looking for a media pc solution, which way to go?

[dmac_]

I edit videos and what not pretty often and I'd like to easily play them on a few tvs throughout the house. Videos are typically on my laptop or desktop. Laptop has no HD video output, desktop is unpractical to carry around the house. I was looking into one of those mini book sized pcs to use, but can't seem to find one with lots of good reviews on HD video output. One of those would be nice to have for sure so If anyone knows of a good one let me know.

What I'd really like to do is network the home in a way I could just pick the videos off an external hard drive and pull them up on the tv, I have new bluray home theater players at the locations I want to use, and they have ethernet ports on them, just don't know if they're capable of doing what I want. Any thoughts on how to do this?

I'd use a networkable hard drive, and I have the house wired with plenty of cat 5 everywhere I want to be.

 

[Nukem]

How about something like this:
Newegg.com - Western Digital USB 2.0 TV Live Streaming Media Player, Wi-Fi, Full-HD 1080p WDBHG70000NBK-HESN

then you can just plug and play a USB external and watch right on your TV

I have a non-HD version of this and it works great for the family who doesn't want to mess with another machine or netflix.

 

[dmac_]

Cool, one of those and a nice networkable hard drive should do it.

 

[jasonalwaysready]

I don't have one myself, but someday i might look into getting:

Newegg.com - Zotac ZBOX-AD03BR-PLUS-U AMD E-350 APU 1.6 GHz Dual Core AMD Hudson M1 w/ 2GB RAM, 250G HDD Blu-ray All-in-One Mini PC

 

[dmac_]

Well best buy matched all the neweggayer prices on everything for me so i picked up the streaming media player, 3TB networkable hard drive, dual band n router, and an 8 port switch.

Gonna hardwire my tvs and put them on the switch, and put my pcs and hard drive on the router.

just getting off work gonna go play with it all now.

 

[t0mlike]

Some nice newer TV's have software built in that allow you to play video and music files straight through them, but if you really want a nice home media build, get a cheap computer, anything with an i3 processor in it, around 4gb of ram, generally cheap motherboard, find a small case, put a 1TB hard drive in it and buy a TV card. Windows Media Centre can be configured as an all in one media centre, store DVD's and films to the hard drive, record TV in HD (if you get a freeview HD card) to the hard drive to watch later, and even rewind live TV.

It's a nice setup once you have everything configured.

 

[jasonalwaysready]

if your media is in a specific acceptable format (typically .mp4 is a safe choice) and is reachable on the network, you can access it and play it via the blu ray player.