My AV system is getting a bit long in the tooth. I bought the system when I bought my house 7 years ago and no self-respecting technophile can be seen without a flat panel TV these days. So I’m considering mounting an LCD TV to the wall, embedding speakers in the wall and moving the components into a closet to regain most of the floor space currently taken.
What I’d really like to do is make my system more Internet friendly. I’ve got Ethernet right there and I want to be able to view material on the TV that I download, stream from Hulu or watch on a DVD or BluRay disc. I’ve already got a NAS device, TiVo and laptop and the last thing I want is another computer running 24/7. It’s too bad the manufacturers and content providers can’t do more to converge these devices so they work better together. The reality is that none of these companies wants to give an inch to the others so something like MythTV running on a SFF computer might be my best choice to control my own entertainment destiny. An Apple TV or hacked Mac mini might also be a possibility. We shall see.
1 response so far ↓
1 Jarod // Feb 11, 2009 at 7:14 pm
I modded my brothers old xbox (1) a couple months back & am running XBMC on it. I’m pulling everything from my NAS with a 1TB disk attached. The NAS is just a NSLU2 which will run LOTS of servers & apps (google it). XBMC on the xbox is pretty cool, except it doesn’t have the power needed to do 1080p. The better solution I think is to build a small HTPC & run XBMC for win/osx/linux.