Whats the best solution for streaming HD media from a PC?
Indeed, the 360’s best feature is that it’s cheap. At one point my apartment had a Mythbuntu box streaming media from my PC to a TV. Worked great, but kinda loud on the fans. We put together some controllers and emulators for Bomberman and Mario Kart as well. I moved out, have a 360 now. There’s software out there to mimic the braindead uPnP protocol, but it turns out the 360 has a narrow window of supported codecs (I’m not a fan of transcoding). And it’s basically no quieter than our original box. Xbox LIVE has video downloads available but basically you have to pay, even for stuff my cable company offers free On Demand. A pal of mine is working on a HD linux based set top box but I don’t know if it’ll be available any time soon.
It’s a very annoying situation, I know – there simply isn’t anything as flexible and as value-for-money as the Xbox+XBMC combo at the moment that can also handle HD – I ran one for a good while, very happily, and was annoyed that anything that can handle HD simply isn’t as good as XBMC. I think it comes down whether or not you have any interest in gaming – if you have no interest whatsoever and that won’t change, a 360/PS3 probably isn’t the way forward. If you might be interested in playing a game now or then, they are very versatile. The PS3 has the advantage of a Blu-ray drive, whereas the 360 has a better selection of games and an (arguably) better online experience – albeit one that you have to pay for. If you want Netflix HD streaming, it has to be XBox360+Gold membership, as it simply isn’t available anywhere else, yet – not even straight from the Netflix site. As for the network adapter, you can use CAT-5 wired networking, powerline networking or buy a third-party wireless AP/B
Actually, I would seriously recommend an Xbox 360. It does Netflix “Play Now” (thousands of movies, a few hundred of which are “HD”), handles WMVHD, Xvid, Divx, MPEG and you can even download HD movies from Xbox Live. Also, there are programs you can run on your PC (VLC, Winamp, Transcode 360, Orb, etc.) that will allow you to stream video (SD and HD) to the Xbox 360. I actually had a HTPC (home theater PC) for a while but ultimately ditched it in favor of an Xbox 360. Only downside is you’ll need to invest in a USB thumb drive to load movies onto from your PC (if you don’t want to keep them on an external hard drive to stream them to your Xbox) as well as a wireless connector (if you don’t run a wired ethernet network). All-in you could buy a used Xbox 360 and get the add-on hardware for $250-$300.
I just set up an Xbox360 and TVersity to do that, in the last few weeks. I started with a completely clean installation of Windows Server 2008 (in a VMware virtual machine on my mac, with the “Desktop Experience” feature installed), installed TVersity and the recommended codec pack, and haven’t found a video file yet that it can’t play. I don’t have any 1080p content handy to test it with, though. I haven’t figured out yet how to make TVersity customize the menus in the way I want yet, but aside from that, I’m happy with the combination. I’m not a Netflix subscriber, so I can’t speak to how well that works. With my crappy bandwidth, I’m betting not very well. I have to admit, that Popcorn Hour A-110 looks pretty slick. If I hadn’t been buying the 360 so I could play Fallout3 anyway, I might have gone with that.
So I’ve been down this route. Sorry if it’s long winded. I’ve had (in order) -Windows XP MCE -MythTV -iStar HD (same thing as Popcorn Hour really) -AppleTV (hacked etc) I’ve settled on the AppleTV with XBMC on it. Reasons for the above progression: -Windows – I hate Microsoft for technical and idealogical reasons. Gave up on MCE the same time I started picking up linux. -MythTV- was great, but a pain to maintain, and as it’s main purpose was recording HD, and there wasn’t an easy method of that, I gave up on it (recording HD that is). -iStar HD – very nice for the price/features.. but a bit kludgy. Navigating menus was slow. Hit stop in the middle of a movie, it’d hang for what seemed like weeks. Played HD well enough, and quiet (no hard drive). Interface is weak, wife-acceptance-factor is lower than AppleTV/XBMC. -AppleTV – streams from iTunes, so I organize all my music/playlists on a vm running iTunes. I can’t find an open source setup that will let me do that, unless i don’t unders
