Xbox360/PS3/popcorn hour/HTPC?


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All I want is to be able to watch movies on my plasma in my living room and stream movies/shows from my computer in the office.

Netflix/hulu/pandora are great and I would love them also.

Budget: $500 max

What do I look at?

This is my setup:

HSI internet with ethernet hookup in living room connected to 802n router. Wireless streaming via 802n wireless.

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You can stream movies to the 360 and it also has Netflix capability.

I prefer the streaming ability of the PS3 though using PS3 Media Server. It's much quieter than my 360 and I just prefer using it more.

The PS3 has wireless built in. The 360 you would need to buy an extra wireless adapter. Depending on the location of the devices though you may be able to just wire them in. You didn't really specify.

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For popcorn hour/HTPC it realy comes down to noise . Are you willing to put up with the noise from the PSU CPU and HDD ? if not go for a streamer (Which has no moving parts)

The downside is without a NAS youll have to leave the computer running whenever you want to play movies/music on your TV.

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You can stream movies to the 360 and it also has Netflix capability.

I prefer the streaming ability of the PS3 though using PS3 Media Server. It's much quieter than my 360 and I just prefer using it more.

The PS3 has wireless built in. The 360 you would need to buy an extra wireless adapter. Depending on the location of the devices though you may be able to just wire them in. You didn't really specify.

The office is about 30 feet away. Plus living in a condo I cannot really run cables.

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I'd go with a PS3, you'll get the streaming and the ability to watch blu ray discs.

Best media streamer (codec support wise) and you can currently use Hulu through the PS3 web browser for free and there's also some application that will do Netflix through the PS3, but I think it costs money. Netflix are more than likely going to support the PS3 officially in the near future.

If you go with one of the consoles you'll also get access to games as well.

Wireless for HD content can be a hit or miss though, streaming 1080p over wireless can be quite taxing. People say home plugs can help on wireless though, I'm not quite sure how they work.

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+1 for the PS3

I don't have one, so I go for what I heard.

This thing have better media support out the box, it have Blu Ray, Wi-Fi, it's silent and have a Web Browser. It worth notifying that the Media remote you will surly buy is BT and not IR.

For media use, it's a very good choice, it retail for $400 for the 80GB vers.

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Agreed, I would go with a PS3 for the added bonus of the Bluray. You don't mention that you would want a gaming maching but obviously you get that as an added bonus. :)

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popcorn hour or htpc would be my suggestion (personally i use a htpc/w blu-ray drive but also own a ps3) popcornhour has lower compatibility than a htpc but is cheap and small, htpc is best if you want to be able to pl,ay absolutely anything whether its a file on a hdd or a disc, ps3/360 are a bad choice imo as popular formats like mkv require streaming/converting, not worth the effort.

theres no reason a htpc cant be just as quiet as a ps3 (cant compare to a pch as i dont have one) mine was quieter than my ps3 till i updated my graphics card and had to change one of the fans to keep temperatures reasonable.

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ps3/360 are a bad choice imo as popular formats like mkv require streaming/converting, not worth the effort.

effort? you literally run a single program on your computer and can browse and play basically any file there on the ps3...

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I'd go with a PS3, you'll get the streaming and the ability to watch blu ray discs.

Best media streamer (codec support wise) and you can currently use Hulu through the PS3 web browser for free and there's also some application that will do Netflix through the PS3, but I think it costs money. Netflix are more than likely going to support the PS3 officially in the near future.

If you go with one of the consoles you'll also get access to games as well.

Wireless for HD content can be a hit or miss though, streaming 1080p over wireless can be quite taxing. People say home plugs can help on wireless though, I'm not quite sure how they work.

incorrect duneHD prime plays more formats than the ps3 its fairly expensive as far as media players go but its also a blu-ray player

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effort? you literally run a single program on your computer and can browse and play basically any file there on the ps3...

or they could be played natively on a htpc or pch (many other media streamers as well) no need to have a pc on all the time just to stream stuff.

ps3 only makes sense if your going to use it for gaming as well as it isnt even the best blu-ray player

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or they could be played natively on a htpc or pch (many other media streamers as well) no need to have a pc on all the time just to stream stuff.

ps3 only makes sense if your going to use it for gaming as well as it isnt even the best blu-ray player

The OP says he wants to stream from another computer...so regardless of what he gets the content will still be on another computer.

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People need to start understanding MKV is just a container, use PS3Media Server and the container is absolutely meaningless, the codec used to encode the video/audio is all that matters.

There's not really any such thing as "native MKV playback", native playback relates to the video and audio and whether or not they can be played without modification on the piece of hardware you are feeding them to.

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even so pch seems as better option to me, roughly half the price of a ps3, the pch wireless addon is 11n compared to the ps3's 11g so it will probably be better suited to streaming 1080p, most popular formats supported nativly so no need for a streaming app, just map your network drive

People need to start understanding MKV is just a container, use PS3Media Server and the container is absolutely meaningless, the codec used to encode the video/audio is all that matters.

There's not really any such thing as "native MKV playback", native playback relates to the video and audio and whether or not they can be played without modification on the piece of hardware you are feeding them to.

thats the biggest load of bull**** i have ever seen, a device either supports a container or does not, the ps3 does not support mkv just because you can stream it and convert the container on the fly doesn't magically make it support it

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thats the biggest load of bull**** i have ever seen, a device either supports a container or does not, the ps3 does not support mkv just because you can stream it and convert the container on the fly doesn't magically make it support it

:rolleyes:

Well done getting the point *handclap*

The point being the container is absolutely meaningless in the streaming realm with the PS3. All that matters is what the video and audio are encoded in. That's it.

If the program used to stream your video files to the PS3 handles everything itself what's the point in making a fuss about playback of the mkv container? There is none.

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effort? you literally run a single program on your computer and can browse and play basically any file there on the ps3...

You can convert an mkv in 25 seconds and play it through windows media extender on the xbox 360. You need to be running Windows 7 though.

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i get your point, it doesnt change the fact that a ps3 doesnt nativly support mkv so a pc is always required (rules out streaming from a nas for example) but as the op said he will use a pc i suppose that doesnt matter here.

answer this why should the op pay $400 (or whatever a ps3 cost in america) compared to $250 for a pch+wireless n adapter (price from the pch site, resellers might be different), even if you say he cant play dvd/bluray thats true enough but he could just rip his disc to the pc and then play them still saving money over a ps3

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i get your point, it doesnt change the fact that a ps3 doesnt nativly support mkv so a pc is always required (rules out streaming from a nas for example) but as the op said he will use a pc i suppose that doesnt matter here.

answer this why should the op pay $400 (or whatever a ps3 cost in america) compared to $250 for a pch+wireless n adapter (price from the pch site, resellers might be different), even if you say he cant play dvd/bluray thats true enough but he could just rip his disc to the pc and then play them still saving money over a ps3

Wat? You need a PC to avoid to use a PC? :blink:
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the difference between the two is obvious one method requires a pc on all the time while the other only needs a pc/laptop while you copy the dvd to it and upload it to whatever you use as a server.

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Fair enough, but he will still need to buy an $100 Blu Ray reader for his PC.

I don't see what the hell is with all these MKV posts.

In first place, I don't see what the hell people are doing with mkv, it's not a popular container and isn't supported by lot of things naively.

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/ho...on_xbox_360.cfm

This article we will take content from the MKV (matroska) container and store it in either the MP4 or AVI container, depending on the type of video and audio we are dealing with. Why do this? The Xbox 360 console does not support the MKV container directly, but by simply taking the content stored in the MKV container and placing it in either the MP4 container (for H.264/AVC) or the AVI container, this avoids a total re-encode of video
Found this after 2 min of google...
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I don't see what the hell is with all these MKV posts.

In first place, I don't see what the hell people are doing with mkv, it's not a popular container and isn't supported by lot of things naively.

I'd say probably 90% of downloaded HD video comes as a .mkv.

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And 100 percent of those files can be converted into 1:1 AVI clones without the horrendious compatiblity of the MKV container. If your streaming avoid MKV like the plague or setup a shuttle to transcode them.

Its just not worth the bother

Edited by bob21
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even so pch seems as better option to me, roughly half the price of a ps3, the pch wireless addon is 11n compared to the ps3's 11g so it will probably be better suited to streaming 1080p, most popular formats supported nativly so no need for a streaming app, just map your network drive

thats the biggest load of bull**** i have ever seen, a device either supports a container or does not, the ps3 does not support mkv just because you can stream it and convert the container on the fly doesn't magically make it support it

Even if I did popcorn I still need a blu ray player. That why I am thinking a ps3 makes sense. Plus you never know when a rock band or guitar hero may make it my way. Those would so rock on my plasma

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