMD APU based systems do well and can be small and basically fanless, we have one running in our bedroom with full W7 and MCE running and it does fine with 1080p from Cable Card, recorded content or blu-rays
 
Yeah cable card with extenders to an Xbox is a good thought too...But not everyone has 3 Xbox 360's. haha
 
Why not get a Roku box or a Pivos? I'm fairly certain both can run XBMC (Might depend on the specific version you buy).

Also, just curious, why are you running the mySQL setup for your backend? Why not simplify it a bit and run something like Plex Media Server? You can still use XBMC as your front-end, and it'll still pick up most of the details (Plex MC and XBMC are offshoots of one another and thus are very similar). I personally use Plex for everything, though I do think the XBMC interface is a bit sexier and cleaner.
 
I wanted to stay with XBMC because it is what my wife, son, and wife's daughter are familiar with already. mySQL is to keep all the different installs of XBMC running off the same data. The last thing I want to deal with is some shows showing up on one box but not another because of whatever random reason.

Plex+Roku looks pretty slick and easy to use. I'll give it a try this week.
 
Why not Raspberry Pi's running Raspbmc? Keep your i5 as the primary, and run Plex or something as the backend to support everything?
 
I use android boxes/tv sticks. they are silent low power and run xbmc fine and can do 1080p content. I havent tried a blue ray rip on them simply because I dont have any blue ray rips.

they also have a web browser and play games well so I can play my snes, genisis, nes, and other emulators.
 
Plex seems to be pretty damn good. Thanks for the suggestions. Now if they would stop bumping my closing date back!!
 
I took a slightly different approach....already had a bunch of pc's so am running 'thick' clients around the house. All the clients are running win7 with mediacenter and mymovies (all the content lives on the server). 3 hdhomeruns and an hdhomerun prime provide all the tv tuners.
 
I think Sandy Bridge finally closed the loop on the HTPC scene. It finally handles all the different video modes "correctly" including different FPS rates. For $300 - $400, you will have a box that will handle pretty much anything you can throw at it.
 
I run 4x D525 ION all-in-one systems with 2GB of RAM (different manufacturers/models, but all Foxconn or Zotac) and have no issues with any 1080 material. Bought for $70-$120 each. All of them run openelec and I like them better than my full xbmc systems. They're also super-tiny which is nice.
 
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