Jayce
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So my girlfriend has been continually dreading her borderline-robbery cable bill as the billing cycles continue. With her working third shift and watching TV as rarely as she does, it's become rather questionable on how the price is justified. Furthermore, some research suggested what few TV shows she does watch may be available on certain streaming services at a fraction of the price of cable. Currently Amazon is on my radar, but I'll have to look around more.
Lately I've considered setting up a PC for her with Ubuntu on it to use as a home theatre system. That way she can use it as a remote NAS to back up music and pictures to, but also view them on the system as well. Likewise, other options like XBMC and Boxee are available which only amplify the way things operate and look.
Further research has come to several conclusions.
1 - XBMC is gorgeous.
2 - Boxee is based on XBMC. It too is gorgeous.
3 - XBMC is optimized for "local" media. Therefore, streaming integration is a long shot, but it sure has a nice interface for navigating through your locally stored media.
4 - Boxee is optimized for streaming. However, it's only optimized for actual D-Link Boxee boxes that are "Netflix ready", etc. Downloaded variants of Boxee seem to fall short in this department based on what I read.
5 - If Boxee's manual installs fall short in streaming, I wouldn't think that it would have a +1 over XBMC then.
6 - While 11.10 isn't out yet, I've been using it extensively. Native GTK3 integration with Unity and Gnome Shell is absolutely beautiful. Would it be so bad to just use a regular desktop environment as my HTPC environment instead?
I figure if I really focus on #6, another severe +1 comes my way. While Boxee and XBMC might not have certain services integrated, what does it matter when I have my trusty web browser RIGHT there? Sure, it's more of a "computer" experience, but with the two desktop environments mentioned above, they really might be do-able. I figure for a TV I wouldn't want bright white backpanes and such, so I opted to test out several dark themes to give more of a movie theatre feel. So far, I've found several that would be great to utilize, as they look good and are very easy to read.
Does anybody have any thoughts in this department?
Lately I've considered setting up a PC for her with Ubuntu on it to use as a home theatre system. That way she can use it as a remote NAS to back up music and pictures to, but also view them on the system as well. Likewise, other options like XBMC and Boxee are available which only amplify the way things operate and look.
Further research has come to several conclusions.
1 - XBMC is gorgeous.
2 - Boxee is based on XBMC. It too is gorgeous.
3 - XBMC is optimized for "local" media. Therefore, streaming integration is a long shot, but it sure has a nice interface for navigating through your locally stored media.
4 - Boxee is optimized for streaming. However, it's only optimized for actual D-Link Boxee boxes that are "Netflix ready", etc. Downloaded variants of Boxee seem to fall short in this department based on what I read.
5 - If Boxee's manual installs fall short in streaming, I wouldn't think that it would have a +1 over XBMC then.
6 - While 11.10 isn't out yet, I've been using it extensively. Native GTK3 integration with Unity and Gnome Shell is absolutely beautiful. Would it be so bad to just use a regular desktop environment as my HTPC environment instead?
I figure if I really focus on #6, another severe +1 comes my way. While Boxee and XBMC might not have certain services integrated, what does it matter when I have my trusty web browser RIGHT there? Sure, it's more of a "computer" experience, but with the two desktop environments mentioned above, they really might be do-able. I figure for a TV I wouldn't want bright white backpanes and such, so I opted to test out several dark themes to give more of a movie theatre feel. So far, I've found several that would be great to utilize, as they look good and are very easy to read.
Does anybody have any thoughts in this department?
grabs the metadata for my movies/tvserieses quickly and accurately, great interface, easy to use, and easy to get remote controls working with it too should you want to do that. I'm running it on a Mac Mini, so I've hooked it up to the Apple remote, currently hooked up to a Harmony.
