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HTPC Rethink/Rebuild

M

Monaro

n00b
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
13
Hi all.

My HTPC (in my sig) has gone through numerous phases over the years, from an audio amp-style small case with 2 HDDs with Vista to a full tower Server 2003 in another room with an Xbox with XBMC extender. Right now it's time for a rebuild, and I'm deciding what I want to do with it, and what features/limitations it will have.

I want it to:
*Play movies locally on the TV
*Media/file server for laptops around the house
*Virtual machine host for Server 2008 plus a couple of other small OS’s (MCSE-related stuff)
*Maybe record & stream TV

I'm not sure which direction to take with media playback/streaming. I’m a huge fan of the library/metadata/scraping, presentation and ease of use of XBMC, but unfortunately it can’t play back HD content very well, if at all. It also has difficulties with large libraries (music especially). The obvious choice would just be to ditch the extender and just play direct from the PC with XBMC for Windows.

I guess my main question is which direction I should go, software and streaming-wise? My setups have always been of the old-school shared folder variety, with XBMC locally playing on the TV, and whatever media player playing locally on the laptops. No UPnP streaming. Am I missing out on much with this setup?

If I went for something like WMC/MediaBrowser to get the TV recording/streaming, what would I lose? ISO playback? Performance? Metadata? Will proper UPnP streaming give the laptops a better advertisement of available media?

Any help or pointing me in the right direction appreciated.
 
Last edited:
Some questions:

- Are you planning on recording HD TV?
- How adverse are you to the idea of building two separate HTPCs? Or using the Xbox 360 as a WMC extender?
 
Yes, it will be HDTV I record.
Definitely don't want two HTPCs. I do have an Xbox 360. How is it with MKVs and ISOs though? Most of my DVDs have been ripped as ISOs, Bluray as MKV. There's upwards of 400+
 
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