I have a friend who came into some money at christmas and wants a similar setup to mine. I have My Movies running on a server and a shuttle box as a client. He wants to be future proof and be able to have extenders or clients in all the rooms.
The problem with extenders is that vista won’t really stream my movies well without a lot of user intervention. He want to hook it up and expect it to work. If I knew he was going to have clients in each room that would not be a problem. I also have someone else’s WAF to think about.
I am not totally sure on if he is going to be okay only with Standard def being the only option either. I know there are HD OTA and Qam tuners but that is a mess also and geting 6 channels ota and trying to configure te EPG is not something he will be able to do.
I don’t know if he knows for sure what he would want there. So the next step to me seems obvious. Go with a OEM media center with Cable card support. This would give him HDTV to any extender and the head unit but no way to play movies recorded to the HD to the extenders. Or no way for clients to play TV.
MS has a huge hole here. and only to protect themselves.
Now I think he will go with cleints in the future so if another MCI is the way to go is there one that has high WAF and will allow HDTV, SDTV, and locally stored movies easily to be played via the network.
I know there are high requirements for viewing HD but if the tuners are on the server and are not playing the content but only streaming the content to clients is the server required to be pretty stout?
Any thoughts on how I can create this network for him. It would be nice if you could also put a HDDVD or Blu ray disc in the server and see it on any client if possible.
Also who are the OEMs build OCUR boxes anyways. Preferabbly in an HT case and not a tower like Dell is doing.
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