[rad123]

Right,

I have done A LOT of reading on here over the last couple of days and there seems to be so many options it is unreal. The problem is, naturally some people want to get so much out of their HTPC and therefore the majority of advice seems to be geared towards them.

In the simplest terms, all I want/need is a unit to put a picture on the screen located on a NAS drive. The only caveat is that it must play 1080p MKV files flawlessly.

I was originally looking at Apple TV2, but then there seems to be a lot of issues involved with this option at the moment. However, it looks good, is cheap, quiet and there appears to be plenty of work arounds. One question, although it only outputs 720p, does it handle 1080p files well?

Are there any cost effective alternatives that are pretty much designed to do this?

I was thinking of streaming wirelessly to the ATV2 from an Airport Extreme Base Station with a Startech SATA Hard Drive Enclosure connected via USB 2.0. I know this may not be the most advanced set up, but would it handle streaming/playing 1080p files well?

Any advice is very much welcome!

Cheers.

[wicky]

The atv2 as it stands can't do 1080p, front row will only showcase 720p. Any 1080p content is just streamed as 720p. But from my experience, most 1080p movies are choppy.

The most cost effective would probably be either atv2 and just reencode your files, or build a box around the ion platform or AMDs new fusion stuff.
To build fromscrstch you'll be looking at $120ish for board and chip, $20-$40 for 2-4 gb of ram, another $80ish for case and power supply, then what ever meets your storage needs. a cheap sad for the os and streaming your media over network is the beet approach for most of us.

[thunderbunny]

Here are some cheap builds put together by a member that all play 1080

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94199

Thanks to eskro, my parts are on the way

[rad123]

In your experience would you say it was choppy due to being streamed? I plan to have the whole netwrok wired...

[teaguecl]

If all you want is a simple box without all the confusion, honestly just get a Boxee Box. I don't like it as much as XBMC, but it certainly "just works" and doesn't require all the tinkering.