I'm thinking about ditching cable. I've read a little about XBMC and was wondering if an XBMC HTPC would allow for the following. I would like to be able to have streaming content organized into favorites or folders. If I was interested in say 10 tv series I could fire it up on my tv and easily find those series similar to finding the content I currently record on the dvr?I would like to stream content from Netflix, Amazon, OTA local stations, and probably Hulu. Can XBMC handle all of them? Can you record PVR content that is streamed,would I need too, I'm just interested in finding it easily.And lastly how would you connect the HTPC to at least two televisions? Can the coax cable int the house be used to link both TVs to one HTPC or would I need to build two,or connect wirelessly? Sorry for the bazillion questions but as you can see I know just enough to get me into trouble.Thanks
You can do most of this addons and custom skins. You'd need PVR components including antenna, tuner cards and recorders for the OTA stuff. Amazon and Netflix use Silverlight to encode their videos so you'll need a Silverlight compatible HTPC.
What I am doing is using Media Browser 3 as my server and have XBMC on a couple computers. It pulls content from Media Browser and shows it. Current shows, movies, DVD boxsets. I use the server to record and organize my media. Browsers work for Netflix, Amazon Instant and Hulu+. There is a television browser called Kylos that can be spawned from XBMC's Advanced Launcher for that purpose.
To actually get content on my television though, I've bypassed XBMC. I already had a Roku and it has a Media Browser client that works well for us. Also installed the Netflix, Amazon and Hulu apps there as well as a few places to rent movies from like MGO, Target Ticket and Vudu. Those channels also give me access to my Ultraviolet collection. The Roku was simply cheaper than building an HTPC and provides more capabilities that fit my needs over a Raspberry Pi.
XBMC definitely gives you more hands on capabilities though.