Anyone messin around with em much? (Home Theatre PCs)

I've begun setting up my NAS and am using Win7 Media Centre with Media Browser as a front end. Pretty slick stuff. Have most of my movies imported (from original DVDs) and it looks nice. Lots of work to get the pretty pics, trailers, etc but I like it. Any other geeks like me out there?

Nope, but I would like to be. I researched it a couple of years back, but never continued. Seemed like a lot of work.

It's time consuming for part but there's some decent utils out there to help. Looks soooooo sweet though.

I have a machine in the bedroom thats setup with Sabayon Linux. I the choice of desktops on boot of KDE/Gnome (standard desktops) or XBMC (XBox Media Center for modded Xboxs fame). I Set it to load XBMC. My system boots into the media center automatically with no additional increases in boot time.

Linux also has MythTV which takes some time to setup, but is pretty popular. I had problems setting this one up though it wants a frontend (located at tv) computer and a backend (server).


For those that want to stick with Windows but don't like Windows Media Center there are also options like XBMC, SesamTV. SesamTV's production has stopped since 2007, but is still a nice Media Frontend. SesamTV uses XML - you can add menus and items, delete items you don't want listed, ect/

Oh TigerDirect had the Patriot PCMPBO25 Box Office All-in-One Media Player on sale this week for like $50 with MIR. but looks like its out of stock so they don't show the price right now. someof the other online dealers might do a pricematch though.

I had to go frontend/backend setup because I couldn't find a media player that got custom enough or would play anything thrown at it. I played with MythTV a while back and really liked it but my knowledgebase is strongest with MS so I went the MCE router. The media browser addon really fixes so much with the frontend. All XML based as well which is great. I like that multiboot option you mentioned, that's slick!!!!

Happy.. Since your most familiar with windows, download XBMC for windows.. give it a try and customize the hell out of it. Then on a test machine install Sabayon and use either KDE or Gnome and use XBMC as a standalone program until you have it customized how you want it. After that you can change the default desktop to XBMC and it will load right Media Center.
Also I have only found 1 file that XMBC couldn't play and it was a screwed up DVD I burnt. It woudln't play in windows either, but got it playing on my Linux laptop with VideoLan (after I loaded just about every codec I could find for it)

I'm gonna have to give it a try. Haven't messed with Sabayon at all yet. Always up for new toys!

another media player than self boots and can use really low speced systems is Geexbox.