Comments | gumbuoy: They come, they come, they never do not come

gumbuoy

They come, they come, they never do not come

Feb 14, 2009 20:00

got a drones line stuck in my head - i figure there are worse things to have stuck in my head ( Read more... )

Comments 4

dalziel_86 February 14 2009, 18:45:41 UTC

Unless there's a lot of local-only programming that you watch, like sports broadcasts and things, a good Internet connection with a sizable quota is the best content-getting device available. You just need a way to play stuff on your TV. If you don't have an HDTV, a pre-owned Xbox can be turned into a media player using XBMC with a minimum of fuss, and will serve you excellently. If you do have an HDTV, you'll want something like an AppleTV that can be made to run Boxee or XMBC, again with a minimum of fuss, because it can output 720p, unlike the Xbox. If you have an Xbox 360 already, or you're interested in one, it can play lots (but far from all) formats, and installing TVersity on one of your computers will allow you to stream more (though TVersity transcodes on-the-fly for formats the 360 won't play natively, so quality won't be great on those). The Xbox will run you about $50-60, and the AppleTV about $330. An Xbox 360 can be had for under $400 these days too, and that's not even the HDD-less Arcade model either ( ... )

onlywords February 15 2009, 01:39:13 UTC

We've had a Series 1 OzTiVo for years and love it. Perhaps we're a bit simple though.

onlywords March 22 2009, 04:57:13 UTC

I am back again. We just bought a new Tivo and if you buy it before April 1 you can save $100 on the home networking package. We got the Tivo for $559 (which may have been cost so might not be easy to find for that price, Darren called in a favour) plus $99 for the networking package. We have been watching our downloaded programs on it today, no worries. Very happy with it. If you have any questions Darren should be able to answer them:-).

xulon February 15 2009, 12:27:48 UTC

We have had a Beyonwiz (which may or may not be the other box you refer to) for just over a year and are quite happy with it. The network functionality is great for watching stuff we've downloaded, and for being able to archive stuff on to the PC if the internal drive starts to get full. Some parts of it are by no means perfect, but they're pretty good about regularly releasing new firmware to fix bugs and add new features.

I've not had any experience with a proper media PC. I imagine one would be capable of doing just about anything one of these dedicated boxes could do, at the cost of extra complexity.