Good, cheap living room media PC?

Right now I have my old desktop PC in the living room hooked up to my TV is a media center. I use it for stuff like Hulu, Netflix streaming and playing AVIs. I don’t have a cable subscription, so I don’t use it for Tivo type stuff.

Anyway, I think it’s starting to give up the ghost so I’m in the market for a media center machine with small form factor. It doesn’t need to do anything gamey, just have good outputs (HDMI etc) and maybe also a Blu Ray drive.

Any thoughts?

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=1351669&postcount=3

Highly recommended.

Doesn’t seem to be available in the US. Any other ideas?

I’ve been looking at the same thing. I’ve priced a Dell Inspiron 530 at $699 (with a number of upgrades – could be cheaper). I’ve looked at an Mac Mini. I’ve looked at building my own (although that doesn’t seem worth it from what I’ve seen).

Yeah go with a max mini, and run OSXBMC on it. No blu-ray yet, though.

My Asus Eee wound up doubling as a media PC, combined with an external HD, a cooling pad, an Avermedia Quickplay (thanks to CCZ), a set of Logitech speakers and storage. For remote control, I plan to install Wiimote software so I can better control it from the couch. This is obviously a poorman’s solution, but since I needed most of these items anyway it worked out in my favor. The laptop is small enough to be fairly easy to hide.

There’s at least one other thread here where several individuals promote the PS3 as being a great candidate (for those who need blu-ray and play PS3 games, anyway).

The PS3 is a really, really crappy media player compared to XBMC. Great for bluray though obviously.

What are the outputs like on the Mini? Also, wouldn’t running OSX preclude the possibility of using Netflix Watch Now? Last time I checked, it was Windows/IE only.

Any thoughts on this little number? It’s not exactly what I’d call cheap exactly, but it seems like the kind of thing I’m looking for.

That seems better if you want to DVR, etc.

Here’s one of the Dell builds I’m currently looking at (in a slimline case – it actually looks like a big XBox 360):

Intel® Pentium® Conroe Dual Core Processor E2200 (1MB, 2.2GHz)
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
No Monitor
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Logitech Cordless Laser Desktop MX 3200 Keyboard and Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included
No Modem Option
Dell 1505 Wireless-N PCIe Card

Total cost: $599

Can throw on a few more upgrades if you want (I’m trying to figure out whether it’s worth it to throw in a better processor or a graphics card for what I want). Annoyingly you can’t throw on a better graphics card along with the wireless card as those both take the only PCIe slot.

edit: linkage

Any idea what AV ports come on that?

edit: sorry to be redundant but I reposted some of this under a new thread

Some more reading and tweaking and I settled on this (basically all I’ve done tonight grin):

Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E8200 (6MB L2 Cache,2.66GHz,1333FSB)
Genuine Windows® XP Professional
No Monitor
2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
16x DVD+/-RW Drive
ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 128MB
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio
Logitech Cordless Laser Desktop MX 3200 Keyboard and Mouse
No Floppy Drive Included
No Modem Option
Dell 1505 Wireless-N PCIe Card

It’s an Inspiron 530, not 530s. In reviews I found complaints that the 530s was too loud (not good for a HTPC) and it didn’t have quite the customizability that I wanted. I measured the cubpoard that my TV sits on and we have just enough space to fit it.

It comes out to $779 and I believe I’m going to be able to drop that $200 with a coupon. The graphics card is reportedly not great great for games but good for HD with an HDMI out. There’s a very good chance I’m going to pick this up tomorrow and, if you haven made a decision in a week or so, I’ll let you know what I think of it when I’m done setting it up and playing with it.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions-- let me know before I pull the trigger tomorrow afternoon. :-)