[wiebersk]

I've been a lurker around here for quite some time, but I'm going to become more involved with the XBMC community.

I recently had my current WHS file server and XBMC appliance wiped out (with all my other electronics) from an electrical storm. I'm looking to replace them when I hear back from insurance, but in the meantime I've created a configuration for two systems to replace the broken ones. I've read poofyhairguy and eskro's guides and followed topics about these two issues.

First off what I'm looking to do with XBMC.

• 1080P HDMI Out
  
• Play Blu Ray MKV rips over Wireless N (or wired if necessary)
  
• Run AEON MQ2 without stutters in the menu
  
• Support 7.1 Surround Sound Out
  
• To some extent be budget friendly. I'm looking to spend around $800 max
  
• Small form factor and fit in style wise with other electronic components (blu ray player, xbox, etc) and be quiet
  
• USB 3 and SATA 6Gb/s support
  
• Low power consumption across the Unraid and XBMC
  
• Some way to rip Blu-Rays on one of the devices that I own
  
• Support PVR in the future as it gets integrated into XBMC core
  
• Be futureproof - ideally I'd like to never have to replace this and it would support 3D rips and blu-ray playback or have a solid platform to extend on to support high end features.
  

My XBMC, yes I recognize this might be a little overkill but please focus on the last bullet above when suggesting tweaks. I was planning to use an SSD for OS and a regular HD for holding Blu-Ray rips with MakeMKV. I would install XBMC on Ubuntu on this machine.

[CASE]Silverstone Milo ML03B ($60)
[MB]ASRock H61M/U3S3 ($75)
[CPU]Intel Core i3-2100 ($125)
[VIDEO]EVGA GT430 ($73-$20 MIR)
[RAM]Corsair (2 x 2gb) 1333 DDR3 ($35)
[SSD]OCZ Agility 2 60gb ($0) - have a spare one of these
[HARD DRIVE]Seagate 2TB Green 5900 RPM ($80)
[BLURAY]Sony 12x BD Burner ($100)
[CPUFAN]Scythe Kozuti ($40)
[PS]OCZ ModXStream Modular 500W PSU ($60 - $10 MIR)
[Total w/Shipping] $675.70 - $30 MIR = $645.70

Questions:

• Is this the right configuration to maximize price to performance while meeting my needs above?
  
• Would it be better/possible to rip on my Unraid machine.
  

Unraid Build

Looking to store and have some backup protection for my media and important data. As a part of the damage, I will be replacing an older Macbook with an iPad so it would be good if this could handle any encoding necessary to stream movies to an iPad. Not a deal breaker though. Overall budget is around $800-$1k. Still would like this to use minimal power because it will likely be on 24/7.

Ideally I'd have some of these shares backing up to CrashPlan and my music backed up to Amazon Cloud. Amazon has unlimited Music storage if you pay for a 20GB service right now which is a pretty sweet deal for $20/year. I'll have some questions after my build about this.


[CASE]NZXT H2 ($100)
[MB]ASRock P67 Extreme6 ($190)
[CPU]Intel Core i3-2120 ($150)
[RAM]Kingston HyperX (2 x 2gb) 1600 DDR3 ($47)
[HARD DRIVE]Seagate 2TB Green 5900 RPM ($80)
[PS]Cooler Master Modular 600W PSU ($100-$30 MIR)
[Total w/o Shipping]$666.94-$30 MIR = $636.94

Questions:

• Is Unraid the right OS to run to protect my data (somewhat) while keeping the specs performance friendly and still allow for CrashPlan and Amazon Cloud backups? I considered Freenas8 or just plain Ubuntu Server, but am open to pretty much anything.
  
• Would this be able to support streaming MKV,H.264 and other videos to my iPad2? Some videos would need on the fly encoding others would not.
  
• How well would this stream to the XBMC over wireless vs. wired?
  

So this is a giant amalgamation of a post, any help would be much appreciated. I really am just looking to verify the hardware does what I would like for each computer and is a smart configuration for now and a few years into the future.

Thanks for helping a long time lurker.

[ChaOConnor]

I'll leave the XBMC build question to someone else, but I can handle the unRaid one.

* Is Unraid the right OS to run to protect my data (somewhat) while keeping the specs performance friendly and still allow for CrashPlan and Amazon Cloud backups? I considered Freenas8 or just plain Ubuntu Server, but am open to pretty much anything.
[A] unRaid doesn't really protect anything in the sense of WHS where you have data on two separate physical drives (with duplication enabled of course). unRaid really is more about maximizing storage while providing some modest protection. What it does provide you is the ability to recover from a single drive failure, provided your parity drive is good. Just wanted to make this point and some people think unRaid is a viable backup solution. Now, if you add in CrashPlan or Amazon Cloud, you get your offsite backup solution. I will caution you though, depending on what you choose to backup, those solutions may not be viable. For pictures, important documents, etc., they'll work, but if you're going to be backing up BluRay rips, that's probably not the solution you want.

* Would this be able to support streaming MKV,H.264 and other videos to my iPad2? Some videos would need on the fly encoding others would not.
[A] my unRaid streams everything to my extender (SageTV HD-300, plus XMBC on Win 7) without fail. I love unRaid! It does not do native transcoding, it's just a storage solution. With that being said if you check the unRaid forums folks have gotten AirVideo to work. Your specs should be more than enough to handle on the fly transcoding with AirVideo installed.

* How well would this stream to the XBMC over wireless vs. wired?
Generally speaking I'd go w/ wired whenever possible. SD content, sure no problem. But for anything HD or if you're streaming to more than one client, you're going to want wired.

Hope that helps!