2013-02-05, 21:42
Let me explain my situation requirements, and then my ideas, and I'd like you to let me know what you think, any recommendations, and reasons for recommendations.
First off the most important thing to me is that this is as low cost. Ideally I'd like to spend a max of 400-600 dollars for everything. I have a living room and bedroom with tv's that I want to display content to using XBMC, with any theme like Aeon. Content will be 1080p. I'd like these clients to be low cost and be controlled via IR remote(harmony I already have), or other RF remote with keyboard. Noise is not an issue. I'm thinking I would rather not build these 2 units as it seems cheaper to buy a small pre-made nettop PC or something. Please recommend something here. My budget for each client is ideally 100-150. As a side note what do you think of the SFF Dell Optiplex 740? My college will be selling a bunch of them for basically free soon.
The second and most important piece of hardware, is a NAS that will be stored in my networking closet. I would like it to have 3 bays so that I can put 3 2TB drives in RAID 5. I would like this NAS server to run sickbeard, sabnzb and couch potato. It will serve content to the 2 XBMC clients and download all the content on its own. What should I buy/build that will be able to handle this without spending too much. My budget for this is about 300-500, drives INCLUDED. I like the idea of running freenas or unraid, as long as they can run the services I mentioned.
My head is spinning with ideas, please give me some direction.
EDIT: Do I need to run PLEX media server or anything on the NAS? Or can I configure sickbeard to download content in a format that will work well with the cients and not be transcoded??
EDIT2: I'd also like to be able to update sickbeard download lists and couchpotato download queue from the xbmc clients(this is for my parents so it needs to be simple to use). Can all XBMC clients do this?
First off the most important thing to me is that this is as low cost. Ideally I'd like to spend a max of 400-600 dollars for everything. I have a living room and bedroom with tv's that I want to display content to using XBMC, with any theme like Aeon. Content will be 1080p. I'd like these clients to be low cost and be controlled via IR remote(harmony I already have), or other RF remote with keyboard. Noise is not an issue. I'm thinking I would rather not build these 2 units as it seems cheaper to buy a small pre-made nettop PC or something. Please recommend something here. My budget for each client is ideally 100-150. As a side note what do you think of the SFF Dell Optiplex 740? My college will be selling a bunch of them for basically free soon.
The second and most important piece of hardware, is a NAS that will be stored in my networking closet. I would like it to have 3 bays so that I can put 3 2TB drives in RAID 5. I would like this NAS server to run sickbeard, sabnzb and couch potato. It will serve content to the 2 XBMC clients and download all the content on its own. What should I buy/build that will be able to handle this without spending too much. My budget for this is about 300-500, drives INCLUDED. I like the idea of running freenas or unraid, as long as they can run the services I mentioned.
My head is spinning with ideas, please give me some direction.
EDIT: Do I need to run PLEX media server or anything on the NAS? Or can I configure sickbeard to download content in a format that will work well with the cients and not be transcoded??
EDIT2: I'd also like to be able to update sickbeard download lists and couchpotato download queue from the xbmc clients(this is for my parents so it needs to be simple to use). Can all XBMC clients do this?
?) and I would like to be able to get the live tv from the tv tuner card in the living room, upstairs in the bedroom, is this possible? If so how please explain it more in detail and the software/services required. What do you guys thik of the arctic mc001?
