Appreciate a good samaritan

[Confused Stu]

Originally Posted by dancake

thats a fine point well made

Amen brother! You realise you're an addict when you almost cry with happiness that the latest PowerDVD integrates with Media Centre without hacking.

[soviet]

Haha that is true, once you start it really becomes an obsession! I started off a while back and had to cut a few corners due to my budget. Few months on Ive upgraded the PSU and the case. You will love tweaking the system to get it to run cooler and quiter

[MortUK]

I'd have to agree.... You can get carried away..

I ended up with 3x XBox 360's dotted around the house acting as extenders (You can pick them up on eBay for £80 now).. Now i have multi-room cable with centrally recorded Cable TV....

Great system, and I have to say, better than you can buy officially.!!!

Mort..

[htpcman]

I'm just about to start my journey in automated commercial skiping Next as that looks fun

3 xboxs!!! I always found them a bit too noisy.... did you consider getting a dma2100? Now they are discontinued lots of places selling them off Chepstow I got one from ebuyer for 60 quid. Not actually connected it up yet though, I've heard they are pretty good though...

[MortUK]

I know what you mean about the noise, although you get used to it after a while and don't really notice, The new ones with HDMI are a lot quieter than the original 360's.

I looked at the DMA2100's But wasn't that impressed with the interface.. It's not quite the same experience as you get with the 360.. The interface doesn't scroll and fade quite as nicely.. There is a lot more support for the 360 as well, especially under Windows 7 the experience is the same as if you were sitting in front of your PC....

They are nice to have, Even if yo just have 1 so you can watch cable in another room..

Mort..

[Confused Stu]

I've never played with a 360, but I have had a DMA2100 up and running for a few months (Vista, and now W7). The interface is sluggish, but turning off animations helps hugely with that and makes everything pretty instant. Once you're actually watching TV it's perfect, but you're right it is slow to navigate. Still glad I got one over a 360 as it's silent, slightly cheaper than a 360 and the kids don't want to buy games to play on my extender.

Mine's running wirelessly off a WRT610N and it's perfect - even on HD channels (except for my current "no sound on HD" thing, but that's the CAM, not the extender). I initially tried it on a Belkin 802.11g and it couldn't do HD, then tried a cheap 85Mbps Homeplug and that was terrible - not quick enough to do SD channels and startup took 3 times as long. Finally got the WRT610N and it's been faultless ever since. Considering another now they're so cheap.

P.S. Sorry for the thread hijack!

[Methanoid]

Originally Posted by MortUK

I know what you mean about the noise, although you get used to it after a while and don't really notice, The new ones with HDMI are a lot quieter than the original 360's.

err might sound a dumb one.. but I'll ask anyway, does this mean the 360 can change channels on the cable cards on your HTPC? Which OS does the HTPC need to run as that sounds rather funky to me. And my boy would be plenty happy if every TV had a 360 in front of it!!!

[Confused Stu]

Originally Posted by Methanoid

err might sound a dumb one.. but I'll ask anyway, does this mean the 360 can change channels on the cable cards on your HTPC? Which OS does the HTPC need to run as that sounds rather funky to me. And my boy would be plenty happy if every TV had a 360 in front of it!!!

The 360 acts as a "Media Centre Extender" so you see pretty much the same interface you would as if you were using Windows Media Centre on the PC on that TV. You can change channels, view pictures and so on, your HTPC will decode that channel and then stream it to the 360 which then plays it. It's very slick, but if you want 3 360's all watching different channels you will need 3 tuners in the HTPC (obvious, but worth saying).