[Arkitket]

I have decided to build a HTPC this winter and am looking for some help on the hardware to go with it. I am thinking of getting the Acer Revo 100 as the HTPC connected to my main TV in the living room. I am planning on putting XBMC on it (either the linux distro, or on windows 7, whichever will work best) along with something like sickbeard and couch potato to gather movies and TV and other media.

My main issue is trying to figure out how to access the HTPC from up to 2 other PC's that are located in other rooms of the house. How can I achieve this? I am not wanting to set up separate HTPC's in each of the rooms, I would like to have one main media library that can be accessed (something like a main PVR system that other STB's connect to and play from).

I have searched a bit and found that it is possible to jailbreak an Apple TV 2G and put XBMC on it, will this serve my needs? I mean, will it allow me to connect wired or wirelessly to the main XBMC library on the HTPC?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[eskro]

prefered way is having a central storage machine (NAS)
that would feed HTPC's around your house....
so yes, it involves having 1 HTPC per HDTV

[poofyhairguy]

A jailbroken AppleTV 2 at each TV with a central NAS would serve your needs.

Having a single HTPC literally hooked to multiple TVs is a bad idea because you can only run one XBMC instance at once.

[Arkitket]

A jailbroken AppleTV 2 at each TV with a central NAS would serve your needs.

Having a single HTPC literally hooked to multiple TVs is a bad idea because you can only run one XBMC instance at once.

I figured having each tv directly connected to the main HTPC would limit the instances. I am searching for a solution that will allow each TV to access the XMBC library separately.

Could the Acer Revo 100 act as the central NAS and still be connected to the main TV in the house? and allow the jailbroken ATV2's to act as STB's that allows separate media to play to each TV?

Also, with this option is a wired network connection more favourable than a wireless one? I am wondering about streaming speeds and bitrate quality if say the two ATV's were wireless and the HTPC was wired to the network.

[CpTHOOK]

Also, with this option is a wired network connection more favourable than a wireless one? I am wondering about streaming speeds and bitrate quality if say the two ATV's were wireless and the HTPC was wired to the network.

If you plan on streaming full 1080p flix with HD sound above 10-15GB then you will probably run into stuttering issues if you rely on wireless. A Wired network, preferably Gig, when HTPC'n is always considered ideal!

[pyrodex]

Few things to note here... if you want a true mini htpc to a single NAS solution you will have to consider a shared database such as mysql for the xbmc database. This way each machine is aware of the media and can share pause/stop times and watched/unwatched across devices. If you don't care about this then each machine will have it's own db and in a "for each their own" setup.

ATV2's only scale to 720P so consider that in your setup. ATV2's maybe ideal for bedroom TV's where you don't have 5.1 surround sound in a nice plasma or flat panel but maybe not so much on a decent tv/sound setup.

Also Wired is the only way to go with a shared NAS unit... unless you are putting each HTPC its OWN wireless network you will have issues when trying to play more than one stream on a decent HD video.

[Kirky99]

+1 central storage server...

SAB, etc is going to be at times a litle resource intensive, add to that streaming to other PCs, you don't want that happening at a TV. Plus that PC will always have to be on, just in case the other TVs want to watch something.

You don't need much of a PC to act as the file server, but it really should be it's own. And everything should be wired if possible. The more wireless devices you have on your network, the worse the studdering will be on everything trying to play back a movie.

[Jetster]

You can have one location HTPC slightly faster act as a Server for the other two. Works just as well.