Home Media Server Question
 

I saw a thread a while back that had some cool home media server software mentioned, but cant find the damn thing.

I want to setup a server and rip most of my DVD collection to it and be able to watch it on my other TVs in the house over my wireless network. I know some people say a wireless network isnt good for streaming HD video, but I can stream netflix just fine in HD over my wireless network, so is there really a difference?

If I buy a movie fom Amazon or iTunes and download it, can that be added to my movie library to watch over my network? I've never done this shit before but I'm real tired of keeping up with this huge DVD collection and it looks like digital downloads are the way to go.

Plex...XBMC...

It may be easier to just setup a NAS and put your media on that.

Then play it on the tvs how? NAS is like an external HDD isn't it? You'd need a device inbetween that could play the media ie Playstation etc? Or is that not right?

I have a spare 2.4Ghz quad-core pentium with 2 terrabytes to use as a server.

Raspberry PI. HTPC. There are a lot of different options on what hardware to use. Personally, I use a real computer using XBMC. I can bitstream HD codecs such as DTS-HD(MA) and TrueHD to my receiver and have it decode the audio (the way it should be).

Netflix HD is much more compressed than say ripping a full blu-ray to your server. Even if you get them down to about 6 or 7 GB I would not want to use wireless for streaming them.

If you don't mind sacrificing video and audio quality for the sake of convenience then wireless would probably work OK.

I personally use mediabrowser. Very similar to XBMC.
http://www.mediabrowser.tv/