Looking for the perfect media PC for my living room.

Sep 17, 2010 | Uncategorized | 1 comment

For over two years now, I’ve had a computer of one kind or another connected to my sound system and TV at home.

First, I used a classic XBox modified to support XBMC. That worked really well but it wasn’t accessible at all. I couldn’t get the menu system to speak. Incidently, if someone wants a really flashy media PC system, I’ll give you that XBox. It supports HD video as well.

Then, I moved to this ultra portable PC. It’s the sice of two old video tapes side by side. It’s really tiny and it’s incredibly quiet. It’s not too bad in terms of performance either. There are two main draw backs with this solution though.

  1. it suffers from stutters while playing both music and video streamed from a wireless connection even at over a hundred and thirty megs per second connection. The server is connected to the switch and access point through a gig connection so there really should be no problems relating to latency on the network. It just doesn’t seem to be able to handle it. I’d say this PC would be great for a moderate user of Windows.
  2. When Jaws is running it has a problem with the 40 inch screen that’s attached. It looks like the mirror driver really doesn’t get on well with this size of display. When I’m playing high definition films I have to first turn off Jaws.

I’m not sure what to use next.
The solution I install next has to be able to do the following.

  • Connect to an active directory domain.
  • Automatically log on.
  • Map to shared files across two servers.
  • Be fully accessible.
  • Play back audio and video in high definition.
  • Be very quiet.
  • Be reasonably small and must look well.

Do you have any ideas?

What do you use?

1 Comment

  1. anonymous

    Hi,
    If you can get a Linux machine to access active directory (not sure if that can be done) but just use a regular file share if not then try Freevo. I have written a patch for Freevo to get the menus speaking and the HD playback will depend on your motherboard. I am using an Intel DG45 mainboard which is one chipset back of current but the onboard intel video mainboards support moving HD audio and video over the same HDMI cable. The NVIdia boards support this too but not discrete 7.1 uncompressed audio.

    Reply

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