Network/Media centre hard drive

[Robby]

Evening all,
I currently use my Xbox360 to play films and TV shows using windows media player, streaming off my laptop over ethernet.

The problem is that it's slow, and can't handle 720p or higher.

So I'm considering one of the network hard drives that claims to do media centre stuff, and also to backup my other machines.

Can anyone recommend one of these, with HDMI out and a remote control.

[el_oso]

not really answering your question,
but have you thought about building a HTPC? using spare/2nd hand parts would probably be able to do it cheaper and better. any reasonably modern processor will do and a graphics card that supports hardware video acceleration would do this job easily.
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[Pedd]

try using tversity to stream from your lappy to xbox, quicker and less hastle than crappy media player. use it on my machine and that serves both my xboxs on the network, real time transcoding if needed and handles 720 etc fine for me,
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[Neorion]

I can tell you of 2 that will do exactly what you want.

WDTV Live HD

or

A Play on box

I have 2 WDTV boxes and have been looking at the Play on box.

Both do 1080p over network or direct attached USB drives.
I think the play on might have nicer menus.

Sub £100 for the WDTV
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"some things man was never meant to know, for everything else there's Google"

[Robby]

I don't want to build another computer, just want a little box that only does this function. The WDTV would do the streaming, but I want something with a hard drive in that I can use to back up my other computers as well, which it doesn't do by the look of it.

[Neorion]

Then you will be a looking at a NAS drive hooked into a streamer, the 2 functions you ask for a quite specific but not related so I dont know of a company that would make it.

A NAS with USB ports and Ghost or carbon copy doing the backups on the pcs would work.
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VFR FI 2000- Shiney Red Thing
"some things man was never meant to know, for everything else there's Google"

[Robby]

Going to get an AC Ryan Playon, 500gb disc will hold enough films and such. The stuff I need to back up is only really photos, which I routinely lose when a hard drive fails. They can go on this as well.

[Colin Edwards]

I use and Iomega ready NAS

Is fantastic and you just need it on 1 gig switch to your xbox and your there.. Then add your laptop to the switch and you got it all

CE