I was at my uncle's house yesterday helping him tweak a few issues with his new home theater system. In an attempt to show off MC and potentially bring him to the MC camp, I took my Asus EEE (through VGA) and connected to my server over library server.
I started showing it off. Luckily the thumbnails download very quickly because they are generated on the server--so it was fast and easy to show everything off. (should point out that about 10% of them were not downloading for an unknown reason)
But when I was showing him the music, his FIRST question was if it was the same quality as CD or not. It's less about can you tell as it is I want the same quality. Period. Especially with several thousand dollars in audio equipment! A hundred-three hundred bucks is peanuts compared to the real equipment cost!
I informed him the issues of internet speed and said at home it is identical but at that moment, it would be converted to high quality mp3s. Nonetheless their whole family was amazed at the MC theater view interface--especially when viewed with our 33,500 media files (FLAC,JPG,DVD).
One important distinction is that he has a Jukebox CD changer and this makes him less likely to switch to MC because he already has a working, decent solution. So switching at the very least can't have any drawbacks--such as lower sound quality.
For those with smaller media collections building a server and running MC can be very reasonable! A < $1,000 server could hold everything the average to below average user has (media wise). I'll let what I showed them sink in. Who knows, they may one day decide to have me set them up!
Another question of his was cost (for MC). I said $40. He thought I meant per month. I should ask him for more details but it sounded like he thought that was a reasonable price (per month!) for the microsecond before I blurted out one-time!
He agreed that the price of MC is a bargain.
One challenge is Blu Ray. With his brand new 1080p LCD, Blu Ray is the way to go. I know Blu Ray support would be of interest to many people--including myself when we get a dedicated 1080p TV. Of course even several terabytes is no match against 50GB per movie! YIKES.