[karym6]

Hi all,

I have recently moved house and now have my media centre pc tucked away in a small office. This makes it a little hard for me to enjoy all of my media files, as the office is pretty small....

I have been thinking of setting up a small vista pc under the telly in order to pick up all my media from the network and play back over the tv and through the surround system. This is a attractive to me as I could probably taylor it to suit my needs and it would use a remote - the down side is that I will need to deal with the os, reinstalls etc.

The other solution would be to have a networked media player under the tv that would be able to play back my media collection - this is the route I am currently taking as it is less fuss to maintain and set up. The only thing holding me back right now is that I dont seem to be able to find a player that has a gigabit lan connection. I think this is fairly important to me as I plan to hold all my media on a NAS (or possibly san, as they seem to be the same price now - undecided) and play it over the network. I dont have any HD content at the moment, but I am worried that 100mbps wouldnt be enough to play the video correctly.

So, could anyone suggest a suitable device? I would like it to ideally:

- Have gigabit lan
- Be able to mount a network share (I think a linux based box would be great for this)

So far I have looked at the Tvix HD M-4100sh and the Rhapsody N35. The Rhapsody seems to be able to mount a network share - but neither come with a gigabit lan connection.

Thanks for taking the time to read this

cheers
-
Karim

[son_t]

Gigabit interfaces on CE devices is very rare... one thing that hinders this adoption is that everyone's gone wireless - even slower!

But I wouldn't worry about it 100Mbit is fine. Your media server should be gigabit... and since it will be a PC, then gigabit interface cards is the norm nowadays...

If you are committed to gigabit then a linux media pc is the only option... running MythTV or the like...

[karym6]

cheers for the advice - the server is going to be a dlink dns 323 or the like (as it has a built in itunes server) or a thecus yes box - both of which have a gigabit connection (the Thecus has two)

I had initialy thought of using mythtv from within LinuxMCE, but I dont really live in a place that would utelise its full potential. There is also the fact that most of the stuff it does I already have with other devices

I think I am going to go for either the Rhapsody or Tvix device after all - am I correct in assuming they use linux? And can anyone tell me if you can map a network share with them?

Cheers
-
Karim