Right, I want to get a bit of the old integration going and have been looking at ways to do it and I thought with the collection of geeks on here you may have some better ideas.

Problem to Solve: Be able to access all of the content on my PC in the comfort of my living room without having a big beige monstrosity humming away in the corner and spoiling things. It would need the right outputs to connect into a Hi-Fi seperates system and DVD player, surround sound, TV, etc.

Solutions I have Thought of:

1. Build a little compact PC that looks nice and is quiet and could sit next to my nice Hi-Fi seperates without standing out like a sore thumb. Something like a Shuttle, I think.

2. Buy one of these new 'media centre' type things that seem to be basically just a PC with nicer looks but for a lot of money. Dont know a lot about these as I havent really researched them yet. Price puts me off though.

3. Buy an XBOX360 and use it to connect wirelessly to my PC in the office and share the content. This has the added bonus of a HiDef out connection, games, etc. Need to look at the spec to see what the sound outputs are like.

Your views please.............

You can buy a box that connects to your pc over your wireless network and plays whatever you have in your media server via the tv. Has a remote control, displays in vga etc so you can select via the tele - dunno what sound quality is like tho.

I think a shuttle box with a whacking great HD might be the better idea, then just ftp/download whatever you want to watch direct to the shuttle. You can also set that up to take a sky feed and record to it using software like showshifter

M

Only problem with the XBOX360 idea is youll also need a copy of Windows Vista to get he streaming Video to work, Atm it only supports streaming music under XP with an update.

You could just have a small bare bones shuttle with wireless adaptor and access and stream that way.

The other way of doing it is buy a new home DVD player that allows you to play AVI / MPEG / DIVX straight from disk in file format without having to convert to DVD format. This has the added bonus of making you put your stuff to disk thus freeing up space on your pc for you to download more shit..

I've just ran vga and audio cable from my office to the plasma downstairs.
(Through a splitter to drive the signal over the long cable)

Then a Gyration wireless keyboard/mouse, has the range to control it

No boxes in the living room at all then.

Btw:
If no VGA input on the tele downstairs an S-Video, or composite video, cable from the graphics card if it has one. This looks shit tho.

Archos thing

http://www.blokesstuff.com/ProductsByMa ... Xgodr2OaqA

i've got the av400 100gb one and it's cool but doesn't play everything i have. you can set it up to either display on the actual player or on the tv but the remote is a pile of shit.

or

chipped original xbox with an upgraded hard drive, just audio out to the hifi and svhs or whatever to the tv.

i've tried the build a custom media center wankfest and it's just not worth the hassle