2nd HTPC or ????

Omegas

Omegas

[H]F Junkie
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Jan 19, 2007
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I just picked up a HDTV for the bedroom and looking to bring over the HTPC experience with it. What would be my best options? My current HTPC in the living room is an 8200 based Box with 2x500gb HD's, a LG BD/HD-DVD Drive, and a 9850BE powering it for encoding and a 9800GTX+ for Hybrid SLI once I mod my case for it to fit. This is just a ripping/playing/gaming box with no tuners nor any desire to add any because I work for the cable company and get a DVR with all channels pretty much for free. What I want to do with this second box in the bedroom is simply access and play the movies stored on my main HTPC in the living room and maybe NetFlix in the future, but that's just an after thought. Networking will be wired through my gigabite switch.

What are my best options? X-Box 360, PS3, Media Center Extender, or another HTPC?

If another HTPC is pretty high up on the options list, I do have alot of spare parts I can use, a be-2400, 780g MB, 2GBs DDR2, Case, PSU, HD4850 512mb and a very old 120gb IDE HD (LOUD!!) So almost a whole computer minus Optical.

Also, I have a remote for an X-Box 360 that came with my Pioneer 5.1 system.


Comments and suggestions are more then appreciated.
 
I know a Xbox 360 will do it quite well with TVersity, but I don't know too much about HTPCs so you might want to wait for someone else's opinion.
 
If you only want it to access and play movie then go with xbox, ps3 or Media Center Extender.
 
for movies an xbox360 would definately work, but what about a popcorn hour?
 
If you've got the parts then why just build another HTPC? Nothing is going to beat a PC when it comes to video playback.

Also, it would be pretty easy to extend PVR into your system if you want to do that. IMO, the Cable Co's (Comcast for me) DVR/UI is just horrendous compared to Media Center.
 
C&E -
I'm not sure if my DVR's UI is better then ComCast, prob not, but everyone in my family is use to it so it'll be a hard sell especially since I can't record any of the premium movie channels on a HTPC, just the usual ones. Maybe a cable-card tuner will be in my future if they dont' kill the new hack soon...


Everyone Else -
It sounds like the Xbox has the highest favor amoungst you so I've got some questions on that. Is there a particular Model I should get? Will it have a problem with MKV's, either DVD or BR/HD Rips? Can it handle DVD/BD/HD ISO Rips on the main HTPC?
 
TVersity has a slew of codecs AFAIK. I just recently tried playing a 1080p .mkv of Taken on the Xbox from my computer upstairs and it handled it fine. It did have to buffer though which is expected.

I think the main benefit of Tversity that they tout is that it has all the codecs you need to just watch movies on the Xbox as you do on the PC. The media extender doesn't support .mkv and others I think.
 
I plan to build another HTPC when I get something setup for the bedroom. Besides, gives you lots of PC's to have a lan party with non-geek friends :) .
 
i always build another pc when i need some media somewhere. its too much fun. normally the bedroom pc ends up being the wall-e of my machines, its just whatever scraps i have left over from my other projects.
 
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