home theater computer

[ps3-13]

hey i was wondering if a dell demesion e 510 with pny nvidia 9800gtx performence edtion with a sound blaster x fi sound card be okay for watching dvds and lisening to music on and i am just geting in to all of this stuff too.

[Just_Strummin]

I'd swap out the DVD drive for a BR drive and let us know what you think!

[ps3-13]

Alright I will but need to save up some money thought ha

[Combat_SAMBO_Guy]

I got an LG Blu-Ray burner for around $299, even though I don't burn Blu-Ray yet. I use a Linux server to store multimedia, I use a Hauppauge TV card (PVR-350) to stream television, I keep this aboard the windows desktop, my server is just more secure. Personally the Linux machine is just more reliable storage, it adapted to RAID 5 for much less money than a comparable Microsoft product. I use aSounblaster X-Fi on the clients, the client in my room drives a receiver through a transducer (Creative IO Module) to drive a receiver through SPDIF. I drive my tv through an Nvidia card.

VLC is an amazing streaming product, it has the potential to stream from any input to many output devices, I use VLC as a client to stream movies, and soon, I will put multiple tv cards into the Linux box so television can be streamed throughout the house as well as movies.VLC can even transcode movies to a file, to be played on a local machine if bandwidth is tight, you can ftp it over.

Actually, the really cool part is that Ubuntu 8.04 recognizes the blu-ray burner, I wish Gnome were prettier or KDE was more stable.

[michael hurd]

Any half decent computer running XBMC will work for most of the functions, unless you are a hardcore geek. Google XBMC, it's about 120 megs when it's unpackaged. The DVD player built in will play .ISO image files of a complete DVD, so you have full menu and all audio options.

ISO takes up more hard drive space, but since space is cheap, I suggest going with that format. ( all subtitles work, as well as special features )

There are freeware programs to decrypt your store bought DVD's so you can create an ISO image with most of the 'copy' programs, even those built into your computer as stock. ( retail box ) The decrypter I use has two numbers after the word DVD.... [:#]

Save these .ISO images ( takes about 20 minutes per disc on my Compaq laptop ) to a file in your computer and then link these to the XBMC using the 'BROWSE' tab and your keyboard or mouse. Exiting each menu structure uses the escape key.... there is support for scaling the picture, contrast etc.. ( correct image display )