Decisions, decisions.....what would you do?

[Jerri]

HTPC has been playing up. Been no end of trouble since I got it and now I'm bored of fixing issues with it.

Time for a replacement.

Now, do I go for a Lenovo Q190 from ebuyer. At £190 I have a copy of windows 7 already that I can put on it.

Or

A WDTV live. At £70

Most of my media is on a 2tb external drive I will hook up to whichever option I go for.

But whenever I buy a new box set or film I usually either rip it and put it on the hard drive or download it.

With the Lenovo I can do that right to the hard drive. With the WTDV ill have to download it on my desktop. Take the external drive upstairs and transfer new stuff over. Then reattach it back to the WDTV.

What would you do? Extra functionality of a HTPC or save cash and go with the simple WDTV?

Thanks

[fred]

Get a Raspberry Pi running XBMC - £30

[Jerri]

I had thought of all that but counted it out. I'd either like something I can plug in and use right of the bat (wdtv) or go with an os I'm familiar with on a htpc.

[Jerri]

Anyone?

Pennies sat in PayPal and no idea what to do with them.

[andy01424]

get a laptop with hdmi port take it any room plug into any tv audi and sound direct to tv

[Skwoddy]

A friend of mine uses a WDTV and has had no end of issues with files not being supported, usual suspects, xvid, mkv etc. In fact hes only had most success with AVI, I run both an ATV2 (Jailbroken) and a Raspberry Pi (xbmc), Streaming has now overtook direct file transfer for me as its great with both 720 and 1080p resolutions. Of course you need an unlimited data limit from your isp to support streaming in such high definition.

Laptop with xbmc installed and on the network is a viable option but doesnt have the small unobtrusive form factor of a Raspberry Pi nor ATV.

Other cheap xbmc alternatives are android boxes such as Pivos. Spending the surplus cash on a NAS Hard drive

[chykensa]

As a temporary (and good) solution, you could rip the film to Dropbox and then simply copy it to your new machine - saves running upstairs.
ANdy

[santa668]

I'd go with a proper mini box over a mediaplayer - alternative to the lenovo is the zbox like this (will require ram and internal HDD. I've got one of the older ones and it works great! Altho, with my Sony TV I can just plug my ext HDD into the tv and play films directly (less hassle). Only accepts MP4 tho...

[Deleted]

Jun 30, 2013 20:05:48 GMT fred said:

Get a Raspberry Pi running XBMC - £30

This.

[Jerri]

Thanks.

I actually like the idea of a laptop. I think one of the more recent net books would do. Install xbmc and configure it with the xbmc hub wizard and off I go.

I do like the look of the zontac but the price of ram and a HDD on top doesn't make sense to get that over a revo

[stu1873]

I have an HTPC that I built a few years ago. It is running win7, with a Crucial SSD, 4gb ram and 9TB of HDD space which is almost full!
I use Mediabrowser with windows media centre to play all my files and it has worked well to date.

[Jerri]

I used to use media browser myself. Until I discovered the plethora of add ons XBMC has.

I didn't really get the fuss about XBMC until I used the wizard to configure it. But now it's set up or just does everything I need and more.