[basketcase]

New to the board, but had been lurking for a while. Based off a suggestion here, I purchased a Zacate board and couldn't be happier with it.

Just wanted to add my .02 cents:
Hardware: http://www.barrymorrison.com/2011/04/25/...ing-soon//
Installation/Final Thoughts: http://www.barrymorrison.com/2011/05/01/...its-here//

Any questions, would be happy to answer any!

I've used XBMC on other platforms, this is my first dedicated HTPC and am considering building one for my parents as they've gotten rid of cable and have shown interest in something like this.

[aptalca]

glad to hear it's working great for you. I am thinking about getting a miniITX Zacate as a second htpc myself. One thing I can recommend is, you should set up a sabnzbd/sickbeard/couchpotato setup rather than torrents. It is amazing. Requires little to no moderation. It costs me $11/m for unlimited usenet access and $10 for life for nzb index access at nzbmatrix.

Before I used to do torrents and use ezrss for automated dls but it was a pain, because eztv moderators had to manually add each episode into the rss feeds and they often missed episodes, and there were frequent outages where the site would be down for a week and all the episodes aired during that time would never get added to the rss so I had to go and download them myself manually, etc.

Not to mention I kept getting copyright infringement letters from my isp which pissed off my wife.

Now I don't have to worry about anything, and both movies and tv shows are fully automated. It has the highest WAF

[homewrek]

Another great alternative to torrents or usenet accounts and even netflix or hulu, is A great plug in for XBMC by the name of Icefilms. It basically gives you an on demand feel to your htpc. It is quickly becoming my favorite plug in for XBMC. Any thing that I was watching and paying for on Netflix and Hulu, I can watch it in Icefilms for free, and great quality in there HD section. A great way to save money on hard drives too since you will just be streaming the content you wanna see, instead of downloading and archiving movies or shows you will problaby not see more than once.

[basketcase]

Sorry for the late reply. I never recieved e-mail notifications of replies.

None the less in regards to sabnzbd/sickbeard/couchpotato -- I guess I thought this was torrents. I had mentioned to some friends regarding usenet, and they had their apprehensions. I'm not familiar enough with it to know what's up exactly. Will need to research this some more.

I'll have to check out the plugin IceFilms also...Thanks!