robot_parade

So, I've been thinking of getting some sort of media player device. Primarily, to stream music from the home server to the stereo in the living room, but it would be nice to play other stuff as well (movies, etc).

My top two choices so far are the popcorn hour (Welcome To Popcorn Hour - the new one coming out soon), or a small form-factor PC with XBMC (XBMC Media Center for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux). From my POV, the pros/cons line up like this:

PCH:

o Already set up and ready to go, no configuration, assembly, or tweaking needed.
o Fanless and silent.
o Somewhat cheaper (about $300 vs. estimated $400 to build an XBMC pc)
o Proprietary and harder to upgrade.
o Doesn't play Hulu (yet - though there's some software that's supposed to do it)

XBMC:

o Get to spec it out and build it myself.
o Probably not fanless and silent.
o Useful for more than just media - internet browsing, games, etc.
o Upgradeable, and leaves me 'in control'
o Have to futz with it, etc.

Anybody have experience with these? Advice?

Martian

The way I see it, if you're going to do this you might as well get as much flexibility/versatility as you can. Those little off-the-shelf media centres are great for folks like my mother, who want things that can just be plugged in and used; for someone like myself (or like you, from what I'm reading), a custom-built rig seems like the better option.

If you're worried about cost, you could always go with MythTV -- it allows you to run the backend server separately from the frontend, so you can stick the backend on your home server which is probably powerful enough to do the heavy lifting and leave the actual HT box to just handle the GUI and streaming. You'll still need something reasonably powerful, though; avoid anything built around an Atom or similar processor and you should be fine. A barebones SFF PC can be had that'll do what you need for $200ish.

On the other hand, spending $400 to $500 will net you a full-featured PC that can handle all of your home entertainment needs. If you build it right, it'll probably even handle some gaming for you, assuming you're into that sort of thing, and it can be made to be silent as well. Building a quiet HTPC is mostly about choosing the right PSU. You can use passive cooling on the processor and graphics card and get the whole thing down to 1-2 fans. At that point you're unlikely to ever hear it, assuming there's any ambient noise at all in your living room. It might end up costing you a little bit more, but setup isn't all that complicated for anyone who is even halfway familiar with computers and it gets you a lot more functionality in the long run.

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fiatguy85

I'm with Martian, if you know what you're doing spec'ing and building a computer, then I would do that. It gives you the flexibility of choosing what software and interface you want and can be upgraded in the future, both hardware and software.

If you do want a prebuilt one, another option might be the AppleTV. I'm not usually an Apple person, but I think they did a pretty good job with that, having seen my friends.

The MythTV backend doesn't really take too much in the way of a powerful computer, I don't think. A fairly low end dual core processor and a few gigs of ram would be enough to watch a stream and record another, if I remember correctly from when I was researching a year ago.

Cynthetiq

I use . it's fanless and open source. there is a robust community who develops new functions for it. It costs less than $100, and I just added a Linksys gaming adapter to it for connectivity. I can add memory to it since it use SD and CF cards which also allows me to use it with a network so I can copy files, and pack the little item to use at a friends house. It also has DVR capabilities so it can also record directly to your SMB shares.

Currently doesn't play Hulu without making conversions, but when I got the little box almost 2 years ago it didn't support youtube right off the net, it did just after I bought it.

Here's a link to some of the community trying to get hulu to play on the box via conversion, but there's always someone making a hacks for this stuff, eventually they get released out to the general community.

Converting Hulu for use on Neuros OSD

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ratbastid

I'm very happy with my hacked original XBox. XBMC (as the name would lead you to assume) runs great on it, it's played everything I've thrown at it. I ran a Cat5 under the house, because wifi wasn't fast enough to stream some larger-format files, but once I did that, it's been a total trooper.