[Ogi010]

Hello everyone,

Once upon a time, I had XBMC installed on my original xbox. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world, that I was able to upgrade the hard drive of my video game system, FTP whatever I wanted on there.

Who would have thought XBMC would have become what it is today.

Anyway, I'm in the process of picking out the components for a HTPC that will be running XBMC exclusively. This HTPC will be attached to my Onkyo 705 receiver through a HDMI connection (will be upgrading that puppy eventually). I have a windows home server, with more hard drive space than I know what to do with.

What I want is to rip my blu-ray disks into either MKV or M2TS containers, store it all on the WHS, and play it back through streaming on the XBMC. I don't plan on doing any sort of compression to the video/audio tracks since hard drive space is not currently an issue.

What my question is, what kind of CPU power will I need to playback 1080p blu-ray container files? Do I need to get an Intel i3 Processor, or can I get away with an ION processor?

The only component than I'm set on on my HTPC is a small SSD to boot off of, and most likely, this case: http://mini-itx.com/store/?c=54

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

[voyager2]

The ATOM CPU alone will not playback bluray or MKV but your onboard ION video card will.

It takes over all processing leaving the CPU free to do other things. VDPAU is a wonderful thing. It plays almost everything I throw at it.

You can Also build your own media center, but be sure you use a nvidia graphic card, a passive cooled gforce 210/220 with feature set C is cheap and will do a excellent job.

Using a Arock ion with a SSD drive will give you a real old xbox feeling, fast power on self test, fast boot, but now it plays full HD 1080p.

[elupus]

An ion running linux using VAAPI hw accelarated playback works fine.

[Ogi010]

Thanks for the response guys. Just weird that I can't quite seem to optimize my desktop through non-XBMC to playback those files, but the little ion systems can. Hardware optimization goes a long way I suppose

Thanks for the feedback guys, looks like I'll be waiting for the 2nd generation of ion systems to come out, should be coming out any day/week now.