For awhile now, I've been trying to find someething that I could connect to my home theater system in the downstairs living room, that would allow me to view or listen to ALL the files I have on my PC upstairs. In my searches, I've come across things like "Media Center PCs", "Media Extenders", "Digital Media Centers", and "Media Servers". None of them seemed to be exactly what I'm looking for, so I'm hoping you folks can help narrow this down and point me to the exact right unit(s), if such a thing exists!

What I want is something that can play, through my home theater system, everything I normally end up viewing or listening to on my PC. This means it needs to be able to view all sorts of video files, which I seem to have in various formates...MPG, AVI (seems to be multiple types of this, as some require Xvid, Divx, or other codecs), MOV, QT, RM, WMV, etc. It also needs to be able to play the music I have, most of which is from iTunes, but others that are MP3, WMA, RA, etc. And it should be able to view all my photos and graphics, mostly JPG, but some GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc.

Of course, it would be best if it could access these files on-the-fly from my PC via my wireless network, but if it was small enough to easily move around, I guess I wouldn't mind connecting it to the PC to transfer the data over, and then move it back to the home theater system to play it.

Note that I'm not interested in having it record television and play it back...my DirecTV/Tivo receiver takes care of that for me. And I'm also not interested in ripping DVDs to files to playback over it. I'd rather just use the DVD player directly for those. All I really want is something that will play back ALL of the various media I alread have on my PC, but do it on my home theater system.

Everytime I find some unit that sounds like it might be able to do what I want, it ends up with some severe restriction that limits it's usefullness...either it won't handle iTunes music (seems to be the case with most of the units!), or it won't play some of the major video file formats, or some other problem.

So is there something out there that will actually do everything I want? I've found posts here about Mediagate, Mvix, Tvix, some new Netgear and Dlink units, but I'm not sure any of them actually cover everything I'm looking for. I need the hands-on experience and advice of some of you folks who may have gone through this same thing to tell me if there IS a unit that does what I want, or if this is still just not available.

You need a home theatre pc. The streamers will not do what you want. You need more of a general purpose device.

The killer is the ability to play back iTunes. Unfortunately, iTunes uses a DRM (Digital Rights Management) method to copy protect the files that Apple refuses to license to other people. So you are stuck with only Apple products being able to play the files back (or hacking things).

You are going to have to make a choice - do you want to live in the Apple world or not? If yes, then Apple TV is about your only option but it will only play Apple-supported files unless you hack it. If no, then there are plenty of options out there like the Popcorn Hour, but of course they won't play Apple's copy-protection.

Like the first poster, a home theater PC would be able to do what you want, but it can be a pain. I built mine about 3 years ago and while it has served its purpose, I am trying to cut back on power usage and moving to a media player box combined with a NAS for my solution.

But I refuse to buy anything with copy protection on it so I am not hamstrung by having tons and tons of protected music or video which makes it easier.

The Netgear EVA8000 (http://www.netgear.com/Products/Entertainment/DigitalMediaPlayers/EVA8000.aspx) says you can connect your Ipod. I got one on 2/21/08, but am selling it (http://baltimore.craigslist.org/ele/593654202.html) because it can not reliably handle MPEG2 >12 MB/s (covered by your TiVO). Everything else I downloaded played fine. I never hooked my Ipod up to it but could try it out tonight. I do not have any purchased Itunes files on the ipod (in spite of numerous gift cards).

The EVA forums (http://forum1.netgear.com/forumdisplay.php?f=85) say that the Itunes are not a problem, "if they play on the PC, they will stream to the EVA." The EVA does not have any internal storage but has 2 USB ports.

Just get a Mac Mini. It's $600, but at least it'll play everything you want and is somewhat future proof. It'll also output in almost any resolution you want, etc. I'm not sure if it'll play WMV, but you can search and find out. The "standard" seems to be H.264 so I have no problem converting my video's to that, unfortunately there aren't as many great tools for this task for the PC as there are for the Mac.

Other than that, I don't have a good solution for you, because I'm in the same shoes. I'm leaning towards AppleTV as a good enough choice for a bedroom, but I'll probably go with a Mini for the living room. There's just nothing on the market which does a great job of everything out of the box... too many compromises.

Boris