FlySurfer said...

If you want to go down the media box... PopCorn Hour are pretty good... the Mrs got my hand me down.

The WD live is good for the price, but still not capable of high bit rate 1080p; I think it uses the same chipset as the older generation Popcorn hours... I like the flexibility of an HTPC, but setting it up properly with DTS MA, DolbyTrue HD pass through, splitters, demuxers, codecs and all the other things I imagine could be daunting.

I use a Logitech Dinovo mini + Harmony one to control the whole thing.

Realistically who streams high bitrate 1080p? There isn't that much content out there, certainly in tv land, and personally I don't see the point in wasting massive amounts of HD space and DL quota (even though I have a lot of both) in the quest for picture quality when your normal run of the mill encode is fine for general consumption. I just want to get home, sit on the couch, press play and watch the Daily show etc and for this WD tv-live is the f'n business

Don't get me wrong you can create some super pimp media server setups, some of the stuff people do is amazing. I've dabbled in it before, but it's quite a bit of work to get it all setup/built and running seamlessly, if all you want to do is watch some tv...bit over the top imo, which is why I bought the tv-live