Long time, no build: net-top or extender, and which?

[RTRski]

Hi; haven’t been around for a while.  My old HTPC died and I haven’t had much time to watch TV so I didn’t really mourn it that much (actually dropped my satellite subscription and never renewed), but I’ve finally got the itch to build a new gaming computer and the wife actually requested the ability to ‘have all our music downstairs again’.

So, I’ll be building a traditional tower PC with Win 7 including Media Center, and have either an internal tuner or get an HDHomerun type solution to have OTA HD.  Primary purpose of that is traditional PC usage (internet, office stuff, gaming, and digital photo editing) but as it’s upstairs it’s the best place to access the OTA HD signals for recording and it will certainly have the specs to handle recording while I do whatever else (looking at Corei7/860, 8 GB RAM, dual 1TB drives, etc….with OTA only I doubt I’d ever want or need to record more than 2 shows at once, and do have a tuner downstairs as well hooked to the TV to watch while recording).

My entertainment system in the living room consists of a 720p DLP “HD-ready” TV sans digital tuner, reasonably good but old 6-channel AV Receiver, DVD player, and the out-of-subscription Satellite box (pre-DirecTV branding Hughes HD unit, no PVR) that is serving as the HD tuner for the TV.  We also have a Wii, and I already have wireless dual-band N in the house (although of course the Wii and our laptops, cellphones, etc all WiFi only over G).

All I want to be able to do downstairs is

1.  stream recorded TV from Win 7 at HD, reliably (no stutter, A/V desynchronization, etc).  Strangely enough we do this wirelessly over G pretty well just to laptops now, but obviously there’s some compression and the like…I assume on the 52″ I’ll want a wired solution or the quality difference will be more obvious
2.  stream DVDs from ISO files on upstairs HDD (ditto on the quality – don’t care if it doesn’t “upscale”, just don’t want to add artifacts if possible)
3.  access my CD library to be stored either on an HDD upstairs or down (depending on selected options).  Currently archived to high data rate (but not lossless) WMA
4.  access Netflix streaming to the living room (am in the queue for the Wii disk, but imagine I can get better quality)
5.  ideally access Hulu TV or internet radio options as well
6.  Simple canned browsing (Flickr slideshow type stuff, weather channel or whatever…not a social network user at all (Facebook = first sign of the coming Apocalypse 😉 )
7.  Could *conceivably* add a webcam for Skype, but not a high priority, just a possibility, and shouldn’t alone make or break the extender/net-top decision

None of my current LR entertainment pieceparts are ethernet enabled, and with an old 720p TV I’ve got no interest in BluRay just yet either.  I am assuming I won’t be able to do wireless and will either go with the MoCP or powerline option to get some sort of networking down to whatever I put in the LR (although as I said, wireless to our laptops works pretty well right now).

[b]So the question is: some sort of extender, or just put a cheap net-top down there?  [/b]

I’ve been out of the game a while and it seems like the marketspace has really fragmented.  Read the reviews of the Patriot and Asus boxes but neither one seems to support 7MC DVR recordings as a true ‘extender’.  And many extenders if I’m understanding it right don’t support Netflix or Hulu….and are disappearing (Linksys, etc.) from lack of interest??  From all that, seems like a net-top to access the stored media as shared files but get Netflix etc ‘directly’ via access to my outgoing internet connection is the best bet.  But its also likely the highest cost compared to an extender. 

Any suggestions?  (Aside from ‘upgrade the living room equipment to get ethernet-enabled ____ [blueray, TV, whatever].)  Should I wait a little to see what emerges in the Win 7 extender space?  Does the new Tivo do what I want, considering I don’t have cable OR satellite (or Uverse…or FiOS….) and am unlikely to get any of the above again anytime soon?

Thanks for being patient with old, out-of-touch gramps here… 😉

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