HP Mediasmart and other WHS Servers

[dicecca112]

Does anyone have one and can comment on there usefulness? I'm looking to stream my Movie Collection to an XBOX 360 and was wondering if anyone had any experience with them.

[KnightRid]

Honestly, I do not have nor have I ever used one of these but i have been looking for YEARS for a simple solution to stream movies to any tv i the house in full HD quality.

I think right now the best solutions are the Boxee or the Roku. Still limits it to having a box at each tv.

You would think in this digital age there would be a simple way to watch a dvd/blu-ray/etc on any tv in the house without a bunch of extra equipment.

[Guru]

I'm not sure if this would help but what I do with my PS3 is:

I use PS3 media server
and PS3 has wireless so, connect to my home network and share/stream everything from my computer.

[dicecca112]

When all you have is a Mac Pro with Dual Quad Cores, its not the most power efficient. I want a solution I can just plug the hdds in and it does the rest. The Windows Home Server Solutions seems to do that no problem.

[little_tea_pot]

With WHS you can stream pictures, music and videos to an Xbox with out a media center PC host. If your wanting to use the media center interface on the Xbox you still need a host PC with MC and set up the 360 as an extender.
One of the good things about WHS v1 is that you can add any hard drive of any capacity to increase your storage space. You can also enable or disable duplication on indiviual folders. Apparently Microsoft is thinking about removing this capability in v2 "Vail" in favor of a true RAID file system. Which would suck for me since I have about 10tb of mixed and non-RAIDable green drives in my WHS.