Building HTPC Cheap

[Angrboda]

I'm running along parallel lines. The roku from what I read doesn't play the range of media types that the WD TV Live & Live Plus do. (And if you have your druthers, the Live Hub, in addition to having an internal hard drive, has an updated UI and better remote.)

I just purchased a Harmony One remote for $105, recertified.

My new PC will have 3+ outputs, one of which will connect via a 25' HDMI cable to my televison and A/V gear.

I have a mix of appliances, including a Raspberry Pi and WD TV Live, but am moving towards dedicated htpc's.

I just purchased a mini-ATX case, black, which will fit an old ECS uATX core 2 duo board and E2180 dual core pentium, and AGP graphics; that goes with the 26" I just moved into the bedroom.

My current main workstation will be converted into a Windows based htpc (I picked up a cheap, windows-only Diamond Multimedia tuner). It will have an E7400 core 2 duo and pcie graphics.

The WDTV Live may or may not be obsoleted; the one lack in it I'm noticing is that it doesn't support Amazon Prime that I can tell.

The Raspberry Pi and/or the WDTV Live and/or another dedicated htpc, along with an output from the main workstation, will drive a 32" wall-mounted flatscreen behind my workstation screens, and will be used for hosting semi-static displays of fine art, calendar/planner display, a separate video screen, or a separate computer screen (with the fine art being its primary purpose).

And I'm still midstream upgrading my file server from 2 TB to 8+ TB of fault tolerant storage. Things are a mess, but a rough guess would be that I have 3-4 TB of DVD content, plus another 1/2 TB of lossy video content. (And roughly 3/4-1 TB of audio content, most of it lossless.)

The only thing I'm really lacking is Blu-ray capability for the bedroom htpc. Beyond it being a big load for such a platform, I've got two Blu-ray burners, but don't want to split them up, so I can dual burn data to Blu-ray simultaneously. Still thinking about it; I don't burn very much blu-ray, but I'm still hesitant, and would rather spend $35 on a BDR reader.

(ETA: One of the few drawbacks to Blu-ray video that I'm finding is, now that I have a substantial library of titles, that means I also have titles for which I only have Blu-ray copies, which ties it to specific setups. There's a ripping program which will downconvert to DVD, but it's pricey.)