Spec Me A... HTPC (Custom or pre-built)

[oHUTCHYo]

Having owned a WDTV for several years now, I recently tried XBMC on my laptop and love the auto scraping.

My requirement are as follows;

• Powerful enough to run XBMC and smoothly playback high bitrate 1080P MKV files
  
• Preferably passive or very quiet at least
  
• Output audio to optical
  
• It will only be to stream movies and TV from my WD Mybook Live NAS (cat5 wired), nothing more - so cheaper the better

Whether its off the shelf or custom build, I don't mind, as long is ticks the above boxes.

 

[Phantom Shadow]

For those needs personally I'd be giving a raspberry pi a go, will run xmbc and play those files, only thing would be the audio output to optical although you could probably buy an adapter for that.

 

[oHUTCHYo]

Read about Raspberry, quit a bit, but the optical is a must.

Looking on eBay at these Android Midnight boxes?? They look like they tick the box!?

 

[MagicBoy]

Might not be up your street ... I'm using a 2009 Mac mini. XBMC runs like a champ and offloads most the the decoding to the video card.

 

[oHUTCHYo]

My god this is a minefield. Turns out the Midnight only decodes 1080P, but outputs at 720p. Also seems the SPDIF is coaxial and not optical.

Does the mac mini output 1080p?

 

[MagicBoy]

Yep. I'm using a Mini-DisplayPort to HDMI adaptor, outputs 24Hz too. The onboard sound output does optical out with a 3.5mm adaptor.