A Home Theater PC, Why? well after watching too many movies only to have the film skip or freeze from a scratched or even a seemingly perfect DVD I'd had enough. I tried several DVD players and even considered buying an expensive top end unit, but after talking to a few ppl who had these types of players I tried another solution.
I had a spare computer case and enough old bits to build a PC with an output that would feed the TV. After tweaking some settings here and there this worked great. Now this allowed me to play the DVD from the drive bay with better results, but also the option to copy the DVD to the hard drive and play back from there. If the disc was slightly damaged at least the computer could take the time to read it so that playback from the HD was flawless. Optical media (in the form of disc's) is evil and should be abandoned. I even had the analogue 5.1 from the sound card going to the surround sound system, even though the TV was a 51cm CRT. I knew a flat panel would one day grace that spot in the lounge.
This was all going well, so I tried copying some of my DVD's to the HD on another computer and playing them over the network (I'd now run a Cat5e cable from the 8 port 10-100M switch to the lounge) This played fine too. I was concerned about the speed of the 10-100M network, but all was good.
I'll add to this later.....
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