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[mickrick]

Okay, so I've taken the plunge and I'm building my first HTPC. Its going to be as minimalist as possible:

Silverstone LC11 case
Asus P5E-VM HDMI motherboard
Core2 Quad cpu with stock hsf
4GB DDR2 667 ram
80GB SATA hard drive (system and mediaplayer only)
LG Blu-Ray burner
Microsoft RC6 Mediacentre remote and usb receiver
Windows 7 Ultimate
JRiver MediaCenter

This will connect to a WD MyBook World nas streaming either Twonky, Ushare or MediaTomb media servers, whichever places the least overheads on the nas. Depending on performance issues I may prefer to run it in upnp mode instead.

I will be outputting to a Harman Kardon AVR255 amp and from there to a Samsung tv.

This about covers the setup and after much research I reckon JRiver is the mediacentre to go with. I'm not going to have any real world experience of it until I have the HTPC built and ready to rock n roll. Are there any issues I may encounter with JRiver on the above configuration? Is it possible to boot the HTPC straight to JRiver in fullscreen mode, bypassing the desktop completely? Would Windows 8 be a better option than Windows 7?

Also, would I be better using an ssd as a system drive rather than a "normal" sata drive, as the HTPC will be in use almost every day. I will need to have it running almost constantly or else it will need to be up and running as quickly as possible.

[mwillems]

I got pretty serious performance gains adding an SSD as my boot drive.  Much faster boot times, and much more responsive generally.  Especially since you're talking about a low GB total, you have much to gain and little to lose (except $$) by using an SSD.

You can definitely configure JRiver to start on boot up and launch directly into theater view in windows 7.

[CYR1L]

MickRick,

I run a similar hardware setup [core2duo e6600, 8g ddr3, nvidia gt430 output to HK avr247 to visio 55"] and JRiver runs great for me, although it's processor intensive if when I run redoctoberHQ, which would probably be fine for your core2 Quad.  I say go for it.

I've dabbled lightly with five of the more popular media-center packages, and in my opinion jriver has the best support for file playback, and works great with any media center remote, including the logitech harmony series with as few or as many key tweaks as you'd ever want.

my htpc runs 24/7 because it's also my seedbox, so for me, as long as storage and playback are the primary functions, an SSD rebuild isn’t warranted.
I don't see any advantage to running it on Windows8 vs Windows7.