Mini PC/Mac Mini for TV shows and Films?
 

I'm getting annoyed having to hook up my laptop to the tv to watch certain things.

This has a region free dvd player so I use it quite often for foreign stuff, and also watch some tv shows through it here and there. So I am thinking of getting a mini pc or mac mini to setup as a purely entertainment system that can be put straigh into the TV.

Anyone else have a setup like this? I noticed most of the mini pcs have about 300-500gb hard drive so I was thinking of one of them and 2-3tb USB HDD connected to it for more space.

Want to hear what you have and your reviews please :thumbsup

I have a mac mini attached to my tv. 500 gig internal and a 2 gig external. It shares the video to my apple tv upstairs via itunes so I get the benefit on 2 tv's with only 1 computer. It also pushes to my ipads and iphones

I have a little Dell Zino HD that seems to have been made for this. It needed a RAM boost and I got the upgraded video card. For under $400 it plays 1080p video with and streams HD web content with no problems.

If I was to buy a new one, it would probably be a Mac Mini.

I have a general purpose machine with Ubuntu installed. I use this as a media server using serviio and air video server. My Samsung LED TV, Xbox 360 and Ipad can all connect to this over my wifi network and stream movies directly. I also have a headless web based bittorrent client installed on this. (using tranmission). This allows me to download torrent files directly and they are instantly available on all my devices..

As well as that it serves as my source repository (subversion), fileshare, and apple time machine backup. Oh..... it also acts as VM host for all my dev images :)

Mac Mini with Plex is heaven!!

This. You can be a small micro case and have a good htpc media player at half the cost of a mac mini.

Have a PC hooked up to every TV in the house via HDMI. I just put an ssd drive and a decent video card in each box now and have one central server that I store all my videos and music on. Everything connected by cat 6. Was having issues with wireless streaming.

I have two options....

One is the apple TV (Airplay is great from my iPhone and other pc's with itunes)

Two is my mini PC with XBMC and Boxee installed (Also have the remote control apps for my iphone)

If you jailbreak the Apple TV you can install XBMC on it.

I have been looking at this as well but keep going back to the playstation 3.
It seems like the cheapest platform to do this

Shit I forgot about this thread.

Thanks for your comments everyone, Mac Mini does look like a good option. I was looking at the small acers for the main unit. Will have to compare everything I guess.

Will check the dell site and see what they have going on aswell.