What Are My Options For A HD Media Center?
My regular readers know that I love my modded Xboxs running XBMC. However, the problem I’m facing currently is that my poor old Xboxs don’t have enough power to handle HD content.
I bought a Xbox 360 in 2005 for two reasons, to play Halo 3 and to get a new HD media centre. Unfortunately, it looks like the modding community are never going to crack the 360 and Halo 3 still isn’t out yet, so my 360 is gathering dust under my TV.
Which means I still don’t have the HD media center I desperately want. What do you think are my best options are for getting one? I read about the Netgear EVA8000 yesterday that can stream HD content. Do you think this will be my best bet, or is there a better device on the market? Or, should I hang in there with my 360 or maybe even buy a Playstation 3 which is showing more modding promise?
Another alternative is to connect my PC directly to my Plasma HDTV. I’m hoping to move to a bigger flat this summer so I might be able to put my PC in my living room and hook it up directly to my TV with a very long cable.
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Comment by Zath on 16 March 2007:
I have an old Shuttle pc (P4, 1gb Ram) connected up to my Samsung LCD tv which I use to watch videos including HD, it has no problems doing this, especially since I don’t have too much installed which for work better than connecting up a main pc that might have lots of stuff running in the background.
I’m currently looking at getting the optical surround sound output working so that I can get rid of my old dvd player (which doesn’t upscale at all) and just use the HTPC to play all my dvds - I can’t use the Xbox 360 since only about half my dvds are region 2.
I’m not sure how good these separate boxes are in comparison for streaming content though.
Comment by Everton on 18 March 2007:
Your reply got me thinking about building a compact media center PC to go under my TV. My main PC can deal with all the storage, and I could take 2GB out of my main PC and put it in the new one. But I’d still need a mobo, CPU, TV card, graphics card and sound card so it’d get quite pricey just to watch HD.
Getting a EVA700 or 8000 looks like my best bet so far, even though I’d need to get a HDMI switch as well as I only have one on my receiver.
Pingback by Linux MCE Misses The Point | Connected Internet on 23 March 2007:
[...] I thought, ‘wow, this application is cool’ and building a Linux MCE PC might solve my HD media problems. But, as the video progressed I decided that Linux MCE just did too much and the interface [...]
Comment by perspectoff on 25 April 2008:
Are you pining away for a Sony Betamax, old man?
Perhaps your kids could help you set up LinuxMCE.
Or maybe you better stick with a DVD player or TiVo.
Complex computers are not for everyone, you know.