Ok sorry I've read on here on the last three pages, lots of great info but not quite getting it for what I might or think I want to do so i'll post my thoughts and specs and hopefully some of you may have some good advice for me.
I've been downloading movies for a few years and want to download 1080 torrents and stream directly to my Panasonic 1080 plasma TV. Current things I already run. Right now I download and burn to DVD and watch Xvids on standalone player to Plasma with good results but not near 1080. Here are my components that might matter. PC is in different room from Home Theater......
Dell PC older no hdmi output, windows XP, cpu pent4, 2.66ghz, 524mb ram.
Panasonic Plasma Viera 42 HDTV1080I ( 2 hdmi ports only using 1 for
up converting DVD player ).
Bell expressvu 6100 hd sattelite receiver directly to tv with rca cable.
Denon receiver avr 1507 I run mostly just the audio from everything through this on optical cables.
I also run everything with a Harmony One remote and would love to keep working with that as it's wonderful.
Not sure what else I can tell you but I want to run 1080 movies directly to my TV so I was thinking about a htpc maybe a dell studio hybrid ( seems like overkill for what I do ). I want to have enough memory to save lots of movies and also play BR if I ever rented one. I would also do some websurfing, home pictures stuff like that.
Costco here has the new Acer AX3200 seems like a decent htpc, comes hdmi ready, bd reader, optical audio output with DTS, Windows vista, 640 gig hd, 4gig ram, AMD Phenom X3 8450 triple-core processor, NVIDIA's GeForce8200 integrated graphics chip it also comes with the P244W 24-inch 1080p LCD display which I could use as a bedroom TV or hook up to my old dell if I run the media center to my plasma.
Not sure what anyone thinks. Any help would be great, honestly I feel overwelmed as there is just so much info out there and I'm not sure if I should wait until a decent media center is available with a BR/BD burner so I can burn too. Of if a media center is the best option.
Sorry for the lengthy read but hopefully the more info the better. Anyone local in Saskatoon, SK that is working with this stuff buzz me back.
Well anyway things for your assistance. Packrule!!!
You say you want it to store lots of movies...but 640GB will be filled within a week.
Depending on how much you actualy want to store, you may need to build yourself something with lots of 1.5TB hard drives. For every 1.5TB of storage, you can estimate about 200 DVDs. At that rate, you will probably need at least 5 1.5TB drives, and you are not going to find that from an OEM.
