Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 11th Sep 2009 22:31 UTC
While we at OSNews often talk about desktops, laptops, and netbooks, there is another "form factor" which is making inroads into various households: the home theatre PC, or HTPC. There are a lot of software packages out there that will aid in turning a computer into an HTPC, and since I've been testing three of them extensively over the past months, I figured we'd talk about what you use.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
Got a Netgear EVA8000 here. Used off eBay, the price was right.
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Entertainment/DigitalMediaPlayers/E...
While the interface is not nearly as shiny or as usable as for example AppleTV, it supports a *lot* more formats--most significantly AVI and Xvid. The interesting part (good or bad depending on how you look at it) is that you bring your own storage--either you can directly connect a USB mass storage device, or access a server on your network via ethernet or wi-fi. No special software is required on the server side--any old SMB server/NAS will do, though it does come with its own software for Windows that adds support for YouTube playback.
The only downside is that if you go the USB route, you can't access the drive over the network. On the other hand if you already have some kind of file server in your network, this may be the device for you.
Edited 2009-09-13 23:35 UTC