there’s been something about castle that has been bothering me for a while and i couldn’t quite figure it out until now. the thing that bothers me is that detective kate beckett is too well dressed to be a detective on tv. it’s not that she is too attractive for the role, there are plenty of hot female detectives on tv. the one that immediately comes to mind is sarah shahi in life. i think that female detectives on tv usually just end up wearing very masculine clothes, but i think the wardrobe choices for kate beckett is much softer than her character is. i’m not sure if that bothers me, but it certainly has been something that has been in the back of my mind.

now that i’ve made the HTPC, i have been using pretty exclusively and it has been working out well. the big issue that i have come across is that the NAS is pretty slow when it is trying to navigate the list of content that i have.

it seems that many people are using a media center plugin called media browser which doesn’t have the latency that media center has. i think that media center is trying to make thumbnails and read other metadata that just takes forever over the network connection. i don’t know why, the NAS and the HTPC is connected over a gigabit connection, but oh well, media browser works quite well.

i have also looked at the iphone app, mediamote. it looks like it is a network based remote control for media center which seems to look pretty cool, but i have some issues with it running stably. the server component appears to keep crashing after a couple of hours or the client fails to connect to the server. not really sure what is going on there…

but the biggest problem for me is HD content. i like HD content but it is just SO big and takes up so much hard drive space. i can’t really tell the difference between the 720p vs HDTV encodings on the 46″ DLP TV, but it makes a huge difference on the projector. i would just suck it up, but streaming to the xbox upstairs is a problem as the xbox isn’t fast enough to decode HD streams.

i might install tveristy or something and have the media center act as a dlna server as well. that should solve that problem…

all in all, it’s starting to come together, though.