[GirouxDaMan]

Im fairly new to Kodi so your help would be greatly appreciated. I've been experimenting with Helix on a Kobo Hd tablet and my Galaxy S3 phone. I found an unused desktop in my basement and was wondering if it would be suitable to act as my media center. Its an emachine T6524 with amd Athlon 64 processor 3500+. It does not have a hdmi port and runs on Xp. Probably would need Windows 7. I don't mind spending a few bucks to tweak it a bit. Your thoughts and input please. What would u do to it to have a great kodi media center or would u scrap it and buy something else? [/php]

[FlowT]

The least thing you would have to do is get a graphics card that has hdmi out and hardware decoding for various codecs. Then you might discover that you need more than that. I don't know the exact specs of this machine, so it is hard to guess. Although I am quite fond of reusing old hardware for certain things, my personal experience is that as soon as you need to start throwing money at them, most of the time it is not worth it. If it works as is for your task, then fine. Finding compatible hardware can get complicated and a lot of times it is overpriced. Except if you want to scavenge for second hand parts. And in the end if it does run, it will most likely be noisy and consume a lot of power.

What you should get instead depends what exactly you want to do with it. If all you want is watch movies stored on your harddrive or NAS, then the raspberry pi 2 is a great device. Software support is very good, especially if you run openelec on it. All video framerates are supported properly. It is small, quiet and uses next to no power. There are a few limitations that one should be aware of, like no h265 hardware decoding, etc., but most people probably aren't affected by those. Read the kodi wiki entries if you would like to know more.

If you want to spend a bit more than that, have a look at the Asus chromebox. The Amazon fire TV also seems to be quite popular. I would avoid any of the cheap Android devices and make sure I go for a platform that is well supported by Kodi or openelec and on these forums

[shabuboy]

My .02...

Cheapest option: Make that old PC a file server (NAS) with whatever OS pleases you + get an AFTV (box or stick)/Pi2/Chromebox. Of course based on your requirements.

2nd option: Get a WD My Cloud NAS + get an AFTV (box or stick)/Pi2/Chromebox, again, depending on your requirements.