Home Setup

There's some serious $$$ being spent. If you want them to connect to windows media (i.e. be a windows media extender), then popcorn hour wont do that. There's only a few pieces of hardware that were extenders, like an xbox 360.

Now if you want them to be able to just read files off windows, then a popcorn hour can do that, the tv alone cant.

It really depends on what your final goal is that you want to achieve. Simply having a network connection allows for very basic connectivity between a media server and your home network. Whatever files you have in video format, or you want access to online will be available from any number of the media server products (and some displays), but vary from product to product.

You could put a separate media player in each room and go to a full features media server like a HP MediaSmart PC and rip all your movies to hard drive if you want.

But, your end goal is really what you need to clarify.

Also, how do you expect/want the Blu-ray players to tie into your setup?

Personally, I haven't jumped into media players beyond my POS AppleTV so I'm still researching, but I have 6 HDTVs in my home with HD video distribution over component video (and some HDMI) throughout all the displays. Two cable box DVRs available anywhere along with my PS3 and other hardware. But, this is a long way from a typical setup... So, it really depends on what specifically you want to be able to do.

Looking at his original post, he never mentioned Blu-ray as a requirement, but he should think about finding a solution that will work for Blu-ray eventually.

You might want to look at running SageTV on your server PC and then getting a Sage HDTheater extender to put next to each TV. That way you can have full control over DVR functions/DVD rip/BR rip playback from any TV in the house. They do not do anything with Windows media center, but run the SageTV front end instead.

If the idea of being able to fully control the DVR system (not just play a TV show that has already been recorded onto the computer, but check the TV guide, schedule recordings, delete watched shows, watch/pause live broadcasts, etc.) from any TV in the house is appealing to you, a SageTV setup has a lot of capabilities that you can’t get with regular boxes like a PCH and such.

Sage extenders also support full DVD rip playback with menus and subtitles and if you have a copy of AnyDVD on your server computer, the extenders can play the DVD/BR disc wherever they are in the house from the disc drive in the server PC. If DVD rip playback is important to you, then it is a significant difference compared to using an xbox360 as an extender with windows media center, as (to my knowledge) the xbox360 still does not support full DVD rip playback. One thing the xbox360s do provide that the Sage extenders do not is the feeling of sitting next to a hairdryer as it prepares to take off, as the Sage extenders have no fans and are completely silent.

Sage extenders do have limitations in BR/rip disc playback. Although they are capable of parsing the BR disc directory structure (so you don’t have to monkey with converting files to mkvs or worrying about converting forced subtitles, etc if you don’t want to) they only play the main movie. They do not support full menus in BRs (yet.) Further, they will only pass the core audio (DD, DTS) track from the Blu ray, not the advanced TrueHD or DTS HD-MA tracks. So if *full* Blu Ray capabilities are a must, they may not be your complete solution.

If you’re going to be setting up all that system, it might be worth a look to check out SageTV. www.sagetv.com and forums.sagetv.com

-Suntan

save yourself from endless headaches - you'll need a PC for each TV.

very popular choice with wireless keyboard mouse. Acer Revo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883103235

2¢

Hmmm After extensive use of HTPCs myself, I think you are recommending a course of action that would actually give him more headaches.

There's a reason why the various known problems threads for popular HTPC components here in the HTPC forum regularly reach into the thousands of posts

-Suntan

He lists that he will have two BD players in his system, but there is not any mention of which displays the BD players are to be hooked up to or how video is getting out to the various displays in the home.

A matrixed HD solution is a great possibility in a high end system to get HD everywhere from limited sources and expands the capability of high quality viewing without needing to maintain half a dozen sources at each display.

But, pricey goes along with the advanced capability of a matrixed solution.

I'll respectfully disagree.
Each and every stand-alone streaming device mentioned in this forum has severe limitations..
from frame-rate issues / dropped network shares / audio-video codec issues / captions..etc..etc.

After dropping a few silent windows 7 boxes in place.. all options are now open..
the entire internet, HD radio, gapless flac playback, any/all video container created under the sun.
Each and every windows box can be remote controlled by any web-enabled cell phone or programmable IR remote.

I'm done wasting time and money on these limited $200 toys.

to each their own your mileage may vary.

I noticed you only talked about functionality and completely ignored my actual comments about which is more hassle...

I agree that computers can do many wonderful things when hooked to TVs, I've been running a HTPC in my house for quite a few years (I was DVRing HD on a 500Mhz PC running Win98 back in the day.) That is not to say they are without issues.

In any case, for people that just want to be able to use their TVs for media (instead of use their TVs to manage a HTPC) I still recommend a look into setting up a SageTV setup. A couple of Sage extenders, working with a single PC running Sage Server, gives an impressive amount of capability with significantly reduced PC headaches.

As you say, to each their own.

-Suntan