HD Media Streamers

[wilksj01]

Hi All,

I am about to move into a new house and I'm doing a bit of a home theatre setup and I am now looking at ways to stream HD mkv, H.264, MP4 etc. My ideal way would be to have 1-2TB of storage in a NAS plugged directly into my router. This can then be accessed by my PC in my office, my xbox in my bedroom (using media extender) and also by my TV in the living room.

My problem is that the various solutions I have looked at are all a bit poor i.e popcornhour etc. The only really good one I have looked at is tvix solutions but for 1TB of storage I'd be looking at nearly £500. So I have considered building a virtually silent HTPC which will run vista ultimate (as I already have a copy) and sit in my AV cabinet connected to my TV via HDMI.

I have seen a decent barebone system on scan by asus which once I've stuck in a blu ray player, 2TB of storage and 4GB of ram comes just over the £500 mark.

Do you think this would do a better job than the higher end streamers? I've read in some forums that people are saying a decent HTPC does better upscaling than a dedicated AV reciever.

One downside with a HTPC based around media centre (I'm looking at media centre as I really like the look of it when using the DVD gallery with all the dvd covers on) is that I have struggled in the past with codec support. Films will play fine outside of media centre but won't inside.

Has anyone had any experience in doing anything like this?

[jimborae]

Go to avforums you'll find much more information there and people that have tried all solutions.

From my own experience there currently is no decent media streamer for h.264. I built an htpc but like you found media centre in adequate and far to fiddly. I'm currently playing around with a mac mini and xbmc for osx, it's still a bit buggy but once it gets there I reckon that it will be the best solution.