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[daveman]

Hi there,

I have a theatre in my home and am considering setting up an HTPC to work as a client.

I have a server in my home that contains all my media (tv, movies, music).  Currently, I have 4 WDTV hubs in my home which are connected to each of the TV sets and I use MC to serve the media.  They work nicely and withough problems.  However, i am unable to use Theatre mode or have access to the video tag information.

So for the theatre I was thinkign of setting up a htpc to work soley as a client.  the media will still remain on the server and it will stream to htpc by sharing the library.

Any advice on hardware and specs I should look at

thanks

dave

[famu97]

I wouldn't build it from scratch if you're truly only going to use it for "playback only".  I built my main htpc server from scratch but for what you're describing I had a similar scenario to get a htpc in my master bedroom for playback only.  They're also referred to as nettops.  I caught this Zotac Zbox onsale at Amazon for $174 - it's the ZOTAC Zbox Atom Dual-Core D510/Intel NM10/WiFi/A&V&GbE/Mini PC Barebone System ZBOX HD-ID11-U.  I added a 250GB hard drive and 4GB of RAM. The 4GB of RAM is a must if you want a good experience because most of these nettops/mini-ITX htpc's come with a less powerful Atom cpu.

Now I'm recommending this new nettop from Lenovo called the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q180 31102KU Desktop (Black) for $319 on Amazon. It comes with a backlit Lenovo keyboard which I love.  You can get this in many configurations with better cpu's, graphics, blu-ray drives & things like SSD's.  This is the htpc I'm recommending to people wanting htpc's that don't want to spend all the time and extra money to build something from scratch that isn't looking to add a video tuner or doesn't need DVD or blu-ray capability.  You can add a blu-ray drive accessory to this if you want to pay for that.  

There is one limitation of Atom based cpu's which is that it doesn't playback of HD video from Netflix.  Netflix uses Silverlight on Windows and Microsoft hasn't implemented hardware acceleration for Silverlight on Atom cpu's.  You can play std def Netflix video just fine and that looks good to me and on a 42" LCD in my masterbed room you can't see the difference.

The last thing to think about is that if you want to push ripped HD quality video from your server to this htpc, then you'll need to run Cat-5e cable to it.  The latency introduced by Wi-Fi signals will not support pushing true HD video (1920x1080 resolution) and I don't care if you're using 802.11n and it doesn't matter what  speed your wireless adapter says your connected at. you need giga-bit network cable to push true  HD video.  DVD quality video is fine over Wi-Fi.  this is separate issue than the Netflix HD video support issue with Atom CPU's I spoke about earlier.