Barebone Xbox 360 for XBMC?

[Donkey_Kong]

My wife has been collecting DVD's for years and has been also ripping them as of lately. I have just about no choice now but to figure out some kind of home network for streaming. I can't believe it took me this long to discover XBMC, but I did today and am liking it.

We will have about 600 DVD's stored on a couple hard drives that I could hook to a serving computer. Do I understand correctly that my best bet for streaming to different TV's throughout the house will be an XBOX 360 as receiver at each TV, or are there other more economical alternatives?

If Xbox 360 is the way to go, would I just need barebone 360's?

[jammin0]

Xbmc doesn't run on Xbox 360.  You could use some Xbox 360's to stream content from a pc running windows 7.  There are probably a few cheaper alternatives.  Do a google search for devices that run xbmc.  They recently ported it to android so a lot of the cheaper android stick computers are starting to be used for this.  Ouya comes out in another 4 or 5 months and for $100 per tv would be perfect for this.  If you wanted to go cheap you could find some old Xbox 1s and mod them.  This was the original platform that ran xbmc.

[ChadTower]

WDTVs can be had for $70 and work well for this too.  Not quite as versatile as XBMC but it's a plug and play solution.  I have three of them that I put in place of my Xbox 1 XBMCs and they work great.

[ark_ader]

WDTVs can be had for $70 and work well for this too.  Not quite as versatile as XBMC but it's a plug and play solution.  I have three of them that I put in place of my Xbox 1 XBMCs and they work great.

+1

[SNAAKE]

so you just play whatever from a usb flash drive/hdd hooked up to wdtv?

right now I have my computer hooked it up to the main tv with hdmi/optical. I use vlc media player for any movies including 1080p.

[DrumAnBass]

Originally I started with XBMC running on modded Xbox1's but they don't have the horsepower to deal with HD content very well. So I upgraded to the modern version of XBMC running on PCs.

I run XMBC on cheap PCs on every TV in my house... Can't remember the exact specs for them, but they were each built really inexpensively from eBay'd or BlackFriday components, using TinyXP as the OS. You can use a cheap USB IR receiver/remote combo. Much better UI experience than VLC. I am a Mac guy but can build a decent PC for XBMC for half the price of a Mac-Mini.

XBMC will pretty much play anything you throw at it. I have each machine set to access several NAS drives connected to my router. Love the way it automatically downloads artwork for media. Cut my cable, so just rely on an antenna and XBMC for our TV watching.

I set my parents up with a WDTV unit; it generally works fine; sometimes comes across a codec it doesn't like... Not very flexible.

You might want to browse the XBMC forums at http://forum.xbmc.org/ for some hardware suggestions.

[ChadTower]

so you just play whatever from a usb flash drive/hdd hooked up to wdtv?

WDTV is fully networked.  Integrated wifi and some models have ethernet ports.  I use the hard wired model.

It has third party services, too, like everything else.  Netflix, Hulu Plus, a bunch of others I haven't tried.

[Donkey_Kong]

Thanks all. Turns out there are quite a few options out there.

Amazon Search

Liking the looks of the TV's that have $treaming built into them