Last week I updated my TV from one that was starting to show its age to one that is shedloads bigger. It's now sitting in the corner of the living room, looking very nice and excessive!
I plan to put the old one up in the bedroom, along with a DVR I bought a while ago (Byrnie will remember that!), and link it upto the TV ariel. I was planning on putting Twinkie (my media PC) under the new screen, however now I'm not sur eit thats goin to work...
Firstly, Twinkie is starting to show his age. At the moment its not picking up HDD's, which is probably loose/broken wires (not unexpected, as they are all really crammed in there). Also, I was wondering if the Divx rips on him will look any good at all on such a large screen?
Aside from that, I was wondering it it may be better to replace Twinkie with a newer model. I noticed the Asus EEE Box is now out, and while its not capable of full HD streaming, it is apparently upto dealing with 720p streams, which would look better on my new tele. I was trying to find out if the mini-mac rip-off the ripple.mini was coming out in the UK, but no joy finding that yet...
Does anyone have any other suggestions for small, quiet media PC's to fit underneath a nice new TV?
The divx rips should look OK
The divx rips should look OK as long as they're relatively recent, but you might want to start looking for h264 .mkv rips when you get new stuff; they look really really good on an HDTV.
As for the player, if all you're doing is watching downloaded media on it, I'd strongly recommend a dedicated box rather than a PC. My TivX 6500 wasn't cheap (about 300 quid,) but it'll play anything I throw at it (1080p .mkv files are no problem,) can stream files from a windows share (or, in my case, an nfs export) or it's internal disk, is almost silent in operation and comes with a nice remote control. Oh, and it's a USB mass storage device, so getting stuff onto the internal disk is a breeze. Obviously, it's a lot less flexible than a general purpose PC, so if you want to do anything like run MAME on it, or browse the web, then it's not an option, but for media playback it's pretty hard to beat.
Obviously, there are other companies making similar products, and some of them will be cheaper, but I can't comment on them. I hear the "Popcorn Hour" is both cheaper and based on the same decoder chip, so it might be a better option, but it has a stupid name...
That seems a bit pricy for
That seems a bit pricy for something without a HDD as standard (still looks to be on the £300 mark).
Popcorn Hour (yeah...stupid name) seems slightly more reasonable, though not exactly easy to get hold of in the UK it seems.
Another option...what are the PS360Box like at streaming HD content? I assume for the Microsoft option you'd need the Elite model?
The xbox is rubbish with HD
The xbox is rubbish with HD content; basically it doesn't do it. Does an Ok job of divx though. I used mine as a media extender for a few months, before I got sick of the lack of mkv support an splashed out on the 6500, and it was alright, but not great. I had to transcode the odd file to get it to play, and some had weird artifacts. I don't think the elite/not-elite distinction will matter, as (afaik) it'll _only_ stream media; you can't just copy divxs onto the HD and get it to play them from there.
I'm told the PS3 is better; I have at least one friend who's got h264 .mkv content playing on it. You mileage may vary though - it seemed to take him about a week of messing around and trying different software to get it going, and I think you still have to stream to it, rather than copy your files across.
I've been doing some
I've been doing some lunchtime reading and the Popcorn Hour thing (name aside) seems pretty good... there are a fair few places in Germany/Netherlands set up to deliver to the UK too, however most of them are currently out of stock, and you are still looking at £180 - £200 for the base unit.
I think you're defeinitely on the right line Aggro, however the sensible part of me is saying to wait until the bathroom(s) are done, and then I'll know how much I have to play with for such a gadget to sit under my tele...
The PS3 used to have some
The PS3 used to have some weird restrictions on how it would access machines it would access windows shares but only if all the files were where it expected them to be (ie hanging off the my videos section) I've heard that newer firmware is better and that with a dedicated media server like twonky vision or some such it works well.
I've not tried streaming hd as I don't have any of those streams