I must mention here my thanks to Mark, whose comments much earlier in this thread about the Zotac Atom/Ion machine pushed me in the direction of finally setting up a dedicated video player pc. I recently upgraded my tv to a rather nice 42 inch Panasonic plasma screen (TX-42PG20B, in case anyone cares) and was looking for a good solution to playing the fileserver video through it. It's my first TV upgrade in 11 years, and I wanted it to work properly.

I ended up, after a lot of research, picking up a Foxconn nt330i box, which is even smaller than the Zotac unit, and cheaper at least in the UK, although admittedly doesn't have as much IO. It has more than enough for the role it's in though, and with the latest XBMC on it (which took about 15 minutes in total to install and configure), works really amazingly well. I'm quite impressed.

And to be honest, I quite like the mediastream UI I have seen much worse in commercial products, and at least it's internally consistent.

So, thanks for showing me the direction to go in, Mark.

pca