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.