HTPC Build

[Jim Tressel]

pretty slick! 

[Jim Tressel]

Drobo stuff is beginning to show up.  DroboShare and 4x 1.5tb WD Green drives came in today.  Waiting on the Drobo now.  Well, that AND my tax return so I can throw some new parts in this Shuttle so I'll have a PC to help wash down my HT.

[gr0n]

Woot!  Yeah if I were really serious about it and horded TBs of video I would certainly do a DroboPro and connect via iSCSI.  Mmmmmm

[Jim Tressel]

To be honest, I don't have any sort of digital video library at the moment.  I've always found it too tedious to watch movies on my computer to bother.  However, I have a large DVD collection and plan to encode it all, then sell my dvd's.  Speaking of which, anyone interested in 250-300 dvd's?

Just used DVDFab and Handbrake to rip and encode The Hurt Locker.  Easy breazy.

[Jim Tressel]

So the Drobo's here (pics forthcoming), and it's very sexy-time with 4.1TB usable disk space.  I've been tinkering with media centers.

Boxee: Kinda sluggish moving between panes (and there's no hardware excuse since it's running on my Alienware), social networking shit is stupid and whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot, Netflix playback is OK but not perfect.  The bubbly-ness of the interface feels a bit like a child's toy and navigation is frustratingly non-responsive at times.

Plex: Fork of XBMC, very sexy, does everything, looks fantastic, performs even better...but it's OSX only.  Fuckers.

XBMC: Where's the goddamn Netflix streaming?!  WTF?!?!

WMC: Much as I hate to admit it...this might have to due for now.  At least until XBMC gets its head removed from its ass and adds Netflix.  It's not bad, but it's also not amazing and pretty like the previous 2.  I know that's a stupid standard, but if I'm going to sink time and effort into nerding out my shit, I want it to look as good as it performs.

[Varg]

Thats pretty much what I came up with JT. I did find a plugin for WMC that gave it that XBMC look when browsing movies.
You should take a look at it: http://www.mediabrowser.tv/

I must say, the netflix plugin on WMC is flawless.

[Jim Tressel]

Have you played with MediaPortal (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) at all?  I might give that a try.

[BCBrent]

That Drobo setup looks like it would be pretty sweet, at least as a way of storing media and being able to access it from several places.

Right now I have a very poor man's setup right now for playing digital content on my TV, and that is the beautiful hookup from Vuze to the 360.  It will automatically convert everything into a format the 360 can read (and it touts converting to HD but I haven't fully put that to the test yet).  I'm looking into expanding that even further once I get more of a digital library to speak of, right now it is just a handful of movies and TV shows that I have on there. I run Win7 on my lappy and it sounds like I can get a pretty decent setup thru WMC from what you guys are saying.  I'll have to play around with it this weekend

[Hawkes]

So the Drobo's here (pics forthcoming), and it's very sexy-time with 4.1TB usable disk space.  I've been tinkering with media centers.

Boxee: Kinda sluggish moving between panes (and there's no hardware excuse since it's running on my Alienware), social networking shit is stupid and whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot, Netflix playback is OK but not perfect.  The bubbly-ness of the interface feels a bit like a child's toy and navigation is frustratingly non-responsive at times.

Plex: Fork of XBMC, very sexy, does everything, looks fantastic, performs even better...but it's OSX only.  Fuckers.

XBMC: Where's the goddamn Netflix streaming?!  WTF?!?!

WMC: Much as I hate to admit it...this might have to due for now.  At least until XBMC gets its head removed from its ass and adds Netflix.  It's not bad, but it's also not amazing and pretty like the previous 2.  I know that's a stupid standard, but if I'm going to sink time and effort into nerding out my shit, I want it to look as good as it performs.

So where's the pics bitch?

[BCBrent]

To be honest, I don't have any sort of digital video library at the moment.  I've always found it too tedious to watch movies on my computer to bother.  However, I have a large DVD collection and plan to encode it all, then sell my dvd's.  Speaking of which, anyone interested in 250-300 dvd's?

Just used DVDFab and Handbrake to rip and encode The Hurt Locker.  Easy breazy.

Have you found DVDFab to be pretty good as far as quality goes?  What settings did you use when you ran it?

I downloaded the trial this weekend and tested with a copy of 300.  I need to play it on my TV to see how the quality looks.   I just chose xbox 360 format as that is how I currently play most of my movies.

[Varg]

Can you guys not get handbrake to work?

[Reddawn]

F handbrake....Procoder for the win

[BCBrent]

Can you guys not get handbrake to work?

I haven't tried it yet, is the idea to rip the DVD files and the use Handbrake to convert them from there? (apologies, Nick = noob)

[Troyer]

DVDFab is only for decrypting the DVD.  Use Handbrake or Procoder to convert the VOBs.

n00B!

[Troyer]

http://lifehacker.com/5472711/boxee-integration-app-plugs-boxee-into-windows-7-media-center

Does this change anyone's decision as to their solution of choice?