BillFitzmaurice.info

bzb wrote:We're Pareto's favorite lowly 20% that complains 80% of the time.

+1

DIY's don't drive the market lion share though.

For those interested in the HTPC route, I've been running XBMC Media Center for a couple years, and it is truly excellent. The latest version is quite highly developed, and in my opinion smokes Apple TV and the like with its flexibility and customizability. The interface is also much nicer than the WDTV Live I tried.

XBMC is a good candidate for the Ion-based HTPCs as it makes use of the GPU acceleration for decoding HD content.

Like others here, I use no physical media aside from popping it in my server to rip to a storage array... everything is then streamed via network. If you take a bit of time to set up your library, then it can load up all the album/movie art, artist/actor/plot info.

If you have an older receiver that doesn't do DTS decoding, it can recode the DTS stream to AC3 so you'll still get the surround when watching new content.

One current limitation (when I last checked at least) is that it still cannot directly play back Bluray from a disc, as there is no open source Bluray decoding library. This is not an issue if you rip your content to hard drive.

Ran XBMC for years on the original xbox. Yes, it ruled... but for simplicity of setup and use by a typical family - my wife and 4-year old use it WAY more than I do - the Apple TV and WDTV are top of the heap.

WDTV allows me to add all kinds of hacks similar to the XBMC (no, not nearly as many, but still) using WDLXTV. IOS has more limitations, but there's a lot of development coming out of the jailbreak community.

One of the coolest things about the WDTV community is the ThumbGen program. Automatically creates movie sheets and thumbnails for all your media, including TV shows/episodes. The sheets can be used on many other devices, including XBMC.

bzb wrote: the Apple TV.

AppleTV is certainly very nice for the plug-n-play, simple to use folks.