HTPC newbie, so many options have fried my brains..

[NathanT]

Appologies for being so vague, as the title suggests, I'm looking in to getting a little HTPC for my front room.

The long story short is the PS3 has packed up, as has the freeview recorder. I'm now using my old PS2 to watch DVD's and if the dog trips over the cable for the hand control one more time and pulls it out of the socket I can see the PS2 being no good.

I'm hoping that I can find the right software and remote (Logitech Harmony?) to do everything that the 3 older units do and a bit more. So what do I want it to do:

Watch DVD's and Blue Rays
Stream Youtube/Love Film/BBCi player
Store and play music (also burn CD's to a hard drive)
Watch Sky GO
Watch Freeview and record to hard drive if at all possible

- No need for any gaming
- No need for any 3D

Wondering what sort of set-up I would need for this to do it comfortably. Would an integrated system like the AMD Hudson be capable of this (having mixed reports on the E35M1-M PRO to be honest) or would I be looking at going to a larger scale with a 1155 sandybridge set-up.

Looking at doing it as small and quiet as possible, although money is not unlimited.

I'm still yet to research the software side of things.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me on this.

 

[NathanT]

Thanks for your time in answering and your help.

Yeah the AMD solution looks a lot more meaty on the GPU side of things.
The price difference worked out at about £30 between that and the Sandybridge so thats negotiable. I was looking at spending £40+ to get an additional GPU later on but I'm not sure if its warranted with the Llano set-up.

The main reason would be for Blueray and DVD playback plus some youtube streaming and music. Not being able to watch a movie in the evening times means the wife is constantly flicking between crap and even worse crap on TV.
I've found I can get Sky Go on any PC so that is not an issue, I have freeview on my TV so recording can wait, iPlayer and "on Demand" will suffice.

I have a 60gig SSD and a 500Gig 3.5 drive that I can use up as and when the time comes.
If I'm going to be keeping the machine on, is there any reason to use the 60gig SSD, its not really big enough to hold any decent size of data and would only really be as a boot disk.

Overclockers dont stock a massive amount of 17x17 boards (any), so I'm probably going to see if I can source a AsRock A75M-ITX Motherboard or simular.

Got to find a suitable case, might go cheap and nasty to start with then move on to something a little more pleasing to the eye