[Raudi]

@dougie, Even though my build is for a server I wanted to see how it plays 1080p blu-ray rips. I played Avatar MKV I ripped with MakeMKV locally off the HD and was getting slightly choppy playback with VLC. I'm curious as to what your setup was playing 1080p. Did you do it with Windows or a Linux version of XBMC?

I just did a quick test using LAVFilter and WMP. I haven't gotten back to playing with that system it to install XBMC and see how it fares. I want to do that, I want to try WMC Live TV (I have a CableCard tuner) and I've also got on my list to try OpenELEC as well. If I hadn't had to deal with all the BIOS finagling I would have had more time in the one evening I was able to set aside.

Hopefully not getting a chance to try XBMC yet won't get me the lashing from the forum police like it did in the Celeron 847 thread. It was all my time just to get Win7 installed and run a few quick tests and I thought it was worth reviewing at that point for Amazon at least.

Haha, yeah after the same ordeal with Bios I haven't wanted to mess with it. If I don't buy my 3TB hard drives this weekend I will give OpenELEC a try.

Thanks for your help so far.

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@dougie, Even though my build is for a server I wanted to see how it plays 1080p blu-ray rips. I played Avatar MKV I ripped with MakeMKV locally off the HD and was getting slightly choppy playback with VLC. I'm curious as to what your setup was playing 1080p. Did you do it with Windows or a Linux version of XBMC?

On Linux with XBMC I have flawless 1080p playback so far.

Right on! Which distro of Linux are you using exactly? I think I'm going to give OpenELEC a try this weekend.

Archlinux
But I would only suggest it to you, if you have some knowledge with Linux, or have no problem learning many new things. But all other distros with a reasonably new kernel should work.