Re: Watching media PC to TV

On 28 Mar, 13:19, Tony Houghton <h...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
You can't use any old 70mm fan (not that they're very common anyway)
unless you shave off one of the corners or something.

I'm sure you're probably right that you can't use all 70mm fans in
existence, but the first one I tried fitted very nicely with no
shaving off of corners (as is needed with 80mm ones). It just pushed
in and fixed with the rubber shock mounts it came with. TBH, the
standard one the xbox comes with isn't that loud anyway when throttled
down to 3-4% of normal speed. YMMV, I guess.

I've a v1.1 with passive GPU cooling, quiet case fan and it's about as
quiet as my Sky+ box in operation with XBMC.  If you're really
sensitive to noise, you can ask the HDD to spin down during playback,
too.  If you're upgrading the HDD then it'd make sense to get a quiet
5400rpm drive to put in there.

Strange you should compare it to a Sky+ box, because one of the reasons
I was going to bring up for an XBox not actually being any good at all
for a media box is that it can't receive TV. Maybe it can stream it from
a PC, but I want a one-box solution.

I used to think that the no-TV tuner thing was a deal breaker, but I
don't believe there is a one box solution that's any better. In my
case, Sky+ is my main over the air source (no freeview signal, no
cable available) and so that mandates a sky box. I'm more of a watch-
content-at-my-own-pace rather than plain live TV sort of person,
anyway.
XBMC will play recorded content from your PC, from your NAS, as well
as play the new BBC iPlayer sources over the internet with the
appropriate scripts etc.
When Sky+ failed to record an episode of Mitchell and Webb last night
the iPlayer plugin got it for me over the net within 5 minutes when I
wanted to watch it this morning. Sure, you can't plug a TV tuner into
it, but dismissing XBMC as "not very good at all" is kind of contrary
to a very large number of people's opinions...

The other reason I wouldn't use it for a media centre except perhaps in
a bedroom with a rarely used 14" TV is the atrocious picture quality.

Not sure what's wrong with yours but mine looks great, even over
composite. You're aware component cables are available, I take it?
The video playback's better than most DVD players for optical media
and downloaded AVIs look brilliant if the source is decent quality -
it also copes very nicely with playing NTSC content on PAL TVs without
going out of sync, which is more than can be said for a lot of other
players.

Ric

.

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