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What's the best software to run on a dedicated HTPC? ideally it should be totally standalone and quick to startup - e.g. an appliance for the purpose of this question, I'm not looking for PVR capability, just playback. I'm looking at XBMC live, but wondered what others are out there that can do the same sort of thing.

edit: additional info - I currently have an original modded Xbox running XBMC - it's fantastic at what it does, but it doesn't (and cannot) do HD playback apart from upscaling. so I'm looking at an alternative hardware platform that is at least as flexible as the Xbox/XBMC combo. I'm hoping a 9300 chipset MOBO (e.g. ASUS P5N7A-VM) with HDMI out will do the trick with XBMC live now that it supports hardware decoding on NVidia chipsets...

UPDATE:
I'm definitely sticking with XBMC front end and am building a Myth TV backend to go with it. I originally wrote this having already bought the ASUS P5N7A-VM and I hadn't anticipated the massive uptake and availability of ION based boxes, so if I was doing this from scratch, I'd still go with XBMC Live, and running on a ION Nettop such as an ACER REVO, ASUS IONSTAR or build from a Zotac Ion Mini-Itx board.

However, I've stuck a Celeron 430 Conroe-L CPU in it, underclocked it, and undervolted and it hardly produces any heat :) and works like a charm

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3 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I would definitely suggest you stay with XBMC. It is, imho, the best software package for this out there at the moment. It can do things which I don't think any other player can do, such as playing movies straight out of .rar-files, for example.

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heh - i haven't tried files straight from rar... I didn't even know about that one. straight out of .iso is nice too – geocoin Jul 16 '09 at 10:50
Indeed it is, it's what makes it a killer app for this particular area and has for the last several years. – Stefan Thyberg Jul 16 '09 at 11:27
I've used XBMC both on the old Xbox and on windows, and it plainly rules. The user interface is the best. – Edoode Jul 20 '09 at 14:49
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up vote 1 down vote

I haven't tried Windows Multimedia Edition, so that might be good. It's definitely worth to check out. But since I work on Ubuntu, and are an open source zealot, I decided to use Ubuntu. And then XBMC is the best choice, no doubt.

If you want TV support, beware, though. That's done via MythTV, and MythTV uses a sort of compression that is tricky to get to work with XBMC on certain video cards. Check what other people use on the xbmc forums. I have an NVIDIA card, and that seems to be mostly trouble with XBMC.

If I was to buy a HTPC today, I'd probably buy a Mac Mini, and a USB TV input. Expensive, yes, but less trouble. Then again, if you like fiddling with computers and trying to get stuff working, Ubuntu Multimedia is a heaven of problems to solve! :-)

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by TV support, do you mean capture/PVR functionality? if so i'm not really interested in that, as Virgin media (my cable provider in the UK) handles that well enough (not amazing, but does the job) and setting up a myth backend is not on my radar right now – geocoin Jul 16 '09 at 11:41
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up vote 0 down vote

I personally use windows media centre on a Mac mini. The machine is setup to auto log in and auto launch Windows Media Centre. It works great, but I couldn't say that it was exactly quick to startup.

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