Advantages of using a HTPC:
• Movies play back instantly, no load times, advertising, menus or other crap to wait through.
• Instant access to your library, all of your library.
These two things alone are what got my wife on board with this.
Currently, when we watch a movie (still pre-HTPC at our house, but "in progress"), my wife will say "Go down and get the movie queued up, and I will be down in a few minutes."
So I go into the theater, fire everything up, pop in the movie, wait for the different previews to skip (most have jumping to the movie menu disabled, so you have to manually skip each preview), then the "FBI" and other warning come up that can't be skipped...
Then I pause it when the movie starts and then hollar to my wife that it is ready.
Now we will just go downstairs and by the time that the projector is "on" everything will be loaded and the HTPC will be fully booted to the menu of movies. Heck, the HTPC will boot in about 10-15 seconds probably anyway from cold boot. Sleep mode or whatever would be even faster.
Of course, we have DVDs, HD-DVDs, and Blu-Rays. Some movie series are on HD-DVD for some of the early movies (like early Harry Potter ones, Bourne movies, Batman Begins, Transformers, etc) and then the more recent sequels are on Blu-Ray. Or some movies that are on DVD still, but now we have to dig through 3 different sets of movies just to find what you are looking for.
Now they will be all in one spot.
