PC for Watching Movies and Streaming

[Prachka]

Hi,


I want to get a small PC and hook it up to my TV for watching movies. I've never done it before, so have a few questions.

First, I see that most of the bare bone systems do not come with hard drives or memory, so if I am looking at Asus EeeBox EB1012P-B0320 for example, the actual price would be $190 for computer, $30 for 2Gb memory and $60 for 500Gb 7200 rpm, for a total of $310. Is it a fair price for such a machine?

Second, I need to put some operation system in there, my home computers are windows based, but I don't want to pay for it, so I am thinking to install a Linux. I've never used Linux before, which one is good for watching videos and streaming from Internet? Is Ubuntu good for this? Will it work nicely with my home windows based network?

The last question is how to connect this computer to my TV and audio system? It only has one HDMI out port. My TV has HDMI in and optical out, my sound system has HDMI in, HDMI out and optical in. Should I connect PC to TV with HDMI and TV to audio with optical or PC to audio with HDMI and audio with TV with another HDMI?


Thanks!
Ivan.

 

[Dngrsone]

Frankly, if you plan on using Netflix, you will have to go with Windows-- Netflix uses Microsoft Silverlight for DRM and it is incompatible with Linux.

If you are just going to stream video (Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc) and/or play optical (DVD, BluRay), then any basic desktop from *mart will do the job. A machine using the specs you listed will cost about the same as you were planning on spending plus you will have a Windows OS already installed.

Assuming you are only going to be using this machine for the aforementioned streaming and such, you can get a BluRay player which will do all of the above for half the price.

 

[TrainTrackHack]

In general, if you want a computer for movies or other "media centre" usage (I think there's a name for these machines... HTPC or something), you're probably better off with Windows... Linux is usually awful with proprietary formats, especially media where companies with a lot of money aren't interested in poor ol' us who are too much of tight butts to even spend money on an operating system, entertainment much less so (who needs entertainment when you can hack away at Lisp?). There is a Ubuntu-based distro that tries to make home theatre stuff as easy as possible (Mythbuntu I think it was called), but as above, no Silverlight on Linux = no Netflix (and there are probably a handful of others that want silverlight), and AFAIK even blu-ray support is still dodgy at best.

Though I suppose that you could just download the Live CD and try it on your current computer just to see how it works for you.